CHANGE: Race is on as carmakers shut, switch or sell combustion engine factories.

Carmakers will increasingly find themselves in a race to shut, switch or sell factories producing vehicles with internal combustion engines to avoid being left with “stranded assets”, as regulators set a course for a decade of electrification to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

Traditional manufacturers are currently playing a “zero sum game” because growth in electric car sales eats into the value of internal combustion engine factories, which “are effectively stranded assets”, a leading analyst has warned.

Philippe Houchois, an analyst at Jefferies, an investment bank, said carmakers’ share prices will be in large part dependent on their ability to avoid losses on fossil fuel assets. “If you want to be a better valued carmaker you need to find a way to shrink your assets faster than a gradual transition to electric vehicles would suggest,” he said.

When are we going to build the nuclear plants necessary to power EVs while actually reducing emissions?

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: 4 Things That Would Happen If We Eliminated Compulsory Schooling: Eliminating compulsory schooling laws would break the century-and-a-half stranglehold of schooling on education.

History books detailing the “common school movement” and the push for universal, compulsory schooling perpetuate the myths that Americans were illiterate prior to mass schooling, that there were limited education options available, and that mandating school attendance under a legal threat of force was the surest way toward equality.

In truth, literacy rates were quite high, particularly in Massachusetts, where the first compulsory schooling statute was passed in 1852. Historians Boles and Gintis report that approximately three-quarters of the total U.S. population, including slaves, was literate¹. There was a panoply of education options prior to mass compulsory schooling, including an array of public and private schooling options, charity schools for the poor, robust apprenticeship models, and homeschooling—this latter approach being the preferred method of Massachusetts education reformer Horace Mann, who homeschooled his own three children while mandating common school attendance for others.

The primary catalyst for compulsory schooling was a wave of massive immigration in the early to mid-1800s that made lawmakers fearful.

Yes, the impetus behind compulsory public schooling was indoctrination, not education.

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KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Happy Monday Kids — COVID Gonorrhea Is Here. “I’m so full of conspiracy theories lately — what else are you going to when sitting a home all the time — that I’m willing to believe that some mad scientist is really behind the Super Clap. It was either that, or somebody was tempting fate by insisting that nothing else could possibly go wrong in 2020.”

HMM: US officials: Suspect in Nashville explosion died in blast. “The man believed to be responsible for the Christmas Day bombing that tore through downtown Nashville blew himself up in the explosion, and appears to have acted alone, federal officials said Sunday. Investigators used DNA and other evidence to link the man, identified as Anthony Quinn Warner, to the mysterious explosion but said they have not determined a motive. Officials have received hundreds of tips and leads, but have concluded that no one other than Warner is believed to have been involved in the early morning explosion that damaged dozens of buildings and injured three people.”

BABY TYCHO UNDER: ‘Space architects’ complete two-month stay in a remote origami-inspired collapsible shelter in Greenland to simulate harsh conditions on the Moon.

HISTORY: Divers recover a WWII Enigma Machine from the Baltic Sea. “The machine that divers recently fished out of the Bay of Gelting had three rotors, which means it probably came from a surface warship and not a Nazi submarine, or U-boat. From 1942 onward, U-boats carried a four-rotor model of the Enigma device. Several U-boat commanders scuttled their submarines in May 1945 as the Allies closed in. But the presence of a three-rotor machine suggests that at least one surface ship’s officers also threw their Enigma machine overboard in the final days of the war.”

“CANCEL CULTURE” IS A TOOL FOR KEEPING PEOPLE IN LINE AND PROTECTING THE ESTABLISHMENT: How cancel culture keeps COVID-19 lockdown-doubters silent.

MARK JUDGE: ‘They Were Relentless’: How I Learned Respect for Our Communist Media.

ROSS DOUTHAT: The Case for One More Child: Why Large Families Will Save Humanity.

Start with the car seats. They hulk in the back seats of any normal sedan, squeezing the middle seat from both directions, built like a captain’s chair on Star Trek if James T. Kirk was really worried about taking neck damage from a Romulan barrage. The scenes of large-family life from early in the automobile era, with three or four kids jammed happily into the back seat of a jalopy, are now both unimaginable and illegal. Just about every edition of Cheaper by the Dozen, published in 1948, uses an image of the Gilbreth kids packed into the family automobile, overflowing like flowers from a vase. Today, the car seats required to hold them would take up more space than the car itself.

In his 2013 book, What to Expect When No One’s Expecting, Jonathan V. Last described “car seat economics” – the expense and burden of car seats for ever-older kids, the penalties imposed on parents who flout the requirements – as an example of the countless “tiny evolutions” that make large families rarer. Obviously car seats aren’t as big a deal as the cost of college or childcare, or the cultural expectations around high-intensive parenting. But it’s still a miniature case study, Last suggested, in how our society’s rules and regulations conspire against an extra kid.

Seven years later, two economists set out to prove him right. In a paper entitled “Car Seats as Contraception,” they argued that car-seat requirements delay and deter the arrival of third children, especially, because normal backseats won’t hold three car seats, so you basically can’t have a third young kid in America unless you upgrade to a minivan. The requirements save lives – fifty-seven child fatalities were prevented in 2017, the authors estimate. But they prevent far more children from coming into existence in the first place: there were eight thousand fewer births because of car-seat requirements in 2017, according to their calculations, and 145,000 fewer births since 1980.

Flashback: The Parent Trap. “Parenting was always hard work, of course. But aside from the economic payoffs, parents used to get a lot of social benefits, too. But in recent decades, a collection of parenting ‘experts’ and safety-fascist types have extinguished some of the benefits while raising the costs, to the point where what’s amazing isn’t that people are having fewer kids, but that people are having kids at all. . . . There’s also the decline in parental prestige over generations. My mother reports that when she was a newlywed (she was married in 1959) you weren’t seen as fully a member of the adult world until you had kids. Nowadays to have kids means something closer to an expulsion from the adult world. People in the suburbs buy SUVs instead of minivans not because they need the four-wheel-drive capabilities, but because the SUVs lack the minivan’s close association with low-prestige activities like parenting, and instead provide the aura of high-prestige activities like whitewater kayaking. Why should kayaking be more prestigious than parenting? Because parenting isn’t prestigious in our society.”

OH: You May Need A COVID Vaccine Passport To Travel In 2021.

BRITAIN: Victory in the war on woke: Judges’ landmark ruling in case of mother who called trans woman ‘he’ on Twitter means freedom of speech DOES includes the ‘right to offend.’

COLD WAR II: Tech Giants Are Giving China a Vital Edge in Espionage.

The embrace between China’s intelligence services and Chinese businesses has gotten tighter, U.S. officials say. In 2017, under Xi’s intensifying authoritarianism, Beijing promulgated a new national intelligence law that compels Chinese businesses to work with Chinese intelligence and security agencies whenever they are requested to do so—a move that codified “what was pretty much what was going on for many years before, though corruption had tempered it” previously, a former senior CIA official said.

In the final years of the Obama administration, national security officials had directed U.S. spy agencies to step up their intelligence collection on the relationship between the Chinese state and China’s private industrial behemoths. By the advent of the Trump era, this effort had borne fruit, with the U.S. intelligence community piecing together voluminous evidence on coordination—including back-and-forth data transfers—between ostensibly private Chinese companies and that country’s intelligence services, according to current and former U.S. officials. There was evidence of close public-private cooperation occurring on “a daily basis,” according to a former Trump-era national security official. “Those commercial entities are the commercial wing of the party,” the source said. “They of course cooperate with intelligence services to achieve the party’s goals.”

Beijing’s access to, and ability to sift through, troves of pilfered and otherwise obtained data “gives [China] vast opportunities to target people in foreign governments, private industries, and other sectors around the world—in order to collect additional information they want, such as research, technology, trade secrets, or classified information,” said William Evanina, the United States’ top counterintelligence official. “Chinese technology companies play a key role in processing this bulk data and making it useful for China’s intelligence services,” he said.

It’s a far-fetched idea, but is there a point where the rest of the world gets fed up with Communist China’s espionage and cuts them off electronically?

ROLE MODEL: How Mark Robinson beat Bloomberg’s billions to win NC’s second-highest office.

In 2018, he attended Greensboro’s city council meeting to voice his frustration over the town’s decision to ban a local gun show, and found himself giving an off-the-cuff yet deeply impassioned speech. Despite not owning a gun at the time, Robinson argued for four minutes in defense of the Second Amendment and ended up garnering national attention. This year, with few resources and no electoral experience, Robinson became the first black lieutenant governor-elect of North Carolina.

“I didn’t expect the reaction that I received from that speech,” Robinson said. “I thought maybe a couple of friends would see it and that was about it. When it went viral … a lot of people encouraged me to get a radio show and things of that sort.”

But he decided against courting fame, because “in order to affect real change, there’s no better place to do that than in the political arena.”

So Robinson ran for lieutenant governor, and became the first black Republican to win a major seat in the state since William Woods Holden in the 1800s. He also earned more votes in his state than the two top Republicans on the ticket: President Trump and Sen. Thom Tillis, and nearly as many as Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, who will now have a member of the GOP as his second-in-command. If Cooper is successful in his rumored run for US Senate in 2022, Robinson will ascend to the state’s highest office.

Robinson’s win is astounding for any number of reasons, but especially because he managed to beat the $8 million spent by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg in his state to take him out.

Someone should ask Bloomberg why he spent so much money to keep a black man out of power.

YOU DON’T SAY: DHS Warns of ‘Heightened Physical Threat Environment’ Ahead of Georgia Run-Off Election.

ICYMI: Dr. Fauci justifies lies, saying Americans can’t handle the truth.

ARGUING FOR A MORE…. MUSCULAR CHRISTIANITY:  Why We Want “Die Hard” to Be a Christmas Movie.

THE US WILL BE VULNERABLE AS LONG AS OUR PRESS IS UNDER CONTROL OF OUR ENEMIES:  WaPo: The U.S. Is Vulnerable Until Biden Is Sworn In.

YES:  Rand Paul: Governors Are “Tin Pot Dictators”.

MAY WE TOO COME OUT OF OUR VALLEY FORGE TO VICTORY:  Trenton — The Battle That Saved The Revolution.

THIS IS WHY HE’S BEEN EFFECTIVE, BUT OTOH HE SOMETIMES FALLS FOR THIER MORE GOOFY IDEAS:  Donald Trump and the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest.

YEAH. WELL, THEY EXPECT THAT THE US WILL SOON BE RULED BY A CHINESE PUPPET, SO WHY WOULDN’T THEY?  Exclusive: Venezuela resumes direct oil shipments to China despite U.S. sanctions.

GATEWAY PUNDIT, BUT ALL THE SAME:  Developing: Dominion’s Anti-Trump Executive Eric Coomer Owns Patents on Adjudication Process That Investigators Found Skimmed Votes From Trump in Michigan.