PETER BRIGHT: Google isn’t the company that we should have handed the Web over to. “Microsoft adopting Chromium puts the Web in a perilous place.”

This is a company that, time and again, has tried to push the Web into a Google-controlled proprietary direction to improve the performance of Google’s online services when used in conjunction with Google’s browser, consolidating Google’s market positioning and putting everyone else at a disadvantage. Each time, pushback has come from the wider community, and so far, at least, the result has been industry standards that wrest control from Google’s hands. This action might already provoke doubts about the wisdom of handing effective control of the Web’s direction to Google, but at least a case could be made that, in the end, the right thing was done.

But other situations have had less satisfactory resolutions. YouTube has been a particular source of problems. Google controls a large fraction of the Web’s streaming video, and the company has, on a number of occasions, made changes to YouTube that make it worse in Edge and/or Firefox. Sometimes these changes have improved the site experience in Chrome, but even that isn’t always the case.

A person claiming to be a former Edge developer has today described one such action. For no obvious reason, Google changed YouTube to add a hidden, empty HTML element that overlaid each video. This element disabled Edge’s fastest, most efficient hardware accelerated video decoding. It hurt Edge’s battery-life performance and took it below Chrome’s. The change didn’t improve Chrome’s performance and didn’t appear to serve any real purpose; it just hurt Edge, allowing Google to claim that Chrome’s battery life was actually superior to Edge’s. Microsoft asked Google if the company could remove the element, to no avail.

Using market dominance in one field, streaming video, to gain market dominance in another, web browsing, looks like an antitrust violation to me. Maybe Glenn with his greater expertise will weigh in on this.

EVEN THE MOST EGREGIOUS FAILURES BY POLICE DO NOT GIVE RISE TO LIABILITY: Cops and schools had no duty to shield students in Parkland shooting, says judge who tossed lawsuit.

UPDATE: Ohio school district votes to allow armed staff members.

SOROS HELPED FUND LEFTY THUGS WHO HARASSED FLORIDA AG: Remember in June when Florida Attorney General Pam Biondi and her boyfriend were hounded away from a movie theatre by left-wing “protestors”? Turn out the protestors were with a group that calls itself Organize Florida.

Just happens, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s Luke Rosiak, that Organize Florida received a $500,000 grant from George Soros’ Open Society Policy Center in 2017. No, I’m not surprised either. Rosiak has more details here.

AND THEY DIDN’T EVEN HAVE TWITTER: Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive.’

A mysterious fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness, day and night—for 18 months. “For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year,” wrote Byzantine historian Procopius. Temperatures in the summer of 536 fell 1.5°C to 2.5°C, initiating the coldest decade in the past 2300 years. Snow fell that summer in China; crops failed; people starved. The Irish chronicles record “a failure of bread from the years 536–539.” Then, in 541, bubonic plague struck the Roman port of Pelusium, in Egypt. What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse, McCormick says.

Historians have long known that the middle of the sixth century was a dark hour in what used to be called the Dark Ages, but the source of the mysterious clouds has long been a puzzle. Now, an ultraprecise analysis of ice from a Swiss glacier by a team led by McCormick and glaciologist Paul Mayewski at the Climate Change Institute of The University of Maine (UM) in Orono has fingered a culprit. At a workshop at Harvard this week, the team reported that a cataclysmic volcanic eruption in Iceland spewed ash across the Northern Hemisphere early in 536. Two other massive eruptions followed, in 540 and 547. The repeated blows, followed by plague, plunged Europe into economic stagnation that lasted until 640.

The whole thing is a fascinating read.

SPENGLER: Who Is Michelle Obama? Read Her Princeton Thesis and She’ll Tell You.

BUT OF COURSE: Left Savages Gay Writer For Saying People Stigmatize His Conservatism More Than His Sexuality. “Progressives proceeded to prove Chad Greene’s original point — and negate their manicured image of being a haven of tolerance for LGBT people — by savaging him on social media.”

Mean people suck, and modern progressives tend to be very mean people.

YOU HAD ONE JOB: Massive boom in Pacific Ocean not corralling plastic trash.

Boyan Slat, who launched the Pacific Ocean cleanup project, told The Associated Press in an interview Monday he is confident the 2,000-foot (600-meter) long floating boom will be fixed.

The 24-year-old innovator from the Netherlands says one of the main issues is the plastic is not staying within the u-shaped boom with a net that hangs below the surface is the device’s speed.

He says the boom is moving slower than the plastic, allowing the trash to float away.

Slat says a team of engineers is being sent out to sea to fix the speed problem.

I wonder if the boom is creating enough water motion to move the trash out of its own way.

SCHOOL DISCIPLINE:  The New York Times is reporting that Education Secretary DeVos plans to rescind the Obama-era school discipline policies.  What the NYT doesn’t seem to understand is what good news that is.  These policies were not just wrong on the law, they have been bad for students and teachers.

FAKE SCIENCE: How a Dubious Forensic Science Spread Like a Virus. “From his basement in upstate New York, Herbert MacDonell launched modern bloodstain-pattern analysis, persuading judge after judge of its reliability. Then he trained hundreds of others.”

Its path — the steady case-by-case, decision-by-decision acceptance of a new forensic science by the justice system — is one that’s rarely, if ever, been retraced. But it reveals the startling vulnerability of judges, and juries, to forensics techniques, both before, and after, they’ve been debunked.

Although the reliability of blood-spatter analysis was never proven or quantified, its steady admission by courts rarely wavered, even as the technique, along with other forensic sciences, began facing increasing scrutiny.

In 2009, a watershed report commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences cast doubt on the whole discipline, finding that “the uncertainties associated with bloodstain pattern analysis are enormous,” and that experts’ opinions were generally “more subjective than scientific.”

Still, judges continued allowing spatter experts to testify.

Subsequent research, funded by the Department of Justice, raised questions about experts’ methods and conclusions. But little changed.

All along, attorneys like Bankston continued challenging the admission of bloodstain-pattern analysts. But they came to learn that a forensic discipline, once unleashed in the system, cannot easily be recalled.

What a mess.

IT’S EARLY YET, BUT THIS MUST BE THE BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: Real Witches Offended Trump Keeps Using the Term ‘Witch Hunt.’

UNLESS YOU’RE SOME SORT OF EVOLUTION-DENIER: Amy Alkon: Don’t Deny Girls the Evolutionary Wisdom of Fairy-Tales.

Ironically, far from contaminating young female minds, these Disney princess stories—and their fairy-tale-fic precursors—provide vitally helpful messages that parents could be discussing with their girls.

Cinderella, for example, revolves around the perniciousness of what researchers call “female intrasexual competition”—the often-underhanded ways women compete with each other. While men evolved to be openly competitive, jockeying for position verbally or physically, female competition tends to be covert—indirect and sneaky—and often involves sabotaging another woman into being less appealing to men. Accordingly, in Cinderella, when the king throws a ball to find the prince a wife, the nasty stepsisters aren’t at all “let the best woman win!” They assign Cinderella extra chores so she won’t have time to pull together something to wear. (Mean Girls, the cartoon version, anyone?)

Psychologist Joyce Benenson, who researches sex differences, traces women’s evolved tendency to opt for indirectness—in both competition and communication—to a need to avoid physical altercation, either with men or other women. This strategy would have allowed ancestral women to protect their more fragile female reproductive machinery and to fulfill their roles as the primary caretaker for any children they might have.

Sure, today, a woman can protect herself against even the biggest, scariest intruder with a gun or a taser—but that’s not what our genes are telling us. We’re living in modern times with an antique psychological operating system—adapted for the mating and survival problems of ancestral humans. It’s often at a mismatch with our current environment.

Understanding this evolutionary mismatch helps women get why it’s sometimes hard for them to speak up for themselves—to be direct and assertive. And identifying this as a problem handed them by evolution can help them override their reluctance—assert themselves, despite what feels “natural.” Additionally, an evolutionary understanding of female competition can help women find other women’s cruelty to them less mystifying. This, in turn, allows them to take such abuse less personally than if they buy into the myth of female society as one big supportive sisterhood.

Plus: “As for the notion that watching classic princess films could be toxic to a girl’s ambition, let’s be real. Girls are being sent in droves to coding camp and are bombarded with slogans like ‘The future is female!’ And young women—young women who grew up with princess films—now significantly outpace young men in college enrollment.”

THE MEDIA LIES. IT LIES ALL THE TIME. It lies for fun and profit. It lies because it hates America and Americans.

LEST WE FORGET:  On This Day: The Boston Tea Party.

I INSIST THEY GO FIRST:  NYT: would extinction be a bad thing?

I DISAGREE. GO FUND IT AND IT WILL BE READY IN MONTHS:  Now, here’s a creative idea for building the border wall.

DOES SHE EVER DO ANYTHING ELSE?  Elizabeth Warren panders.

NO. NEXT?  Were Social Media Companies Honest With Congress?

I WANT TO BUY AN ARMY OF T-REX FOR THE FRONT YARD. I’LL DRESS THEM FOR THE SEASONS…  Perfect Response to Judgy Neighbors: MOAR Dragons!

ALSO STUPID. THE AMERICAN PEOPLE KNOW HARASSMENT WHEN THEY SEE IT:  Dear Media; Your Glee Over The Multiple Trump Investigations Is Appalling.

KURT SCHLICHTER: Pardon Everyone, Except That Rat Cohen. “This is all a lie and a scam. And Donald Trump can and should use his pardon power to highlight this fraud before he drives a stake into the heart of the elite’s soft coup play.”

AT AMAZON, save on Men’s Underwear.

“RULE OF LAW,” 2018 VERSION: “It’s completely a coincidence we have two identical drafts at three different dates; not at all because we re-edited original version. Also, a coincidence we didn’t record it, asked for no lawyer to be present, lost original handwritten notes & hide one of the agents involved.”

UPDATE: Byron York: “At long last, read the Michael Flynn 302. Together with all we know, seems pretty clear there was a fundamentally different assessment of Flynn case pre-Mueller and post-Mueller.”

A RATHER STRONG STATEMENT FROM THE WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: