NEWS YOU CAN USE:  “If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up” – Ferris Bueller Replica Ferrari Spyder heads to auction.

“CALIFORNIA WANTS TO TEACH YOUR KIDS THAT CAPITALISM IS RACIST”:  Bill Evers has an essay in the WSJ about the California Department of Education’s new “Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum.”  Yes, it’s bad, but I’m sure you figured that:

Begin with economics. Capitalism is described as a “form of power and oppression,” alongside “patriarchy,” “racism,” “white supremacy” and “ableism.” Capitalism and capitalists appear as villains several times in the document.

On politics, the model curriculum is similarly left-wing. One proposed course promises to explore the African-American experience “from the precolonial ancestral roots in Africa to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and enslaved people’s uprisings in the antebellum South, to the elements of Hip Hop and African cultural retentions.”

Teachers are encouraged to cite the biographies of “potentially significant figures” such as Angela Davis, Frantz Fanon and Bobby Seale. Convicted cop-killers Mumia Abu-Jamal and Assata Shakur are also on the list. Students are taught that the life of George Jackson matters “now more than ever.” Jackson, while in prison, became “a revolutionary warrior for Black liberation and prison reform.” The Latino section’s people of significance include Puerto Rican nationalists Oscar López Rivera, a member of a paramilitary group that carried out more than 130 bomb attacks, and Lolita Lebrón, who was convicted of attempted murder in a group assault that wounded five congressmen.

Housing policy gets the treatment. The curriculum describes subprime loans as an attack on home buyers with low incomes rather than a misguided attempt by the government to help such home buyers. Politicians—Republicans and Democrats—imposed lower underwriting standards on the home-loan industry. Republicans billed it as a way to expand the middle class, while Democrats crowed that it would aid the poor.

A friend of mine wrote this morning calling Bill “a brave man.”  But he didn’t mean Bill was brave to write the op-ed.  He meant that only a brave man could plow through the thousand pages of material Bill had to read in order to write his op-ed.  “Reading it all would be a fate worse than death,” wrote my friend.

The Republic won’t survive too much of this kind of stuff, you know. Yes, there’s a lot of ruin in a nation.  But it’s not infinite.  I may be a Cassandra. But never lose sight of the fact that Cassandra was right.

WOW: IBM Just Made its Cancer-Fighting AI Projects Open-Source. “The first, PaccMann, uses deep learning algorithms to predict whether compounds will be viable anticancer drugs, taking some of the expensive guesswork out of pharmaceutical development, according to the press release. Then there’s INtERAcT, which automatically parses medical journals for important updates in the field, and PIMKL, which helps doctors provide tailor-fit care based on individual patients’ needs.”

AS LEGENDARY HIPSTER FRANK BURNS LIKES TO SAY, INDIVIDUALITY IS FINE, AS LONG AS WE ALL DO IT TOGETHER: Hipster offended his photo is in article about hipsters looking all the same, it isn’t him. “Eric contacted Getty Images. Getty looked in their archive for the model release. And came back to us with the surprising news: the model’s name wasn’t the name of our angry hipster-hater. In other words, the guy who’d threatened to sue us for misusing his image wasn’t the one in the photo. He’d misidentified himself. All of which just proves the story we ran: Hipsters look so much alike that they can’t even tell themselves apart from each other.”

CHANGE: Nashville’s Next Mayor May Be a Black Conservative Woman.

The election is being shaken up by Carol Swain, a woman who is – of all things in traditionally Democratic Nashville, a blue stronghold in a red state – a no-holds-barred black, Christian Republican conservative.

Swain’s vitae resembles neurosurgeon/cabinet member Ben Carson’s, but is in some ways more extraordinary. She was one of twelve children born in rural Virginia in 1954, growing up in a shack without running water. Her mother, a victim of infantile paralysis who never made it out of high school, was physically abused by her stepfather. Her own father ended his education at third grade. Carol herself, shoeless and unable to attend on snow days, did not finish high school either. She dropped out and married at sixteen to have three children, one of whom died of sudden infant death syndrome. Five years later, she was divorced and tried to commit suicide.

But then everything slowly changed. In a remarkable bootstrap story she would likely ascribe to her faith, Swain earned her GED while working as a cashier at McDonald’s, then attended, in succession, Virginia Western Community College, Roanoke College (BA), Virginia Tech (MA), University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (PhD) and Yale (MLS).

But wait, as they say, there’s more.

Good stuff from Roger L. Simon. You’ll want to click over for the rest of the story.

BLUE ON BLUE: ‘Complete Chaos’: Top Democrat Staffer Ousted Amid Complaints DCCC Is Too White.

HOUSE OFFICIALS MUM ON NEW CYBERSECURITY MEASURES: Remember Jackson Cosko and Imran Awan, the congressional Information Technology (IT) aides who committed serious abuses of the Senate and House computer systems? Select Committee on Modernization of Congress recommends half a dozen IT reforms but won’t say if they will prevent future such abuses.

RAPTOR ABOVE THE SNOW: Dazzling photo of an F-22 Raptor over snow and glaciers in the Alaska Range.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Harvard med school remains tight-lipped about transgender overhaul of curriculum.

CHANGE: Court ruling against Venezuela in Crystallex case puts Citgo at risk. “A U.S. federal appeals court on Monday rejected an appeal by Venezuela’s state-owned oil company to set aside an order allowing a Canadian gold mining company to seize shares in its U.S. refining unit, Citgo Petroleum Corp.”

Maduro might be this close to losing another major source of other people’s money.

RACISM, STRAIGHT UP: Bernie Sanders blasted Baltimore as ‘Third World country’ and ‘disgrace’ in past comments.

GOLDIE TAYLOR: Trump’s Racist Attack Puts U.S. in ‘Dangerous, Filthy Place.’

It’s different when Trump says it because reasons.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Oberlin’s Effort To Fight Judgment Backfires Bigtime.

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LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Trump Forces Democrats, Media to Defend Al Sharpton. “I’m not surprised because the media and the Democrats have normalized antisemitism with their celebration and defense of anti-Semites like congressfolk Omar, Tlaib, and AOC. So why not Sharpton? It’s the next logical step.”

OF COURSE HE IS: Bob McManus: Trump is absolutely right about ‘con man’ Al Sharpton.

REALCLEARINVESTIGATIONS: Why the Mystery of Russiagate Hinges on the Mystery of Joseph Mifsud. “Although Mifsud has traveled many times to Russia and has contacts with Russian academics, his closest public ties are to Western governments, politicians, and institutions, including the CIA, FBI and British intelligence services.”

SUSTAINABILITY: Treasury to Borrow Over $1 Trillion in 2019 for Second Year in a Row.

PAUL BEDARD: Immigration top 2020 issue, 3-to-1 over healthcare, illegals ‘affect my life.’

Illegal immigration has forcefully moved to the top issue in the 2020 election, with Americans declaring that it impacts their lives and that they believe migrants are abusing social welfare programs once they get into the nation.

According to a series of polls released today by Heritage Action for America, immigration was cited as the top concern of Americans, at 21%. By comparison, just 7% cited healthcare.

What’s more, 54% said illegal immigration impacts their lives.

I’m pretty sure we’ll be hearing more about it. The Dems’ problem is that their core constituency — the Woke White People — doesn’t realy believe in borders, but a lot of their actual voters feel differently.

KAROL MARKOWICZ: Dems refuse to help fix border crisis because bashing Trump is more fun.

There isn’t a good solution, and the continual ratcheting up of the rhetoric by the left only ends up actively harming these kids. Democrats are telegraphing the message that as soon as they win the White House, people who cross the border illegally can stay.

Sen. Bernie Sanders referred to “racist child prisons,” because the Trump administration is housing children at an army base that served as a World War II internment camp for Japanese-Americans. He was silent when the Obama administration did the same thing. Will a President Sanders detain any migrants?

Sen. Liz Warren says, “We should not be criminalizing mamas and babies trying to flee violence at home or trying to build a better future.” Sounds like her administration would let everyone in, too.

But we simply can’t admit every mama and baby (and presumably a daddy or two). Such unrealistic rhetoric will only exacerbate the misery of the migrants and serve as a boon to the smugglers who profit off their misery.

If it unseats just one Republican president, isn’t it worth it?

THE FATHER OF THE MODEL T: On this day in 1863, during the depths of the Civil War, future automaker Henry Ford was born.

Ford didn’t invent the automobile. Nor did he invent the assembly line. But he put those two ideas together and combined them with a relentless … and I really mean relentless … effort to make a product that was both functional and affordable. Said Ford:

I will build a motor car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one – and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God’s great open spaces.

Sounds like a good idea to me. Of course, as he acknowledged, he had great people working for him. When we pay tribute to Ford for putting ordinary Americans behind the wheel of a Model T and other early Ford automobiles, don’t forget Ford’s many bright boys–Clarence Avery, Gus Degner, Eugene Farkas, Jozsef A. Galamb, Henry Love, Peter E. Martin, Charles E. Sorensen, C.J. Smith, Childe Harold Wills and others–who supplied their share of that relentless effort.  I suspect Instapundit readers can fill in some names that I don’t know.

Yes, I know Ford was an anti-semite. And not your garden-variety turn-of-the-century anti-semite either. He was hardcore, feels-it-deep-in-his-gut kind.  I bet he had other bad qualities too. But the Model T was a marvel.

WITH A CLOWN CAR FULL OF CANDIDATES, HOW CAN IT NOT BE A CIRCUS? Matt Taibbi: The Iowa Circus.

ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE: Viva Maduro! The Chicago Teachers Union’s Solidarity Trip To Venezuela.