LEAVING CALIFORNIA: Flight of the Icons. Anti-business policies are driving flagship firms and young residents out of California. Once the ultimate land of youth, the state is now aging faster than the rest of the nation.

Mark Zuckerberg has claimed that he would never start Facebook in today’s California. Yet he seems unconcerned about the fate facing smaller firms. His foundation gave millions to Proposition 15, a measure that would have increased property taxes on businesses and was opposed by most legacy businesses, and particularly by minority-owned firms. In a letter to Zuckerberg, the business owners noted: “Unlike Facebook, restaurants, dry cleaners, nail salons and other small businesses can’t operate right now and many may never open again. The last thing they need is a billionaire pushing higher taxes on them under the false flag of social justice.”

Not to be outdone, New York City has been chasing people out of town by stifling housing and industrial development. Many are  crossing the Hudson River to Jersey City, which built seven times more housing per capita as Manhattan last year.

UPDATE: Headline link was incorrect before. Should be working now.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Traditional marriage roles make for much better sex.

HMM: Texas A&M Apologizes to Black Trump-Supporting Student for Threatening Him, Says a ‘Template’ Is to Blame.

VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR DAILY INSANITY WRAP: Listen to Tom Cruise’s Obsessed Social Distancing Rant.

Insanity Wrap needs to know: When is the first openly-gay cabinet secretary not the first openly-gay cabinet secretary?

Answer: When he’s Republican Richard Grennell and needs to be shoved aside so Pete Buttigieg can enjoy the media spotlight.

Before we get to the sordid details, a quick preview of today’s Wrap.

• It’s Cuomo vs Be Blasio for who’s the biggest dictator
• Fox News outdoes CNN on Wuhan Flu scaremongering – you can catch it from the Happy Birthday song
• Biden campaign deputy chief wonders why you Republican “bunch of f-kers” aren’t showing any unity

Bonus: Ayn Rand was right about the Left again.

And so much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.

ROGER SIMON: Michigan Legislators Blow It Big Time Questioning Dominion CEO.

We live in a complicated time for democracy, to say the least.

As the world becomes increasingly technological, the less knowledge most of our legislators have with which to make their judgements.

In many cases, they are essentially flying blind.

When it comes to understanding the computer-based voting systems dominating our elections this can be perilous indeed.

This was painfully and, I regret to say, tragically in evidence Tuesday when John Poulos, the elusive CEO of Dominion Voting Systems, finally appeared in front of a panel of Michigan Republican state senators to answer questions about the Nov. 3 election.

It was in Michigan’s Antrim County where, because of a supposed computer “glitch,” a forensic audit of Dominion equipment was undertaken last week by Allied Security Operations and its co-founder Russell Ramsland.

Ramsland found the Dominion machines rejected an unheard of 68 percent of the ballots, making them subject to the manual process of “adjudication,” easily subject to fudging.

He deemed the situation a “national security issue.”

Ramsland was not at Tuesday’s hearing, nor were, astonishingly, any information technology professionals at all to ask questions of the Dominion CEO.

The legislators were, as noted above, flying blind—and it sure sounded that way as they read questions fumblingly off cards (from staffers?) and didn’t seem to know how or what to ask in follow-ups.

Given this unprepared performance (I will give my explanation for this later) I reached out to an actual qualified professional—Garland Favorito of VoterGA who has been deeply involved with the situation in Georgia—to see what he thought about the Michigan proceedings (viewable here).

Mr. Favorito took a look and replied via email:

“The opening statement by CEO John Poulos claiming it is technologically impossible for a voting system like Dominion to flip votes in real time has already been proven to be BLATANTLY FALSE by many American computer scientists. I can state categorically based on my career IT experience and 16 years of non-partisan voting system research that any voting system can be programmed in advance to flip votes in real time. Mr. Polous may be able to fool members of a legislature or the media but he cannot fool Election Integrity advocates who are IT professionals.”

So, I ask again, why wasn’t a computer scientist or scientists there at the hearing to interrogate Poulos? This may have been their only chance.

Favorito continued:

“Mr. Poulos further claimed that vote switches have not occurred on Dominion systems. It is fact that hand count audits proved Dominion Democracy Suite 5.5 voting systems swapped votes from President Trump to former Vice President Biden in both Michigan and Georgia. We don’t know what component of the system caused this to occur in Georgia because the Secretary of State [Raffensperger] is blocking forensic system exams in multiple counties. However, we now do know that for the 2020 Presidential election to be considered legitimate, properly conducted hand count audits must be completed by any counties running the Dominion Democracy Suite 5.5 system.”

Now I will respond to the question I just raised as to why this crucial hearing was conducted in such a perfunctory manner.

Earlier William Jacobson of Legal Insurrection on Where things stand at this hour.

SARAH HOYT’S SHOCKED FACE COULD NOT BE REACHED FOR COMMENT: Hunter Biden Appears To Have Known About Investigation Into Business Dealings Long Before He Claimed.

“One of the FBI documents from the laptop published by the Post ‘included a case number that had the code associated with an ongoing federal money laundering investigation in Delaware, according to several law enforcement officials who reviewed the document. Another document — one with a grand jury subpoena number — appeared to show the initials of two assistant U.S. attorneys linked to the Wilmington, Delaware, office.’ Hunter Biden claims he only learned of the investigation this past week, but these documents suggest otherwise,” Hemingway wrote.

As The Daily Beast reported late last week, much of what is now being reported about Hunter’s scandals began with the New York Post’s report that was suppressed by social media companies ahead of the 2020 election.

Yes, but the election is over now, and there’s a much more reliable hardcore progressive — Kamala Harris — waiting in the wings.

COLLUSION: Former Ohio-based researcher pleads guilty to selling American medical secrets in China.

A REPUBLICAN NEVERTRUMP POSTMORTEM: How history will view these self-proclaimed conservatives and protectors of principle.

Most important, this bipartisan guild believes in the “rules-based international order,” the congeries of multinational institutions whose rules and regulations should limit and hinder our own national sovereignty, which feeds a dangerous “nationalism” sure to mutate into fascism. And they endorse the narrative of “moralizing internationalism,” the century-old, dubious belief that all peoples across the planet want to be Westerners and enjoy our goods like prosperity, peace, human rights, religious tolerance, sex equality, free speech, and all the other cargo of the Western way.

These are the stale ideas that created the “endless wars” in the Middle East that Trump decried and began to end, even as he brokered normalization of relations between Israel and several Muslim states. And he did it by ignoring one of the foreign policy guild’s most cherished narratives: only a Palestinian Arab state, created at Israel’s expense and a threat to her security, could resolve that long bloody crisis––another reason for the RNT, foreign policy and national security division, to hate the president so intensely.

Of course, Trump’s seeming failure to get reelected has no doubt excited the RNT. Now Joe Biden, if elected by the Electoral College, will be running the government according to the decrepit protocols of the traditional postwar ruling class. That Biden will have won likely with the help of widespread electoral fraud won’t matter, any more than the degradation of journalistic professional standards, or the debasement of the FBI and DOJ, bothered the RNT. Their anger, bitterness, and outrage will be assuaged, and they can return to being the Dem’s “good” Republicans, the ones who will sacrifice conservative interests and principles to progressive ones.

If you think that’s an exaggeration, consider this tweet from Steve Schmidt to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the radical New York Congressman. Schmidt is a high-profile RNT who heads  the RNT Lincoln Project. Seeking a partnership with AOC to delegitimize the “other side,” Trump supporters smeared as “white supremacists,” Schmidt tweeted, as reported in PJ Media:

“I have an idea. Let’s approach each other and our points of view with good faith. We say the following with respect and seriousness Ma’am. Our hand is open and we need to work together or we are going to lose America,” Schmidt wrote. “We will not yield and we will never break. We are the side opposed to autocracy.”

Schmidt described Never Trumpers and AOC as “the left and right flanks of a broad coalition. Should we buckle, they will win. We must not. We are together. We pledge to listen. We pledge to learn. We pledge to be open to your ideas and we pledge to compromise. We have no such offer for the other side.”

And Schmidt takes his “togetherness” with the Democrats pretty seriously!

SEEN ON FACEBOOK: “So, by my reckoning if Joe Biden took the Pfizer vaccine today, and the second dose on schedule, he would be close to full immunity by Inauguration Day. I would think there would be bipartisan support for him to do this (for different reasons), and the only reason not to do is pandering to populists. I think he should do it today, and do it on TV with his winning smile. A great opportunity to send the right public health message and to ensure he doesn’t begin his presidency with the Commie virus coursing through his nervous system.”

Anything to delay a Kamala Harris presidency.

PROF. JACOBSON: While You Were Focused On The Electoral College Vote, The Senate Filled The 7th Circuit Coney Barrett Seat: Trump’s 54th appointment to a Court of Appeals, a legacy to last a generation.

And you should be focused on the Georgia Senate runoff, as keeping the Senate in GOP hands will make things much harder for Biden in this area.

SHOUT DOWN THE WOKE TERRORISTS: In defence of academic freedom at McGill University: We insist that inclusivity must begin with a commitment to a broad diversity of thought, opinions, theoretical interests and political views.

REFILL THE SWAMP: Biden Fundraiser Floated as Ambassador Pick Took Millions in PPP Loans While His Law Firm Won Massive Settlements.

THAT’S BECAUSE IT IS: Top business school profs say student loan forgiveness, is a ‘highly regressive policy.’ “Full cancellation would distribute $192 bn to the top 20% of earners, and only $29 bn to the bottom 20%.”

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KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Americans Revolt Against Life in COVID-19 East Berlin. “As I write this, my hometown is under curfew from 10 PM to 5 AM. There is no logic or science to back this up as being in any way effective to combat the ‘rona, but many ‘Listen to scientists’ Democrats are fond of the curfews.”

WAR ON THE MIDDLE CLASS: The College-Debt Debate Is a Culture-War Battle: Progressives are all too happy for Americans of more modest means to subsidize relatively high-income Democratic households.

Related: Top 20% Gets 6x More Benefits from Student Debt Cancellation than Bottom 20%, New Study Finds.

SURE, THEY COULD, BUT WOULD THEY GIVE UP ALL THAT REVENUE HE GENERATES? Could Twitter Ban Trump Once He’s a Private Citizen?

FLASHBACK: How five members of Joe Biden’s family got rich through his connections.

JAMES LILEKS’ WEDNESDAY REVIEW OF MODERN THOUGHT:

Threading through this predictable scrum, every day: a retweeted word of warning from somehow pleading everyone to stay home, because they got COVID despite doing everything right. Masks, distancing, sanitizing, everything – and they still got it. This is held up as a possibility so dire it becomes the default assumption under which everyone else should live.

If you go to a restaurant, you deserve what you get.

But if you just go out, and do everything right, and you get it, do you deserve it?

No! Because they weren’t going to a restaurant! But they did leave the house. Or they did let someone into their house. They should have known better. So they’re slightly deserving, right?

No.

What if no one’s guilty? What if no one deserves it? I don’t blame anyone, except China. If you’re hoping someone gets it and drawing up fantasy rules whereby they’re forbidden medical treatment, there’s something askew with you. There always was. This just brought it out.

* * * * * * * *

It’s fun to make up lists.

Some people just love lists.

Read the whole thing.

(Incidentally, if you’re curious about your own potential place in the line, the Gray Lady has you covered: Find Your Place in the Vaccine Line.)

KISS KISS FANG FANG: House Republicans Call For Eric Swalwell’s Removal From Intelligence Committee Over Relations With Chinese Spy.

“HPSCI handles some of the most sensitive information our government possesses, information critical to our national defense. As such, we urge you to immediately remove Rep. Swalwell from his position on the House Intelligence Committee,” it continues.

Citing Pelosi’s willingness to call for former Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ resignation and a broader commission to “investigate his ties to Russia” following a series of meetings between him and a Russian ambassador, the letter calls out Democrats’ hypocrisy in pursuing issues related to national security.

“By your own standards, Congressman Swalwell is unfit to serve on the Intelligence Committee,” the letter states.

Democrats enjoy a different set of standards, if you could call them standards.

THANK YOU, PRESIDENT TRUMP: Moderna’s COVID-19 Vaccine Is About to Change the Game for Americans.