PRIVACY: WhatsApp forces users to agree to share private data including phone number with Facebook. “Data collected includes ‘battery level, signal strength, app version, browser information, mobile network, connection information (including phone number, mobile operator or ISP), language and time zone, IP address, device operations information, and identifiers (including identifiers unique to Facebook Company Products associated with the same device or account).'”

SEGREGATION NOW, SEGREGATION TOMORROW, SEGREGATON FOREVER: University of Florida students receive invitation to segregated town hall.

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KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Your Weekly Reminder That the Democrats Are Still Awful. “Yeah, they’re all on their high horses after Wednesday, pretending that they are peace-loving and the bringers of unity to the Republic, but we’re actually reaping the seeds that they’ve sown. Unrest has been the leftist modus operandi for a very long time but it has greatly escalated during President Trump’s time in office. They hit the streets and filled their diapers almost the second after he was elected in 2016. And they never let up.”

BUFF REGENERATION: B-52s refuse to die. From the USAF photo caption: “The B-52H bomber nicknamed “Wise Guy” sits in post dock nearing completion of its regeneration back to active service, Nov. 19, 2020. The bomber sat in the desert for 10 years at the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group’s National-Level Airpower Reservoir located at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Arizona.”

JOSH BLACKMAN & SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: Can President Trump be Impeached and Removed on the Grounds of Incitement? If Trump’s speech is protected by the First Amendment, then incitement cannot be grounds for impeachment.

The legal definition of incitement is quite narrow. The press definition, on the other hand, is “anything we can tie a Republican to.”

Compare Barack Obama’s famous if they bring a knife, we bring a gun statement.

More on incitement from Eugene Volokh and Howard Wasserman.

SUPERFICIAL MEDIA DISAGREE, BUT SO WHAT: International Violence Continues To Decline In 2020 and 2021. It’s the latest StrategyTalk podcast. If you like it, subscribe. Here’s the MP3 download if you prefer that medium.

NOT THE BABYLON BEE: CNN’s Anderson Cooper, who makes $12 million a year, tried to mock regular Americans saying, “And they’re gonna go back to the Olive Garden and to the Holiday Inn they are staying at.”

What is it with smug lefties singling out the poor old Olive Garden chain?

GLEICHSCHALTUNG: Shopify takes down Trump’s campaign store.

More: Facebook bans Trump for at least remainder of presidency.

We’re witnessing the unpersoning of an American president.

BLACK LIVES MATTER PROTESTERS WOULD HAVE BEEN TREATED ‘VERY DIFFERENTLY’ THAN CAPITOL RIOTERS, BIDEN SAYS.

Alternate headline: Unity Candidate Beginning His Administration By Declaring Capitol Hill Police Racist.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Biden’s right. If the Capitol Police had shot a Black Lives Matter protester, it would be the main story. Instead, the shooting of Ashli Babbitt is being rapidly memory-holed.

WORK ETHIC: Impeach Trump? Pelosi’s House goes on vacation instead.

DANA LOESCH: The False Narrative Over Police Treatment Between BLM/Antifa Rioters And Capitol Rioters.

Reject this false narrative. There is a considerable difference between the capabilities of a too-small and unprepared police force and overwhelming police presence. This omission from the debate on the issue is reason enough why this argument should be disregarded.

There are two tiers of justice when there should be one. Media and Democrats did little to nothing to hold accountable violent leftist rioters thus have no credibility here to objectively remark this issue.

Read the whole thing.

HMM: Worrisome Signs the Capitol Breach was Planned to Discredit Trump Supporters: An Eyewitness Account.

Related: Actions by Police Before Trump Supporters Attacked Capitol Backfired Spectacularly: Federal and local law enforcement say they underestimated threat posed to Congress, despite evidence of plans online. “Policing tactics in the U.S. have changed in the seven months since George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police, sparking nationwide protests last year. In Portland, Ore., months of nightly demonstrations escalated after President Trump sent in federal agents to protect a federal courthouse. In a letter to federal officials on Monday, Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser urged federal law enforcement to maintain a light footprint for Wednesday’s protests, seeking to avoid the type of show of force that had inflamed tense situations in the city last year.”

To be fair to law enforcement here, Trump protests have traditionally been very orderly and well-behaved.

UPDATE: At the U.S. Capitol, Milling Crowd Sparked Riot in a Few Crucial Minutes.

The milling crowd of President Trump supporters had taken his invitation to march on the U.S. Capitol, but upon arriving at the steel fencing at the edge of the building’s western lawn, they seemed unsure of what to do next. Then, at 12:48 p.m., a clutch of men in blaze orange hats and military-style vests turned a nearby street corner, marching straight toward them.

In a matter of moments, the two groups merged and the crowd swelled to hundreds and surged forward, toppling a metal barricade at the curbside and charging up two small flights of stone steps toward five startled officers of the Capitol Police.

Hmm.

PRIMA DONNA: CNN’s Most Special Flower Jake Tapper Calls Republicans ‘Selfish Dipshits.’

HEH: Rashida Tlaib’s New Office Neighbor to Fly Israeli Flag.

HEINLEIN’S CRAZY YEARS (CONT’D): State and Federal Laws Move To Erase Biology and Women.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

● Shot:

● Chaser:

Perhaps the best-known casualty of Coca-Cola’s 124-year expansion is Isidro Gil, a union leader whose face, heart, and groin absorbed a total of 10 bullets. The year was 1996. Gil had been lobbying Colombian Coke bottler Bebidas y Alimientos de Urabá for both higher wages and protection from paramilitary hit men who had already assassinated several of his associates, and who had once played soccer in the town square with an elderly man’s head. The killers had also been seen sharing Cokes with the bottling plant’s manager. In the span of a single day, they murdered Gil, burned the union hall, and forced the remaining members to resign or flee.

Was Bebidas behind the violence? Had Coke’s Atlanta headquarters known of the threat but failed to intervene? Was Coke actually responsible for Isidro Gil’s death? Michael Blanding’s The Coke Machine—part nonfiction narrative, part history of the Coca-Cola Company and the many crimes it has been accused of—works hard to provide answers. Along the way, Blanding explains how a little-known medicinal drink grew into one of the world’s most recognized brands, a symbol of both the gleaming mechanisms of free markets and the controversies they sometimes spark.

Among the other “injustices” Blanding documents in his occasionally overzealous introduction: “decimating water supplies of villagers in India and Mexico, busting up unions in Turkey and Guatemala, making kids fat throughout the United States and Europe, and hoodwinking consumers into swallowing glorified tap water marketed under its bottled water brand Dasani.” Their origin, Blanding argues, is Coke’s single-minded pursuit of profit, and he accordingly devotes the book’s first half to the evolution of the company and its brand.

—The Pause That Represses? Coca-Cola’s Controversies, The Atlantic, October 18, 2010.

● Hangover: Apple, like Coca-Cola and Nike, is lobbying against China forced-labor bill in Congress. Big companies are reportedly weighing in on legislation that would crack down on imports of goods made with forced labor.

—C/Net, December 5^th, 2020.

SPOILER: NO. Will Democrats ditch policy that has promoted income equality?

COLORADO: Polis doing real damage with COVID response.

Polis’ handling of the nuts-and-bolts of governing in a crisis has deteriorated to the point of earning him the nickname “Controlis” as small business owners facing permanent ruin lash out and parents sour on his approach to school and sports.

Of dubious note, Colorado’s unemployment system is still an epic, historic disaster, as economically displaced Coloradans struggle to navigate the broken bureaucracy run by Gov. Polis, struggling to simply get an unemployment check.

Our governor, a man who famously built a fortune in the technology sector and whom the press frequently casts as an adept technocrat with his hands tightly on the reins of governance, can’t even stand up a website and call center to process unemployment checks.

The results have been devastating. One news account in December noted that, “Colorado’s unemployment system is so overwhelmed that strangers have resorted to helping each other” and described how “forums and online groups have sprung up during the pandemic as the unemployed search for answers they’re not getting from the state Labor Department.”

A broken unemployment system depriving many citizens of a basic social safety net is only the beginning of Jared Polis’ leadership failures.

What a mess.

JOHN HINDERAKER: Enough With the Outrage. “It is blindingly obvious that in the last days of the Trump administration, the Democrats are laying the groundwork for a comprehensive repudiation of the considerable achievements of the last four years, tying them all to Trump’s sometimes-unfortunate personality, and in particular to yesterday’s riot, which was small beer compared with countless riots that the Democrats have either cheered on or indulgently tolerated. What is important for conservatives is not to defend Donald Trump’s personality, still less the events of the last 24 hours, but rather to defend, aggressively, the solid achievements of an administration that surmounted four years of hysterical and dishonest obstructionism by the Democrats. It is unfortunate that some Republicans, joining in the Democrats’ hyena troop, do not seem to understand this.”

#UNITY: Doubling Down on Division: Joe Biden Uses Capitol Riot to Demonize Trump’s Entire Presidency.

THE CAPITOL POLICE FAILED TO MAINTAIN SECURITY, THEN HAD A BAD SHOOT. It’s not for lack of money. “After all the security breaches at both the congressional complex and White House over the years, and the many large protests in the city, you would think that the Capitol Police would have been better prepared. The Capitol Police certainly has enough funding to be prepared. The force has 2,300 officers and a $516 million budget to defend two square miles.”