AND, INEXORABLY, IT’LL BE BROUGHT HERE EVENTUALLY UNLESS PEOPLE MAKE A BIG POINT OF STOPPING IT: China Techno-Police State will identify any face within 3 seconds by 2020 using billions of cameras.

WELL, IT RANG THE EARTH LIKE A BELL: Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid May Have Also Triggered Undersea Volcano Eruptions.

APPLE’S APPEAL: “If you mate with me, your kids are more likely to survive than if you mate with someone carrying an Android phone.” One of my colleagues claims to have overheard a sorority girl saying “He’s cute but when I texted him it was green, so now I’m afraid he’s poor.”

NORTH KOREA’S KIM YO-JONG IS THE NEW STAR FOR THE LIBERAL, TRUMP-DERANGED:

In today’s Trump-deranged America, journalists and like-minded Hollywood celebs painted the sister of North Korea’s brutal dictator as an iconic figure and the vice-president and his wife as ugly Americans. When Friday’s opening ceremony of the Olympics was broadcast that night, rave reviews poured in from the left – for Kim Jong-un’s sister’s alleged side eye glance to Pence.

Kim Yo-jong was seated directly behind Vice-President Pence and his wife, Karen. It appears the awkward seating arrangement was done on purpose, as seating is assigned. All were in South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in’s box.

A national correspondent for the Washington Post mentioned it.

CNN International calls her a star.

Read the whole thing. Whatever his excesses, Roger Ailes had CNN International’s number long ago, but as Karen Townsend notes at Hot Air, it isn’t just CNN that’s passed the Juche on the left-hand side this weekend. CNN, NBC, the Politico, the Washington Post in both its current and former incarnations (Slate is owned by the Graham family, who sold the Post to Jeff Bezos) are in full Walter Duranty mode this weekend.

UPDATE: Iowahawk nails it, as usual.

THE LEFT MORPHED INTO THE MORAL MAJORITY SO SLOWLY, I HARDLY EVEN NOTICED. Wowza: Chelsea Handler claims she has a ‘moral obligation’ to shame porn stars and all hell breaks loose.

Related: The woke police have ruined entertainment.

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Why is the Porter resignation a big scandal, asks Andrew Klavan? “Because Democrats and their news media are pumping it up to distract the public from the truly enormous scandal of the Obama administration’s apparent illegal spying on the Trump campaign and its apparent scuttling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation.”

Read the whole thing.

NOTHING IN PETER ARNETT’S SUBSEQUENT HISTORY ENHANCES HIS CREDIBILITY HERE: Destroying a Quote’s History in Order to Save It: A famous Vietnam War dispatch is now 50 years old, but the origins of the phrase are older than that.

Arnett has always been adamant that he got the quote right, and I have no reason to doubt him. Still, I would be remiss if I failed to note that there are skeptics. 2 One is the indefatigable Ralph Keyes, author of “The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where, and When,” and scourge of misquoters everywhere. Keyes argues that “a quotation this seminal needs better confirmation.” He points out that Ben Tre was a fair-sized city, not a town or village, and that although damaged it did not come close to being destroyed. Keyes quotes the senior Army officer present at the battle, who insisted that what he actually said to Arnett was: “It was a shame the town was destroyed.” (Arnett says he talked to four officers, not just one.) More intriguing for present purposes is another fact Keyes turned up: The day before Arnett’s story ran, the Times’s James Reston had asked in his column, “How do we win by military force without destroying what we are trying to save?”

Keyes is suggesting that the metaphor was already in the air. He’s right. In fact, the Associated Press itself had used a similar phrase almost exactly a year before Arnett’s dispatch. In late January 1967, the AP distributed a wire photo of a different village with a caption that read in part: “The Americans meantime had started to destroy the village to deny it to the Viet Cong.” The photograph was published across the country. One wonders whether the officer Arnett was quoting had come across the caption the previous year. In other words, the AP might well have created the very meme it would later popularize.

But read the whole thing.

CULTURE OF HATRED: Journalist calls for profs to drown conservative students.

AT AMAZON, Save on Hot New Releases – Updated Every Hour.

Plus, Shop Amazon Outlet – Clearance, Markdowns and Overstock Deals.

Also, Kindle Daily Deals, and today’s Digital Deals.

VIETNAM TET OFFENSIVE PHOTO RETROSPECTIVE: Church services on the DMZ, February 1968.

THE ECONOMIST: The techlash against Amazon, Facebook and Google—and what they can do.

MARK PULLIAM: Looking Back at Law School: A Lawyer Ruminates on Legal Education.

In recent years my law school alma mater has hosted an annual “celebration of diversity” event, which I recently attended out of curiosity. I thought that my law school class of long ago was quite diverse, with students from all over Texas, who had attended a variety of colleges and universities located throughout the country, representing a wide range of backgrounds—socio-economic, age, marital status, political orientation, and otherwise.

Alas, that is not what “diversity” means these days. “Diversity” connotes the politically-correct assortment of students (and faculty) from specific racial and ethnic groups that were “under-represented” in the era of primarily meritocratic admissions. Race-conscious affirmative action at the University of Texas School of Law—once considered controversial and sparingly used—has “fixed” that. . . .

Have these changes improved legal education at UT? Pondering that question prompted me to write this blog post.

Spoiler: No. “When I attended, UT was exclusively in the business of training people to become lawyers. The school’s mission has seemingly morphed into that of a social justice academy.”

JOURNALISM: NBC Apologizes to Korean People After Correspondent’s Ignorant, Insensitive Comment.

BUT EVERYONE’S BEEN FULLY BRIEFED ON GENDER IDENTITY ISSUES: Bob McManus: The Navy Is Failing At Its Most Basic Responsibilities.

THE NEW YORK SUN: Olympiad Of Appeasement.

FREE SPEECH UPDATE: Two universities stop censorial outrage mobs dead in their tracks.

It is notable what both UCF and CSUDH did not do. Neither university gave the typical platitudes of “we take these matters very seriously,” nor did either university publicly announce imminent investigations into the expression of its community members.

Unlike Wichita State University, which almost immediately announced a Title IX investigation into a fraternity banner, or Sam Houston State University, which responded to an outrage mob by publicly launching an investigation into a student’s tweet that some felt “disrespected” a murdered police officer. Also unlike Drexel University, which announced an investigation into a professor’s controversial tweet and then banned him from campus, and Texas State University, which crusaded against its own student newspaper because people were offended by an editorial one of its columnists published.

Instead, UCF and CSUDH chose to put an end to their respective controversies at a relatively quick speed, reiterating their commitment to freedom of expression and academic freedom.

And what do you know? By and large, the outrage mobs have realized that they will make no headway, and have resumed lurking in anticipation of the next opportunity to take offense. That is precisely why universities should respond in the way that UCF and CSUDH did. When administrators give in to the demands of the outraged masses, or indicate that they are considering it, they communicate that those efforts are an effective tactic. And tactics that are proven effective are bound to be used with increasing frequency.

Exactly.

JOURNALISM: CNN Hires Comey Fanboy To Defend FBI. “The FBI held a farewell party for Campbell. The announcement for the event invited co-workers ‘to celebrate [Campbell’s] new endeavor defending the bureau as an LE analyst at CNN.’ (Emphasis added) A legitimate news organization would not hire an analyst whose purpose is to defend a government agency he covers.”

MORE NEWS FROM NASHVILLE: Blockbuster Investigative Report by NewsChannel 5 Adds to Mayor Barry Scandal: ‘Chief Anderson Did Not Receive Nor Approve Sgt. Forrest’s Travel Requests.’

They’re blaming a “computer glitch.”

THE RISE OF THE ANTI-CHRISTIAN ALT-RIGHT. Well, with most churches being temples of social justice, this isn’t a big surprise.

INDEED: Falcon Heavy Is Making America Great Again: Elon Musk’s big rocket launch reminds us of what we can still accomplish if we’re willing.

AYN RAND DIDN’T WRITE THE RETURN OF THE PRIMITIVE AS A HOW-TO GUIDE: #MeToo Fashion Show Features Pig-Faced Men Handcuffed to Models with Angel Wings.

OPEN THREAD: Think of this as the 2018 Winter Commenting Olympics.