ALL HAIL NORTON I, EMPEROR OF THE UNITED STATES, PROTECTOR OF MEXICO: On this day in 1818, Joshua Norton was born in Britain, before immigrating to South Africa at the age of two.  As a young adult, he left South Africa with a small inheritance and came to San Francisco.   There, he appeared for a while to be a reasonably successful, though perhaps slightly eccentric, businessman.

Unfortunately for Norton, one very bad investment—attempting to sell Peruvian rice to China–pushed him into bankruptcy. After that he was no longer slightly eccentric, but rather very eccentric.

How eccentric was that? In 1859, he proclaimed himself Emperor of the United States:

At the peremptory request and desire of a large majority of the citizens of these United States, I, Joshua Norton, formerly of Algoa Bay, Cape of Good Hope, and now for the last 9 years and 10 months past of San Francisco, California, declare and proclaim myself Emperor of these United States; and in virtue of the authority thereby in me vested, do hereby order and direct the representatives of the different States of the Union to assemble in Musical Hall, of this city, on the 1st day of February next, then and there to make such alterations in the existing laws of the Union as may ameliorate the evils under which the country is laboring, and thereby cause confidence to exist, both at home and abroad, in our stability and integrity.

— NORTON I., Emperor of the United States

San Franciscans liked the guy. He seemed harmless enough. He even had some good ideas–like building a bridge over the bay.  The newspapers routinely carried his proclamations. Merchants sold “Emperor Norton” souvenirs. He issued his own currency, which was honored by businesses he patronized. The whole thing was rather adorable.

Dressed in full military regalia, complete with a beaver hat decorated with a peacock feather, Norton was a frequent sight on San Francisco streets, where he was usually treated with respect (or at least indulgence). After all, what’s not to like about a guy who issues a proclamation abolishing Congress?

This went on for over 20 years. Then, in 1880, at the age of 61, Norton collapsed on the street and died. San Francisco was in mourning.

Of course, an Emperor’s funeral should be splendid.  And so Norton I’s was (despite the fact he was himself close to penniless). Members of a San Francisco businessmen’s association paid for a nice casket. And as many as 10,000 people lined the streets to pay their last respects to their beloved Emperor.  San Franciscans really liked the guy; it’s enough to make one really like San Francisco.

Alas, that was back when San Francisco had a sense of humor. These days too many San Franciscans believe or claim to believe that half their fellow Americans are “haters.” If they really believe that, it isn’t surprising that they don’t have much lighthearted fun anymore.  It’s got to be exhausting to have to carry the torch of virtue with so little help from one’s countrymen.

MICHAEL LEDEEN: Iran’s Mullahs Can See Their Destiny Acted Out in Venezuela. “I’m not a betting man, but if I were, I’d lay long odds that the Iranian regime is highly penetrated, by us, by the Saudis, by the Israelis, and all the rest you can conjure up in a few minutes. But the really profound penetration, about which I’ve been writing and speaking for many years, is political and ideological. The masses, all over the country, have had it with the regime. They want regime change, and the regime knows and fears it.”

Faster, please — and do read the whole thing.

LAWS ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Report: U. Illinois ‘improperly blocks’ two-thirds of public records requests.

PROPUBLICA: Facebook Moves to Block Ad Transparency Tools — Including Ours. “Our tool had let the public see exactly how users were being targeted by advertisers. The social media giant urged us to shut it down last year.”

ProPublica, Mozilla and Who Targets Me have all noticed their tools stopped working this month after Facebook inserted code in its website that blocks them.

“This is very concerning,” said Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., who has co-sponsored the Honest Ads Act, which would require transparency on Facebook ads. “Investigative groups like ProPublica need access to this information in order to track and report on the opaque and frequently deceptive world of online advertising.”

For the past year and a half, ProPublica has been building a searchable database of political ads and the segments of the population advertisers are paying to reach. We did this by enlisting thousands of volunteers who installed a web browser extension. The tool shared the ads users see as well as Facebook’s details on why the users were targeted.

In a statement to ProPublica, Facebook said the change was meant to simply enforce its terms of service. (The Guardian also published a story Sunday flagging the change.)

“We regularly improve the ways we prevent unauthorized access by third parties like web browser plugins to keep people’s information safe,” Facebook spokesperson Beth Gautier said. “This was a routine update and applied to ad blocking and ad scraping plugins, which can expose people’s information to bad actors in ways they did not expect.”

Facebook has made minor tweaks before that broke our tool. But this time, Facebook blocked the ability to automatically pull ad targeting information.

For a service built on sharing, Facebook certainly doesn’t like to do much of that itself.

CHANGE YOU’LL BE REQUIRED TO BELIEVE IN: Land, jobs are top priorities for radical S. African party.

A former ANC member, Malema founded the EFF in 2013, and his radical programme rules out “compromises” allegedly agreed to by ANC leaders with the white minority.

Malema, 37, has begun to eat away at ANC support amid chronic unemployment that now stands at 27 percent of the workforce.

But his keystone issue is land redistribution.

“The economy is in the hands of the white community, we want to change that,” he told the crowd to cheers and raised fists.

“We are going to place all land under the custodianship of the state, for equal redistribution to all,” he pledged.

Prediction: They’ll take the land and lose the jobs — but that’s an easy one.

WAIT, WHAT HAPPENED TO #BELIEVEALLWOMEN? Lt. Gov. Fairfax slams ‘defamatory and false’ sexual assault allegation.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: WKU pays students for service projects, except these faith-based ones.

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SALENA ZITO: Howard Schultz unifies the parties — against him. I don’t like Schultz, but it’s amusing to see how much the anti-outsider reaction against him from both parties mirrors that against Trump. The parties’ biggest fear isn’t that someone from the other party will win. It’s that someone from outside the Beltway Uniparty will win.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Is Northam In or Out and Much, Much More. “WaPo spends major coin during the Super Bowl for commercial celebrating themselves.”

If not them, who?

HAS RALPH NORTHAM LANDED YET? Northam meets with senior staff and considers options, including resignation.

JOURNALISM:

Also:

UPDATE:

Well, you know:

HARDEN THE GRID: China’s EMP Weapons Pose Grave Threat to America, Newly Declassified Report Shows.

CHANGE: Trump Nominations Begin to Remake the Liberal 9th Circuit.

HMM: China’s Slowdown Is Starting to Hit Where It Hurts: Employment.

At a meeting in July 2018, the Chinese Communist Party’s Politburo analyzed the current economic situation and proposed stabilizing employment, finance, foreign trade, and investment to tackle external changes and ensure stable economic operations effectively. Within that list, the Politburo ranked “stabilizing employment” as the first and most important task. In addition, the report of the 19th National Congress of the CCP also stated that employment is pivotal to people’s well-being, noting that instability in employment will affect the standard of living and may ultimately affect social stability.

From this perspective, stabilizing employment is tantamount to safeguarding social stability from economic risk. China’s employment situation is generally stable and improving, but there are changes and difficulties in maintaining stability, Zhang Yizhen, vice minister of human resources and social security, said at a regular policy briefing of the State Council on December 5. The Hong Kong media said that the rare use of the phrase “difficulties in maintaining stability” was a grim omen for China’s employment situation.

The reality confirms the grim employment situation in China. The internet industry is experiencing a downturn at the moment. Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent (often collectively referred to as BAT), China’s internet giants, are a desirable place for job seekers. But since September, the news of Alibaba scaling back its campus recruitment program has caused an uproar on the internet. At the same time, news spread that Baidu and JD.com have stopped social recruitment and that Tencent will lay off about 6,000 of its staff.

During his George W. Bush’s first term, I remember a news item where he told then-Chinese President Hu Jintao that if the economy didn’t produce at least four million jobs, he wouldn’t win reelection. Hu replied that he had to deliver 25 million jobs each year to avoid unrest.

PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: Nick Sandmann’s Lawyer Sends Letters To These 54 Entities For Potential Lawsuits.

Related: Covington Lawyers Begin Big Payback.

I hope that young Sandmann becomes rich, but I also hope that he doesn’t lose his faith.

The worst thing about this mob against him and his fellows was to have their spiritual leaders — the Dioceses — join the mob and betray them without even knowing the full story. I’ve repeatedly pointed out that all mobs are demonic. Assuming that my assertion about mobs is correct, what can we conclude about the leaders of these dioceses?

We expect creatures like Kathy Griffin (on the list in the link above) and Alyssa Milano to stir up strife and call for blood. They are, after all, the declared enemies of young, white, pro-life Catholic young men.

The most painful thing for anyone, however, is to have a trusted friend stab you in the back and the dioceses’ leaders were more than just friends to Sandmann, et. al.

They were the boys’ spiritual fathers.

Those who the Covington students should have been able to trust were their Judases.

Yes.

Related: Why They Blamed The Kids At First.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Facebook’s business model exploits YOU and Mark Zuckerberg could care less.

No rhetorical sleight of hand, such as Zuckerberg’s disingenuous claim that “we don’t sell your data,” can obfuscate that fact. His claim makes a technical distinction. Obviously, Facebook does not part ways with the data we give it in exchange for money from advertisers. They hold onto this precious commodity and sell insights into who we are and what we do to advertisers, treating it as a renewable and recyclable resource.

Indeed, Facebook’s business model relies on amassing as much personal information as possible. Zuckerberg admits this in his piece, saying Facebook aims to collect “what pages people like, what they click on, and other signals.” The latest illustration of this intent appeared in a recent New York Times report that Facebook plans to integrate Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp into a unified platform, which will dramatically increase their holistic knowledge and insights of users and their behavior.

All of this is emblematic of Apple CEO Tim Cook’s stark warning that we have allowed companies to create a “data industrial complex” in which “companies know you better than you may know yourself.”

Let’s not be fooled or distracted by semantic debate. We are being monetized and sold.

Yes, but… it’s working: Facebook’s Stock Surges 7 Percent on Huge Q4 Sales, Massive User Growth.

DEMOCRATS HATE WEALTHY CANDIDATES…WHEN THEY’RE NOT DEMOCRATS: Who’s ready for a class war from the party of John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Michael Bloomberg, and the Kennedy/Roosevelt clans?

CHANGE: Trump Economy: Blue-Collar Wages Rise Faster than White-Collar. “Salaries for college graduate Americans are growing much slower than for Americans who are working in transportation, restaurants, services, construction, and sales, according to federal data. . . . Poll ratings shows that Trump’s support is weaker among university graduates than among blue-collar workers.”

A HIGH-TECH FISKING: We dismantle Facebook’s memo defending its ‘Research.’

JOEL KOTKIN ON THE DEMOCRATS: Party of the people? Or the oligarchs?

In the past Democrats attracted large numbers of middle- and working-class voters seeking their fair share of the national cornucopia. But over the past 20 years they have become increasingly dominated by what historian Fred Siegel has called “an upstairs, downstairs” coalition, bringing together the most destitute with the most privileged parts of our society.

Nancy Pelosi, the mega multi-millionaire from San Francisco, epitomizes “upstairs downstairs” politics of the party. Neither she nor President Obama threatened the ascendency of the tech oligarchs, in fact saving them from strong anti-trust action while raking in their generous political contributions. Some putatively left-wing candidates including Kamala Harris also seem anxious and willing to serve as their chosen tool. The oligarchs, after all, do “not have to rule,” notes historian Jeffrey Winters, but they likely will draw the line at such things as regulation, anti-trust and capital-gains rates that threaten their hegemony.

In contrast, the new progressive heartthrobs, such as Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, openly regard tech and Wall Street billionaires, much as Bernie Sanders did in 2016, as class enemies. They seem certain to reject nominally “woke” and self-financing oligarchal candidates such as Michael Bloomberg — we have apparently been spared a Tom Steyer candidacy — as they regard billionaires as inherently “immoral.” . . .

Sadly, pragmatism seems increasingly out of fashion among Democrats. Most of the leading candidates — Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker — have been embracing a program of massive tax increases, ever more environmental regulation, the elimination of the fossil fuel industry, imposed high density and large income r-distribution. None of these are likely to appeal to suburban or small town voters.

Indeed.

ENDGAME? Protesters rally in Venezuela; general defects from Maduro.

The street protesters in Caracas on Saturday were mostly backing opposition leader Guaido, who the United States has also recognized as interim president. They were pushing for Maduro’s ouster from power at home while signaling to other nations to consider supporting Guaido as the country’s leader, The Washington Post reported.

Before the protests, Venezuelan Air Force General Francisco Esteban Yanez Rodgriguez broke with Maduro and called on the military to back Guaido.

About the only thing worse than a military junta is a properly elected, energetic socialist.