ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Which Captain Marvel Is Better, and Why Is It the One Who’s a Man?

ROUND TWO: PragerU Lawsuit Claims Google, YouTube Violated Calif. Law on Free Speech, Discrimination. “At least 80 videos remain restricted.”

ROGER KIMBALL: Those who think Trump will cave on the wall are wrong.

THEY TOLD ME IF DONALD TRUMP WERE ELECTED WE’D BE LIVING IN THE HANDMAID’S TALE. AND, WELL. . . A professor of women’s studies is suing a university after, she claims, the women’s studies department there retracted its employment offer after learning of her pregnancy.

BECAUSE THEY CAN: Why Single Women Are (Way) More Likely to Own a Home Than Single Men. “In the nation’s 50 largest metropolitan areas, single women are almost twice as likely to be homeowners as single men.”

A new report by the online loan marketplace LendingTree has found that single women own far more homes than their male counterparts. The study revealed that in the nation’s 50 largest metropolitan areas, single women are almost twice as likely to be homeowners as single men. Single women in New Orleans, for example, own 27 percent of all homes compared to only 15 percent for single men. Multiple cities boasted disparities of over 10 percent. Interestingly, there were no cities in which single men outpaced single women. This is a surprising trend, the author noted, “given the average woman in the U.S. only makes 80% of what the average man does.” For those familiar with the economics of gender, however, the results of LendingTree’s report are not surprising in the least.

The decision to marry and have children has a profound impact on earnings. Though the average man makes more than the average woman, the disparity is reversed when looking at unmarried women versus unmarried men. Based on data compiled from 2,000 urban communities, one study found that the median salary for young, unmarried, childless women is about 8 percent higher than men with the same characteristics. Other cities experienced pay gaps in the double digits, sometimes reaching as high as 20 percent. Further research has shown that unmarried college-educated women between the ages of 40 and 64 earn an average of 17.5 percent more than their male peers.

Because the patriarchy.

FIGHTING SMALL BOAT SWARMS WITH USMC LIGHT ARMORED VEHICLES: Read the post. LAV-25s lashed to the ship deck and used to detect and fire on Iranian (etc.) small boat “swarms.” It makes a lot of sense.

IT’S AN EXTRAVAGANZA OF SECURITY THEATER AND SHUTDOWN THEATER TOGETHER FOR THE FIRST TIME: TSA official warns of shutdown impact on security operations at California airport.

SO YOU THINK THE MULTIVERSE THEORY EXPLAINS IT ALL: Neil deGrasse Tyson has other more immediate problems with which to deal, but there are also some significant questions to be asked about a widely held explanation for the existence of us all that he often pushes. (And if you wonder what this has to do with politics, Pelosi, freedom, federalism, Trump, etc. etc., just remember what Dostoevsky said when everything would be permitted.)

UNC IS REALLY A MESS: UNC defends hosting ‘anti-semitic’ Women’s March leader for MLK Day. Double standards? Hey, at least we have standards!

Freeman Slaughter, vice president of UNC-Asheville College Republicans chapter, told Campus Reform that he believes the university is being hypocritical in inviting Mallory to be the keynote speaker.

“The Dean of Students, Jackie McHargue, stated in her commencement speech that ‘hate speech is not free speech,’” Slaughter said. “And I fail to see why this situation should be any different. Mallory is anti-Semitic and anti-Israel, but she’s being given a pass due to her work with the Women’s March.”

I’m glad the students are calling them out.

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HMM: Ginsburg misses second day of arguments, sparking some concern about recovery.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Trump’s Oval Office Speech and Much, Much More. “Chuck and Nancy, aka your parents after you spilled Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers on the new carpet in the living room Saturday night back when you were in high school, gave a response to Trump.”

THE STAKES IN CONGO – LIVES AND LIFESTYLES:

If you advocate electric vehicles and dote on cellphones whose manufacture depends on Congo’s minerals, then the Democratic Republic of Congo’s flawed Dec. 30 presidential election matters because it can affect your digital lifestyle.

Congo’s stability also matters if you value human life. In Congo’s last civil war (Great Congo War, 1996-2003) some three million to five million people died in anarchic combat and from starvation, disease and exposure exacerbated by war.

My latest Creators Syndicate column.

RELATED: Chapter Six, Cocktails from Hell: Anarchic Violence, Cyclic Intervention, and Mineral Wealth.

FOLLOWING THE SCRIPT: Yellow vests: France to crack down on unsanctioned protests.

PARTY OF YOUTH UPDATE: Wrinkled, white, and wrong — this is the face of the Democratic party.

ROGER KIMBALL: Those who think Trump will cave on the wall are wrong. My takeaway from last night — besides that Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi looked amazingly creepy — was that the shutdown is hurting the Dems more than it’s hurting Trump.

YOU MIGHT NOT BE INTERESTED IN THE GLEICHSCHALTUNG, BUT THE GLEICHSCHALTUNG IS INTERESTED IN YOU: Laurence Jarvik: Patreon’s Purge “One of the Most Important Speech Wars of Our Time.”

WAITING: An F-35A Lightning II waits on the runway. In the background: an F-22 Raptor climbs after take-off.

RELATED: Cool photo from November 2017. A Raptor on a mission in the combat zone refuels over Iraq. Beautiful plane, snaking river, rough terrain.

I DO NOT TRUST THE INTERNET OF ROADS: The ‘Internet of the Road’: CDOT to implement new technology along I-25.

It’s called V2X, or Vehicle to Everything, and it’s essentially a new cellular network. Colorado Department of Transportation is calling it the “Internet of the Roads,” and it’ll let cars communicate with signs and traffic signals to help with safety and alerting drivers.

Amy Ford, Chief of Advanced Mobility at CDOT said, “Imagine Waze on super steroids, do something very fast and very instantaneous.”

Colorado Springs residents will see V2X in the Interstate 25 gap between Monument and Castle Rock, the 18-mile stretch of road which is currently under construction to be widened. The gap will now also feature this safety technology upon completion by 2021.

It has some immediately clear benefits, according to Ford.

“An ability to listen to and allow us to talk to those vehicles. for instance, being able to tell someone, ‘Hey you are coming up into a work zone you need to slow down now;’ or for that matter, for them saying ‘My airbag went off’ and it sends that information to CDOT, and we are able to deploy emergency service personnel,” said Ford.

And the gap is only the beginning.

If they figure out a way to use V2X to force left-lane hogs over to the right, I might come around to it.

APPARENTLY A BUNCH OF DEMS HAVE THEIR PANTIES IN A WAD OVER THIS ENTIRELY ACCURATE FACT-CHECK:

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: John O. McGinnis: Liberal Bias Makes Law Schools Bad For Democracy.

The assumption that law schools should have a left-wing orientation is deeply problematic. Universities should have as their objective the production of knowledge, not activism. … [D]emocratic stability is bolstered from having an engine that tries to discover truths even amidst its divisions of interest. And activism interferes with the university’s production of knowledge, because it leads directly to ideological discrimination and the erection of roadblocks of orthodoxy that impede truth seeking. To be sure, the law has a normative dimension, but norms also are a form of knowledge to which people can add and which they can refine. Thorstein Veblen thought that law schools had no more business in the university than schools of fencing, in part because they did not aim at producing knowledge. Moyn is proving him right.

The idea that law schools should steer students away from legal practice is an equally bad idea, particularly because it is bound up with another strand in Moyn’s essay—that law schools should imbue their students with a skepticism about the rule of law. This trope—drearily familiar from the critical legal studies movement—is obviously an ideological one as well. And in my view an indefensible one. To be sure, good societies have an imperfect commitment to the rule of law. But societies that lack that regulative ideal are truly dreadful ones.

And yet they’re what all the best people seem to want to create.

21ST CENTURY CRIME: Almost $500,000 in Ethereum Classic coin stolen by forking its blockchain.

The heist was the result of carrying out what’s known as a rollback attack, which allowed the attackers to reorganize the Ethereum Classic blockchain, Coinbase security engineer Mark Nesbitt said in a blog post. From there, the attackers were able to “double spend” about 88,500 ETC, meaning they were able to recover previously spent coins and transfer them to a new entity. As a result, the coins were effectively transferred from the rightful recipients to new entities chosen by the attackers.

“We observed repeated deep reorganizations of the Ethereum Classic blockchain, most of which contained double spends,” Nesbitt wrote. “The total value of the double spends that we have observed thus far is 88,500 ETC (~$460,000).”

Rollback attacks are often referred to as 51-percent attacks, because, in theory, they require an attacker to control a majority of the CPU power generating a blockchain. Such an arrangement violates a core requirement of any blockchain-based currency: it allows a single entity to write the contents of its universal shared transaction history.

That sounds like a problem with Ethereum in particular, not crypto in general. But with crypto as in anything else, it remains caveat emptor.

LIBS WOULDN’T DO FACEBOOK ADS DESIGNED TO REDUCE RIGHT TURNOUT IN 2018, WOULD THEY? Of course they wouldn’t, we all know that. This Peter Hasson fellow at the Daily Caller News Foundation is probably just making it all up. Wait, what is this “American Engagement Technologies” stuff?