EMPLOYEES ARE USING THE LOW UNEMPLOYMENT AND RISING BLUE COLLAR WAGES TO LEVERAGE DEMAND FOR RAISES? I BLAME TRUMP!  Strikes are 257% up in 2 years, even though labor union membership is down — why more workers are taking a stand.

Nevertheless policy directors of left leaning think tanks say it isn’t enough, demand structural reform  (Gee – I wonder what that new structure might be! I’d guess same structure they prescribed for global warming and global cooling and the heartbreak of psoriasis. Socialism. Again.)

THE LEFT AND ASTROTURF:  The Democrats’ Fyre Festival Nomination.

A CONSUMMATION DEVOUTLY TO BE HOPED FOR:  Devin Nunes hints that Robert Mueller’s team will be exposed soon.

AND ON THIS BLOG, I CONTEND AYANNA PRESSLEY IS A TRI-PLATED MORON:  On the House floor, Ayanna Pressley contends the Constitution is sexist.

Come on, guys, how can someone serve in an office that requires swearing to protect the constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic when this person wants to destroy the constitution?  And we should be asking Bernie fans that, too.

OBVIOUSLY: No, Rush Limbaugh’s Comments About Buttigieg Are Not Homophobic.

Also, look, let’s leave aside the fact it’s a gay marriage, okay? Anyone who married to that man, at some point had to go to his/her (if he’d been straight) family and say “mom, dad, I married Alfred E. Neuman.”  One of those people is unwell. And I’m not going to speculate on which. Kissing Alfred E. Neuman on stage is beyond the pale, and I don’t care what sex you are, or if you think your gender is attack helicopter, or even tank.

CULTURAL APPROPRIATION AND “STAY IN YOUR LANE” ARGUMENTS ARE ALL ATTEMPTS AT CONTROLLING THOUGHT.  BAH. A FREE MAN THINKS (AND CREATES) FREELY. AND YES, THAT INCLUDES — AND GOES DOUBLE — FOR A FREE WOMAN. AT LEAST THIS FREE WOMAN:  Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.

MY FACE, MUCH SHOCKED, SO UNBELIEVING, WOW WOW WOW:  Roger Stone And The Biased Juror.

THEY ARE AWARE THEY EARNED RETRIBUTION, RIGHT?  Retribution Tour: The Latest Media Hysteria.

The guilty flee when no one pursues….

WHO?  Prager University Makes Samantha Bee Mad.

CHINA SYNDROME: Looks Like Huawei Might Be Screwed This Time.

AT AMAZON, AMMEX Medical Indigo Nitrile Gloves.

NO. GO AWAY. Coronavirus Could Infect Two-Thirds of Globe, Research Shows. Assuming this is true, which is an assumption indeed, it really matters whether the mortality rate is as bad as it seems in Wuhan — which would be a global catastrophe if two-thirds of people got it — or if, as seems plausible, it’s a lot less outside of Wuhan for whatever reason. At this point, that’s essentially unknowable, but we are accumulating data.

JACK DUNPHY: 2020 Democrats Are Pure Comedy Gold, None More So Than Bloomberg.

Characteristically of the left, Bloomberg is being branded as a racist for actions he took as mayor that helped black residents of New York, specifically, his continuation of the tough-on-crime policies that began under former Mayor Rudy Giuliani and his police commissioner William Bratton. Those policies included proactive measures intended to deter street crime of the type that had turned much of the city into a dystopian war zone. One of those measures, the most controversial of them, came to be known as stop-and-frisk.

The very term has been branded as racist based on the fact that the number of blacks and Hispanics stopped and frisked by police in New York was disproportionate to their share of the population. Gentle readers, when you see stop and arrest rates for this or that ethnic group compared with that group’s share of the overall population, you know you are being hoodwinked. It is the criminal offender pool that must be compared to the stop and arrest rates, and in New York City — as is the case in any other city you can name — it is blacks and Hispanics who commit the vast majority of violent crime.

In 2018, blacks were 72.6 percent of the shooting suspects in New York City, and Hispanics were 24.1 percent (see page 12 of this NYPD report). Blacks and Hispanics were also 73.3 and 22.4 percent of the city’s shooting victims, respectively, so it should be beyond saying (but sadly isn’t) that curtailing shooting incidents will be a balm to those communities. Arrests for firearm possession closely mirrored these statistics (see page 13 of the same report), so it’s clear that, by the benchmark that matters, there is no racial disproportion among the arrestees.

Bloomberg, fearful of the racist label sticking despite its lack of a factual basis, has apologized for stop-and-frisk, in essence saying he regrets the tactic that brought about crime reductions few thought were possible. The NYPD investigated 2,262 murders in 1990; in 2019 the number was 319. This decrease would not have been possible without the proactive measures, stop-and-frisk chief among them, initiated by leaders unafraid of political backlash.

Related: Warren, AOC: Let’s not forget that Bloomberg’s a racist.

OPEN THREAD: You know what to do.

CORONAVIRUS:

JUST NORMAL EVERY DAY REGULAR FLU SPRAYING GO BACK TO WORK #coronavirus pic.twitter.com/1HeCszNbXh

— Steve Warner ✘ (@darkcityfm) February 13, 2020

To be fair, this is exactly the 21st century I was promised by Hollywood in the pre-Star Wars 1970s.

CRYING WOLF: Roger Waters: Trump a Mass Murderer Killing ‘Brown People for Profit.’ 

Waters, credibly accused of being an anti-semite, took his Trump attacks to a new level next.

“And this is a man who has failed at f***ing everything in his life except becoming the biggest … tyrant and mass murderer and mass destroyer of everything that any of us might love or cherish in the whole [world], only because he has the power,” he continued. “Unfortunately, he has his finger on the button on it, and he’s right. In ‘Pigs,’ when we put up that he has a bigger button and it works, it does. And it’s working all over the world, murdering brown people for profit.”

At this point, according to Rolling Stone, the moderator applauded Waters’ passion.

To be fair, any president with an (R) after his name gives Waters the vapors. Fortunately, the era when David Gilmour led the Floyd focused on the music rather than the histrionics.

I THOUGHT IT WAS ALL CONTROLLED BY MY SUV: Scientists say solar system affects Earth’s carbon cycle.

ON THE ONE HAND, I GET IT.

On the other hand:

The Justice Department’s descent into partisan hackery and its inability to police itself are doing more harm than any tweet.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: HGTV Features Its First-Ever Throuple on House Hunters.

LEFTISTS ARE STILL TRYING TO COPE WITH THE LOSS OF THEIR ACCUSTOMED IMPUNITY: ‘Are you okay?’ Blue-checked WaPo journo cannot ‘overstate the cultural damage’ South Park has done by making fun of smug liberals.

KEVIN WILLIAMSON: The Left and the Theocrats.

Kim Ghattas, a correspondent for the BBC, gave a remarkably frank interview to her home network about her new book, Black Wave, an account of the Saudi–Iranian rivalry that has warped life and politics in much of the Islamic world.

What struck me about the interview is that the Beirut-born Ghattas is much more plain and direct about the disastrous role played by leftist Western intellectuals — particularly French thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir—in encouraging and enabling the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini and his repressive model of Islamic government.

It is worth remembering that the Iranian theocracy was a great project of the secular Western Left.

Foucault welcomed Khomeini’s revolution as “the first of the grand insurrections against global systems.” Sartre traveled to Tehran to flack for Khomeini. The French Left celebrated Khomeini as “the Islamic Lenin.” (American conservatives might have said much the same thing, but the French Left meant that as praise.) Andrew Young, Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to the United Nations, hailed Khomeini as a “saint.” Many of those intellectuals stood by their judgment, though some of them, such as Simone de Beauvoir, recoiled from Tehran’s treatment of women and minorities.

Read the whole thing.

Related: Roger Kimball on The perversions of M. Foucault.

CORONAVIRUS: U.S. Coronavirus Claims 15th Infection.

Coronavirus live updates: China’s Hubei province reports 116 more deaths and 4,823 new cases.

Coronavirus: Why have two reporters in Wuhan disappeared?

White House does not have ‘high confidence’ in China’s coronavirus information, official says.

Latest on Coronavirus Spreading in China and Beyond.

Coronavirus: Sharp increase in deaths and cases in Hubei.

Spread Of Coronavirus Takes A Turn For The Worse.

CAN WE GET ONE THAT TERMINATES THEM? This App Automatically Cancels and Sues Robocallers.

AT AMAZON, save in Car Care.

Plus, deals in Pet Food and Supplies. Stock up!

GOVERNMENT AS PREDATOR: Innocent Owners Sue Detroit For Seizing Cars, Holding Them Ransom.