GREAT MOMENTS IN PARENTING:

Shot: “Nine years ago, when crypto-fraudster [Sam Bankman-Fried] was 19, his mother, a Stanford professor, wrote a very long article making the case that free will is a myth and that we should not blame people for committing crimes.”

— Michael Shellenberger, yesterday.

Chaser: Sam Bankman-Fried’s father drafted tax legislation for Elizabeth Warren, donated thousands to Dems.

—Fox News, yesterday.

UPDATE: FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s family boasts deep ties to Democrat power players.

FTX HAD ‘COMPLETE FAILURE OF CORPORATE CONTROLS,’ NEW CEO SAYS.

Related: Singapore writes down $275 million in FTX, calls belief in Sam Bankman-Fried ‘misplaced.’ “In a statement on Thursday, state-owned investment company Temasek said it had decided to write down the value of its full investment in the exchange to zero, ‘irrespective of the outcome of FTX’s bankruptcy protection filing.’”

MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Philadelphia’s Turn to Get a Taste of Biden’s Border Crisis.

GREAT MOMENTS IN DIVERSITY:

Shot: Here’s a List of 58 Gender Options for Facebook Users.

—ABC News, February 13^th, 2014.

Chaser: San Francisco Transgender Income Program Includes 97 Gender Options, 19 Sexual Orientations.

—Joel Pollak, Breitbart.com, today.

Flashback: Microsoft just dropped the latest Pride flag design, and yes, IT’S REAL.

“As always, we’re going to remind you that Jordan Peterson called this over 5 years ago. Here’s a lecture where he said that the endgame of woke tribalism is the fracturing of things like the Pride flag into millions of ‘oppression groups’ until we get down to the rights of the individual:”

LAUGHING WOLF: The Untold Hogan’s Heroes. “Well, not completely untold, but I’m amazed at how many people have never heard this story. Over on Twitter, Don Surber made a post about Hogan’s Heroes and how all the Nazi’s were played by Jewish actors. In fact, the major actors all had very personal stories and reasons to want to portray the Nazis in a bad light.”

This is from July, but worth another look after Robert Clary’s passing.

ADD DOJ ANTI-SEMITISM TO HILL’S 2023 PROBES: A key maxim repeated often among Reagan political appointees was “Personnel is Policy.” The truth of that maxim is being brought home again as the Department of Justice (DOJ) launches a new investigation into the death of Abu Akleh, an Al Jazeera reporter, during a clash between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian terrorists in May 2022.

Israeli authorities previously investigated the incident and concluded the reporter was killed by a stray bullet fired by one of the soldiers. But DOJ under Attorney General Merrick Garland clearly questions that conclusion. And that fact is stirring anger on the Hill as Republicans prepare to take over the House of Representatives January 3, 2023.

The Biden appointees at DOJ include, according to the Washington Free Beacon’s Adam Kredo, Kristen Clarke who “came under fire during her Senate confirmation hearing after the Free Beacon revealed she edited a law journal that featured an anti-Semitic black nationalist who peddles conspiracy theories about Jews.”

Kredo was told by multiple Hill sources that “the only way to root out this bias … is for Congress to launch an investigation into the DOJ’s anti-Israel agenda, which has been fueled by a cadre of anti-Semitic lawmakers in Congress known as ‘the Squad.’ These lawmakers, which include Reps. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) and Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.), pressured the DOJ for months to investigate the Abu Akleh shooting.”

Lesson: You appoint anti-semites, you get anti-semitic policy decisions.

BLUE STATE BLUES: Gavin Newsom’s $98 Billion Surplus Went Bye-Bye.

HOLIDAY DEAL: West Bend Manual Crockery Slow Cooker. #CommissionEarned

WRAY WAS TOO BUSY WEAPONIZING THE BUREAU AGAINST TRUMP AND CONSERVATIVES TO NOTICE UNTIL NOW: Wray warns about ‘threat’ posed by TikTok’s connection to China’s government.

LIKE TENNESSEE FOOTBALL FANS THROUGHOUT TIME, PEOPLE WANTED A CRUSHING VICTORY AND ARE HAVING TROUBLE ACCEPTING A SO-SO ONE: Yes, the GOP took the House and it’s still kind of a big effing deal.

WHY ARE THE BLACK ACTIVISTS SO RACIST AND HOMOPHOBIC? Black activists want queer Latina diversity chief removed at University of Arizona.

SARAH HOYT’S SHOCKED FACE IS RESTING COMFORTABLY: WaPo Sheepishly Admits the FBI Found No Nuclear Secrets, or Anything Else, in Mar-a-Lago Raid.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Judge Ho Boycotts Yale. Yale Boycotts U.S. News Rankings. “Yale Law School is withdrawing from the rankings compiled by the U.S. News World Report. The rationale? The rankings are biased against the progressive institution! . . . I would add one other possible rationale. This decision was made in the shadow of Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard. The Supreme Court will very soon make it difficult for elite private universities to use racial preferences for admission. Post-SFFA, the law school could no longer justify wide gaps between admission rates for applicants of different races. They can no longer rely on “personal” scores and other subterfuges. As a result, if Yale wants to keep its racial diversity numbers high, the overall LSAT and GPA scores would have to drop. And that decrease would affect the law school’s rankings.”

I also expect a sharp drop in reputation rankings due to the chaos there, which I think is at least as big a motivation for the change.

Plus: “Update: Harvard Law School is also boycotting the rankings. Stanford and the other Ivies will probably follow. U.S. News may soon implode like FTX.”

More on Harvard here.

Like the Iran/Iraq war, I kinda hope everyone loses.

HMM: How Google Stopped the Red Wave.

Over a period of months, Google nudged undecided voters toward voting blue by showing people politically biased content in their search engine, suppressing content they didn’t want people to see, recommending left-leaning videos on YouTube (pdf) (which Google owns), allegedly sending tens of millions of emails to people’s spam boxes, and sending go-vote reminders on their home page mainly to liberal and moderate voters.

These manipulations (and others) don’t affect voters with strong points of view, but they can have an enormous impact on voters who are undecided (pdf)—the people who decide the outcomes of close elections.

I know Google did these things (and more!) because, in 2022, my team and I were doing to them exactly what they do to us and our kids 24/7: We were monitoring the politically related content that Google and other tech companies were showing to actual voters—our politically diverse panel of 2,742 “field agents,” who were located mainly in swing states.

Flashback: Could Facebook Swing an Election?

Related: Facebook Worked With FBI to Spy on Americans Who Questioned 2020 Election.

MEDICAL MUTILATION: No tattoos for kids — sex-change drugs are OK.

Related: The mind-blowing evil of slicing off young girls’ breasts.

Some data has been released in the United States that really tests your faith in humanity. The Daily Wire reports: ‘A new study of nationwide hospital databases found that at least 1,130 adolescents between 2016 and 2019 received “gender-affirming” chest surgeries in the US. The study, published in JAMA Paediatrics, saw a 389 per cent increase in adolescents (ages 12-17) obtaining chest surgeries from 2016 to 2019. An overwhelming majority (1,114) of the adolescents seeking this surgery were female (98.6 per cent), and just 16 were male (1.4 per cent).’

This is the United States, where the regulation of such ‘surgery’ is minimal. We should be grateful for the fact that such procedures cannot be carried out in the UK on minors, but they can receive dangerous ‘puberty blocking’ drugs under Gillick competence. This was tested in the courts, but ultimately it was held that such powerful drugs, which can cause infertility, may be administered to children in limited circumstances.

The US figures are truly shocking. First, the numbers are underreported, as they do not take into account operations carried out in private settings. Leor Sapir, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, says: ‘Because these procedures yield around $10,000 per patient, many mastectomies take place outside of hospitals in surgery centres owned by plastic surgeons themselves.’

Plus: “The ages of the girls involved are horrific. The Daily Wire: ‘The paediatric patients ranged from 12 to 17, with 42 (5.5 per cent) of the recipients between 12 and 14, 131 (16 per cent) aged 15, 291 (34.5 per cent) aged 16, and 365 (44 per cent) aged 17.’”

PEOPLE ARE DISAPPOINTED IN NOT TAKING THE SENATE, BUT THE ELECTIONS DID BRING CHANGE: New conservative school board in South Carolina bans CRT, fires superintendent.

You might say well, South Carolina. But even red states have been a hotbed of public-education (and higher education) wokeness, so this pushback matters.

KEEP THIS UP AND MAYBE MILLENNIALS/GEN Z WILL START TO BELIEVE IN FREE SPEECH:

It’s a job, not an entitlement:

#JOURNALISM:

It’s always been that way. Trump is treated as a criminal just for existing. Weirdly everyone was fine with him until he was a political threat to Democrats.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: The Post-Red Trickle Mitch McConnell Will Be a Problem for Conservatives. “Yeah, Cocaine Mitch had some shining moments when Trump was in office but his body of work before and after that hasn’t always been something that conservatives celebrate much. I am afraid that we’re not going to like much of what we see from Still Minority Mitch in the next couple of years.”

#RESIST: Sheriffs Refuse to Enforce Democrat-Controlled State’s New Gun Law.

Oregon voters approved Measure 114, also known as the Reduction of Gun Violence Act, during the Nov. 8 midterm elections. The rule, among other restrictions, outlaws magazines that hold more than 10 rounds—similar to rules that have been implemented in New York, California, and other Democrat-controlled states.

Several county sheriffs have publicly announced they won’t enforce the law or parts of the law.

“The biggest thing is this does absolutely nothing to address the problem,” Sheriff Cody Bowen of Union County told Fox News on Tuesday. “The problem that we have is not… magazine capacity. It’s not background checks. It’s a problem with mental health awareness. It’s a problem with behavior health illness.”

Indeed.

MARK JUDGE: What Happened When The FBI Interviewed Me About The Smear Campaign Against Brett Kavanaugh.

SADLY, THIS IS A GOOD POINT:

FTX’S DOWNFALL: How Moral Preening Obscured Fraud. Theranos was the same with all the “first woman” stuff. “Altruism, cultural sensitivity and the need to project a progressive air in the media can make or break the reputation of a politician, celebrity or corporation these days, especially in the newly emerging landscape of social media cancellations and corporate ESG ratings that act as ways for businesses to advertise their ‘social responsibility’ to investors. . . . It’s no accident that our hellish cultural landscape that grants favors in return for moral posturing and patronage has unleashed the insidious ambitions of opportunistic figures like SBF, or Elizabeth Holmes, another Silicon Valley darling revealed as a fraudster.”

WASN’T THIS THE GUY WHO ASSURED US COVID WAS OVER BEFORE THE ELECTION? Biden Threatens to Veto Senate Vote Ending COVID Emergency.

POST-MIDTERMS THEY CAN ADMIT IT: SHOCKER! WaPo Sheepishly Admits the FBI Found No Nuclear Secrets, or Anything Else, in Mar-a-Lago Raid. Well, the whole thing was a political exercise.

Related: Majority see FBI as Biden’s ‘personal Gestapo’ after Trump raid.