IT’S ALL SMOKE AND MIRRORS:  Twitter had been elevating libs and suppressing conservatives for 10 years. They used to say this was a “conspiracy theory.” 

A LOT OF TIPPING POINTS:  “End the Chinese Communist Party” | Protesters rally in Vancouver to oppose CCP influence in Canada.

THERE’S A LOT OF TIPPING POINTS UPON US:  The Tipping Point Cometh? Maybe?

MUSK: “THE TWITTER FILES ON FREE SPEECH SUPPRESSION SOON TO BE PUBLISHED ON TWITTER ITSELF.” It’s really too bad that he committed suicide tomorrow before he could publish that info. Who knew he was even depressed?

I’LL BELIEVE IT’S A CRISIS WHEN THEY START EATING BUGS ON THE REGULAR THEMSELVES. They really really want you to eat bugs.

IF YOU SEE IT ON THEIR TRANSCRIPT, DON’T HIRE THEM: Have the Anticapitalists Reached Harvard Business School? Social justice joins discounted cash flows on the syllabus as essential knowledge for aspiring corporate leaders.

OPEN THREAD: Enjoy each other’s company.

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: Reinventing the Root of All Evil.

The migration of ID and money into the network accomplishes an extraordinary thing. It promises to protect the public from bad players but leaves everyone potentially vulnerable to a perverse playing field run by the Big Guys. The saga of Sam Bankman-Fried may be over, but the story of the system he was advocating is not. Despite our desire to virtualize everything the physical still has its place in the world. One of the enduring problems facing all cryptographically protected digital assets is the five dollar wrench attack, so named after the hypothetical heavy who threatens to beat you with a 5 buck wrench unless you tell him the PIN to your cold wallet. That’s why totalitarianism plus digital assets equals less money in the bank than you think. We have not yet invented a way to banish men from the loop.

https://twitter.com/JamesMelville/status/1597282329181159425

Read the whole thing.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: China outlines pathway for lunar and deep space exploration.

OUT ON A LIMB: The Packers need to find the guts to say no to Aaron Rodgers. “Will the Packers do that — bench Rodgers — if the doctors say things are good? He has been playing with a broken thumb on his throwing hand for weeks and now he has issues with his ribs. He also turns 39 later this week and I can’t imagine anything less fun at that age than playing tackle football in the freezing cold against grown men who would love nothing more than to slam you to the turf. There’s nothing left for Rodgers to do here. There’s a lot left for the Packers to learn from with [Jordan] Love. The timing all just seems to be right. Will the Packers have the guts to do it? Their fans should hope so.”

NOW OUT FROM ANDREW WAREHAM: An Emergent State. I believe this one is based on his experience as a policeman in New Guinea.

HIGHER EDUCATION IMPLOSION UPDATE: The Babylon Bee Publishes a Hysterical Spoof of a College English Course Description. Oh, Wait!

If the Babylon Bee’s most creative satirists conjured up a parody of a woke college course description, it would probably read something like this:

Reading and Writing Gender and Sexuality ENGL 214 CREDITS: 0.5

How do you read gender? How do you read sexuality? How and in what ways have gender and sexuality been written and rewritten? This course serves as an introduction to queer and transfeminist theories and practices in gender and sexuality studies. Conceptualized through its intersections with race, ethnicity, coloniality, class, and ability, the sex/gender system of oppression has long served as a taxonomizing apparatus. And yet, the literary, in league with anticolonial, civil rights, and LGBTQ social movements, not only sheds sharp light on how gender and sexuality are regulated and troubled, but also animates the liberatory potential of imagining embodied relations otherwise. At once world-building and world-shattering, representations of gender and sexuality can leverage critiques against normativity in the same gesture as they bow to reproducing it. Taking our transnational cue from subjugated knowledges and intersectional epistemologies, we’ll constellate the diverging genealogies and methodologies that have shaped the politics and aesthetics as well as the ethics and affects of gender and sexuality. Against the traffic of binary opposition, we’ll index the possibilities of intimacy and performativity that determine desiring subjects and their objects. As a class collective, our aim will be to read and reread as well as write and rewrite texts that interrogate and complicate how gender and sexuality, as contested sites of pleasure and pain, are embodied and experienced. The geographic and generic focus of this course may vary; for more information, students should contact the instructor. This counts toward the methods requirement for the major and an elective for the women’s and gender studies major. Open only to first-year and sophomore students. Prerequisite: ENGL 103 or 104.

Sadly, this nonsensical, unintelligible gibberish was copied, word-for-word, from an actual English course description currently appearing on the website of Kenyon College, one of the nation’s preeminent liberal arts colleges.  That Kenyon approved a course description (and course) so replete with esoteric academic jargon and hackneyed, woke buzzwords reveals the intellectual vacuousness that currently permeates the college.

Could actually be worse, though: Duke University To Publish A ‘F*ggotology’ With Intro That References Anal Sex.

CYBER MONDAY DEAL AT THE SHOP OF ONE OF MY FANS: If you do gaming figurines, or even like to paint and collect minies, give MurphicIndustries a look.

Oh, and because everyone is tight this year, Promo code HOYTSHOCKED, for 25% off of orders over $10.

IN THE HOT SEAT: Iranian reporters grill US coach, captain with government questions in surreal presser.

OH, GOODY: Zeihan Predicts EV Revolution Fails and High Global Inflation for Five Years.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Preparations begin for a rail strike.

I’D BE INTERESTED TO SEE IF THE QUALITY IS ANY HIGHER, TOO: Study shows prestigious institutions produce more published manuscripts because they have a bigger labor pool. “The researchers found a pattern—more prestigious schools tend to produce more papers because they have more people available to work on research teams. They noted that neither the senior- nor junior-level people working on the papers were more productive than others working at less-prestigious institutions; it was just more people working and getting more done.”

PRIORITIES: WHO renames monkeypox as mpox, citing racism concerns. “Although WHO has named numerous new diseases shortly after they emerged, including Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS and COVID-19, this appears to be the first time the agency has attempted to rechristen a disease decades after it was first named. Numerous other diseases, including Japanese encephalitis, German measles, Marburg virus and Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome have been named after geographic regions, which could now be considered prejudicial. WHO has not suggested changing any of those names.”

In other words, they’re idiots.

HAPPY 93rd BIRTHDAY: Berry Gordy: The Visionary Who Made Motown.

A company that was started with a loan of $800 went on to help shape the sound of the 20th century. We could only be talking about Motown Records, founded on January 12, 1959 by Berry Gordy Jr, who was born in the city he helped make synonymous with soulfulness, Detroit, on November 28, 1929. Unfailingly spritely, just ahead of his 90th birthday, Gordy announced his retirement at the Hitsville Honours ceremony, safe in the knowledge that his achievements will last forever.

Gordy built his empire on his early success as a songwriter, notably of “Reet Petite,” “Lonely Teardrops” and others for perhaps the pre-eminent black music entertainer of the late 1950s, Jackie Wilson. Detroit, the Motor City itself, was sharing the fruits of America’s post-war economic boom, and there were possibilities for a young and savvy business creative, as we’d call them now. But no one, surely not even Berry himself, could have known exactly the global dimensions that those possibilities would assume in the coming decades.

Gordy’s genius was to adopt the assembly line methods of both Detroit and Hollywood to the music industry, a topic I explored in my interview with Allan Slutsky, the producer of one of the best documentaries about the record label in the 1960s, Standing in the Shadows of Motown.

WHEN REALITY IS TOO OUT THERE FOR THE BABYLON BEE TO SATIRIZE: Controversial energy official charged with stealing woman’s luggage at MSP. “Sam Brinton, one of the first ‘openly genderfluid individuals in federal government leadership,’ was charged with felony theft last month after allegedly stealing a woman’s luggage at MSP Airport.”

You remember Sam, right?

Here’s the story:

Law enforcement at the Minneapolis-St. Paul (MSP) International Airport were alerted to a missing suitcase in the baggage claim area on Sept. 16. The adult female victim said she flew into MSP on a Delta flight from New Orleans and went to retrieve her checked bag at carousel seven.

Airport records confirmed the navy blue Vera Bradley roller bag arrived at 4:40 p.m. but was missing from the carousel. So law enforcement reviewed video surveillance footage from the baggage claim area and observed Brinton removing a navy blue roller bag from carousel seven, according to a criminal complaint.

The complaint says Brinton removed a luggage tag from the bag, placed it into a handbag he was carrying, and “then left the area at a quick pace.” Brinton arrived at MSP Airport around 4:27 p.m. on an American Airlines flight from Washington, D.C., but did not check a bag, meaning he had no reason to visit baggage claim, according to the complaint.

Police showed the surveillance video to the victim and she confirmed it was her bag.

Brinton left the airport in an Uber for a stay at the InterContinental St. Paul Riverfront hotel, where he checked in with the blue bag, the complaint says.

He returned to MSP on Sept. 18 with the bag in hand for a departing flight back to Washington, D.C., authorities allege.

Surveillance video from Dulles International Airport shows Brinton traveling with the bag on an Oct. 9 return trip from Europe, the complaint notes.

The victim said the estimated value of the bag and its contents was around $2,325.

“Brinton’s first court hearing is scheduled for Dec. 19 in Hennepin County. Alpha News attempted to contact Brinton via email but received an automatic reply saying he is on leave and unable to access his email.”

SPACE: NASA Orion capsule to reach farthest distance from Earth in lunar orbit.

THANKS FOR NOTHING, TIM: Apple Blackmailed Developer Into Blocking COVID Searches… and Maybe Elon Musk’s Twitter, Too. “‘Secret suppression of free speech by Apple,’ Musk tweeted back. ‘Customers were never told. What the hell is going on here?'”

HE’D RATHER ENRICH COMMIES IN VENEZUELA THAN TEXANS IN AMERICA:

Doocy: Why is it President Biden would rather let U.S. companies drill for oil in Venezuela than here in the US?

Kirby: That's not accurate.

Doocy: He said no more drilling… Does the President think there's some benefit to the climate to drill oil in Venezuela and not here? pic.twitter.com/Oj3QpNFlt8

— Media Research Center (@theMRC) November 28, 2022

CHINA TRYING TO HIDE PROTEST VIDEOS BY SPAMMING SOCIAL MEDIA WITH PORN.

CYBER MONDAY: The Biggest PJ Media VIP Sale Ever.