EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY IN MUTTI MERKEL’S GERMANY: Several German states want German COVID curbs extended to April: draft plan.

CRISIS BY DESIGN: Trump EVISCERATES Biden’s Border Policy: ‘Turned National Triumph Into National Disaster.’

WHAT WENT WRONG: The Sinking of the Golden Ray.

J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS EXCLUSIVE: Read the Shocking Pentagon Training Materials Targeting Conservatives in the Military.

SHOCKER: Bill Moyers casually smears the Federalist Society with laughably false claim.

I haven’t forgotten that Bill Moyers asked the FBI to investigate two men who were “suspected as having homosexual tendencies.”

More on Bill Moyers here and here.

XI’S GOTTA HAVE IT, BIDEN’S GOTTA GIVE IT: Democrats Push ‘Drive Plastic Manufacturing To China’ Act. “Congressional Democrats are offering up a bill whose effects will be to destroy the American plastics industry and drive manufacturing to China.”

THE PRESS IS HIDING THIS BECAUSE THEY CAN’T PIN IT ON TRUMP: Project Veritas Exposes SHOCKING Images of Kids Packed Like Sardines in Border Facility.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Apple and Facebook’s Fight Isn’t Actually About Privacy or Tracking.

Apple isn’t going to stop developers from tracking you. It’s also not against personalized ads, as Facebook refers to the targeted advertising it shows you based on your internet activity. If you want to share everything you do online with Facebook, Apple won’t stop you. In that case, a developer can still collect the IDFA for the purpose of targeting ads or tracking conversions.

Apple is just going to require developers to be transparent about what data they want to collect and how they want to use it. Then, they have to ask your permission.

That’s what the real fight is over–transparency. And, it’s why Facebook is so worried.

Facebook’s problem is that, if given a choice, many people will choose not to allow tracking. A recent survey from AppsFlyer, an attribution data platform, shows that almost half of all users (47 percent) are likely to opt-out of tracking.

That’s the dirty little secret it would rather not talk about. Facebook doesn’t want you to think about tracking, and certainly doesn’t want you to have a choice.

In other words, it’s a very progressive firm.

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA HATE: USC College Republicans expose abusive messages sent to conservative students.

The College Republicans at the University of Southern California have taken matters into their own hands to expose abusive messages sent to conservative students after they say university officials have done nothing to help stop the online bullying.

The initiative is called Trojan Truths and aims to expose and challenge the hateful messages they have received from others on campus by publishing the comments for the world to see.

The series consists of actual screenshots of messages sent to center-right students from peers, edited to conceal full names. The USC GOP then adds thoughtful rebuttals.

I think it’s generous to conceal the names. I don’t think hatemailers have a legitimate expectation of privacy.

WHAT WAS SHE THINKING? Noem ‘Neutered’ Bill Protecting Women’s Sports. “Gov. Noem’s veto would scrap the vast majority of the bill text and would strip protections for female athletes in collegiate sports in the state. Additionally, it would eliminate all reasonable enforcement mechanisms, neutering the legislation so much as to render it meaningless.”

WELL, THAT’S WHAT SOCIALISTS DO — THEY STEAL THINGS AND THEY CENSOR PEOPLE: Anti-socialism memorial vanishes overnight. “The Young Conservatives of Texas at Sam Houston State University set up a memorial on the evening of Feb. 23 to honor victims of socialism only to find it gone the next morning. The night before an event against socialism, the Young Conservatives of Texas at Sam Houston State University planted 1,000 red flags on the lawn near the Lowman Student Center to represent the more than 94 million lives lost to socialism. The next morning, however, the flags were nowhere to be found.”

FASTER, PLEASE: Israeli company says oral COVID-19 vaccine on its way. “Oramed’s technology can be used to orally administer a number of protein-based therapies, which would otherwise be delivered by injection. Oramed is in the midst of a Phase III clinical trial through the US Food and Drug Administration of an oral insulin capsule for type I and type II diabetics.”

The “faster, please” seems a little presumptuous, given how quickly Warp Speed and other programs have produced results.

A BREAKDOWN OF ANTI-ASIAN “HATE CRIMES:”

The best data I’ve found for 2020, the salient period for this discussion, are provisional data on complaints and arrests for hate crimes against Asians in New York City, one of two cities which seem to have been most affected. They record 20 such arrests in 2020. Of those 20 offenders, 11 were African-American, two Black-Hispanic, two white, and five white Hispanics. Of the black offenders, a majority were women. The bulk happened last March, and they petered out soon after. If you drill down on some recent incidents in the news in California, and get past the media gloss to the actual mugshots, you also find as many black as white offenders.

This doesn’t prove much either, of course. Anti-Asian bias, like all biases, can infect anyone of any race, and the sample size is small and in one place. But it sure complicates the “white supremacy” case that the mainstream media simply assert as fact.

And, given the headlines, the other thing missing is a little perspective. Here’s a word cloud of the victims of hate crimes in NYC in 2020. You can see that anti-Asian hate crimes are dwarfed by those against Jews, and many other minorities. And when you hear about a 150 percent rise in one year, it’s worth noting that this means a total of 122 such incidents in a country of 330 million, of which 19 million are Asian. Even if we bring this number up to more than 3,000 incidents from unreported and far less grave cases, including “shunning”, it’s small in an aggregate sense. A 50 percent increase in San Francisco from 2019 – 2020, for example, means the number of actual crimes went from 6 to 9.

Is it worse than ever? No. 2020 saw 122 such hate incidents. In 1996, the number was 350. Many incidents go unreported, of course, and hideous comments, slurs and abuse don’t count as hate “crimes” as such. I’m not discounting the emotional scars of the kind of harassment this report cites. I’m sure they’ve increased. They’re awful. Despicable. Disgusting.

But the theory behind hate crimes law is that these crimes matter more because they terrify so many beyond the actual victim. And so it seems to me that the media’s primary role in cases like these is providing some data and perspective on what’s actually happening, to allay irrational fear. Instead they contribute to the distortion by breathlessly hyping one incident without a single provable link to any go this — and scare the bejeezus out of people unnecessarily.

It’s not unnecessary if it’s necessary to their chosen political narrative.

Also, if anti-Asian hate crimes are such a white-supremacist thing, why do most of them occur in deep-Blue cities? (Bumped).

UPDATE: Related: “Everyone who’s posting ‘stop Asian hate’ should need to publicly take a position on whether universities should be allowed to systematically exclude many Asian applicants for the explicit reason that they are Asian. It’s easy to post the trending hashtag of the day in response to a clearly horrific mass murder, but would you ever be willing to speak out against less visible forms of discrimination against Asian-Americans?”

Also: Anti-Asian “hatred” shows up mostly in university admissions.

Plus: Dear White Liberals, We Asians Aren’t Your Pawns. “My brother replied that there were over 3,800 incidents of anti-Asian violence last year, yet you didn’t check on us. The friend said he didn’t know. My brother said, of course not—because no one besides us Asians cared. But now that you see a perp is a white male from the South, you start to care. You have to make this about YOU making a political statement rather than really caring about us, the Asian Americans. . . . My brother told his ‘friend,’ or his ‘ally,’ to snap out of trying to be the white savior.”

THE TIMELINE THAT UPENDED EASTER DEBATE: There are 13 days left before Easter, so there is a bit more talk than usual about the event that precipitated the holiday. It wasn’t that long ago that doctoral students claiming a literal resurrection of Christ would be laughed off campus.

But the debate has radically changed in recent years, due in great part to the timeline Dr. Gary Habermas explains in this excerpt from a famous lecture he delivered at the Veritas Forum. It’s based entirely on sources skeptics and believers largely agree are credible. That’s why it changed the debate from derision to a genuinely open discussion.

COME SEE THE RACISM INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM: ‘Teen Vogue’ Staffer Who Seized on New Editor’s Racist Tweets Had Racist Tweets of Her Own.

CHANGE: The New U.S. News Law School Rankings Methodology: Implications And Predictions. For the first time, they’re punishing schools with high graduate debt, which is a good thing. The weighting may not seem like much, but given that the rankings are actually pretty tight, even a small difference in score can move a school several places.

MICHAEL BARONE: What explains Biden’s chameleon-like transformation?

About the Biden transformation, there can be no question. The senator who opposed government financing of abortions for 30-some years now supports it up through the ninth month of pregnancy.

The Judiciary Committee chairman who sponsored and bragged about the tough provisions of the 1994 crime bill now decries systemic racism and echoes almost the entire Black Lives Matter mantra.

The politician who supported the welfare reform bill that Speaker Newt Gingrich kept pressing until Bill Clinton, facing reelection, decided to sign it in 1996, has now concocted “COVID relief” legislation that includes multiple thousand-dollar payments to single mothers with no work requirements.

I don’t think Biden has any view anymore. I think he’s just a vessel for his handlers at this point.

Related: There Is No Biden Administration. “Biden’s face is everywhere, but there’s no real sign that he’s actually running anything. Instead the Biden administration seems to be exactly the kind of mess that the 25th Amendment was designed to prevent in which a non-functional president is the figurehead for the cabinet members and the special interests who are actually calling all the shots. The Potemkin village that is the Biden administration was built in two tiers with establishment cabinet members who appear more moderate presented for Senate approval while extremists were being placed in key positions to set policy on everything from civil rights to Iran.”

#RESISTANCE: Protests spread across Europe as coronavirus surges create new lockdowns.

SKYNET FROWNS: New York lawmaker wants to ban police use of armed robots.

HILARIOUS: Bruce Gilley writes at the James Martin Center: “[I]n December of last year, the [Portland State University—American Association of University Professors] ‘voted overwhelmingly’ to officially condemn my research on colonialism. In a bizarre twist of logic, the PSU-AAUP justified its action by declaring that it ‘stands for academic freedom’ but does ‘not stand for hostile work environments created under the guise of academic freedom.’ In other words, by conducting research according to accepted methods and publishing my findings, I have somehow created a hostile work environment for my colleagues who have repeatedly attempted to censure me.”

This kind of problem is everywhere these days, including, most recently, at my own cute little law school.

BUT NYU WILL TAKE A BOLD POSITION AGAINST “ANTI-ASIAN HATE.” China Regularly Abuses NYU Students. NYU Keeps Taking Chinese Money Anyway: NYU receives millions from regime.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, CULTURE OF CORRUPTION EDITION: Cornell University, Pursuing Partnership with China, Can’t Say Whether Beijing is Guilty of Genocide.

JOHN FUND:  IDs for a Vaccine Shot, but Not for Voting?

MAYORKAS CLAIMS BORDER IS ‘CLOSED:’ Right. And President Biden regularly works out on a Stair Climber. Meanwhile, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX) predicts a million illegal border crossings by summer.