OPEN THREAD: Leftovers again?

WITH GOOD REASON: Most retirees and near-retirees are worried about the stock market and inflation.

XI’S GONNA GET IT: Videos Show CCP Forces Violently Crack Down on China Protests Against Xi.

Also: Protests erupt across China in unprecedented challenge to Xi Jinping’s zero-Covid policy.

Plus: China protests spread as demonstrators call for Xi to step down over COVID policies.

OUR GENETIC HISTORY IS COMPLICATED: An AI Found an Unknown ‘Ghost’ Ancestor in The Human Genome.

PROGRESS: Handgun owners carrying daily in US doubled in 4 years; self-protection cited as main reason: study.

EVERY INSTITUTION HAS BEEN CORRUPTED: Apple hobbled a crucial tool of dissent in China weeks before widespread protests broke out.

Anti-government protests flared in several Chinese cities and on college campuses over the weekend. But the country’s most widespread show of public dissent in decades will have to manage without a crucial communication tool, because Apple restricted its use in China earlier this month.

AirDrop, the file-sharing feature on iPhones and other Apple devices, has helped protestors in many authoritarian countries evade censorship. That’s because AirDrop relies on direct connections between phones, forming a local network of devices that don’t need the internet to communicate. People can opt into receiving AirDrops from anyone else with an iPhone nearby.

That changed on Nov. 9, when Apple released a new version of its mobile operating system, iOS 16.1.1, to customers worldwide. Rather than listing new features, as it often does, the company simply said, “This update includes bug fixes and security updates and is recommended for all users.”

Hidden in the update was a change that only applies to iPhones sold in mainland China: AirDrop can only be set to receive messages from everyone for 10 minutes, before switching off. There’s no longer a way to keep the “everyone” setting on permanently on Chinese iPhones. The change, first noticed by Chinese readers of 9to5Mac, doesn’t apply anywhere else.

Apple used to advertise itself as the remedy for Big Brother. Now Apple is Big Brother’s accomplice.

AT AMAZON, shop the Holiday Gift Guide. #CommissionEarned.

ELON MUSK WAS RIGHT ABOUT “HANDS UP, DON’T SHOOT” BLM NARRATIVE: “The Whole Thing Was A Fiction.”

For some reason, Musk deleted the tweet and substituted a tweet that only had the link to the DOJ report.

But that didn’t stop more outrageous outrage, such as from Tech Times, Elon Musk Deletes His Tweet, Defending the Ferguson Cop Who Shot Unarmed Michael Brown. John Sexton did a good job dissecting how various lefty outlets tried to whatabout the DOJ report in response to Musk’s now-deleted tweet.

Well, yes, Brown was unarmed. Including when just prior to the shooting he strong-armed a local convenience store.

And Brown also was unarmed when he sucker-punched officer Darren Wilson in the face as Wilson sat in a patrol car, and tried to steal Wilson’s gun. That was the first time Brown was shot, and then he was shot fatally when he made a second charge at Wilson.

Wilson was exonerated and never charged by the local prosecutors or the Eric Holder – Barack Obama Justice Department.

Not everybody can handle the truth, though: St. Louis mayor Tishaura Jones quits Twitter over Elon Musk’s Ferguson tweet.

HMM: Covering a cylinder with a magnetic coil triples its energy output in nuclear fusion test.

ALL THOSE YEARS AGO: “In 1978, George married Olivia Arias and in the same year they had a son, Dhani.  Dhani only discovered his father’s past when he was at school.  ‘I came home one day from school after being chased by kids singing ‘Yellow Submarine’, and I didn’t understand why,’ he has said.  ‘It just seemed surreal: why are they singing that song to me?  I came home and freaked out to my dad: ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were in the Beatles?’  And he said: ‘Oh, sorry. Probably should have told you that.’  It’s impossible to imagine, John, Paul or Ringo neglecting to mention they were in the Beatles to their children.”

ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Chicago Mayoral Candidates Piling on Lori Lightfoot and Her Dismal Record on Crime.

I can’t say I blame them, especially after all of her promises to clean up the city:

Chicago’s last Republican mayor left office in 1931.

THAT SEEMS RIGHT: For tactical use, a semi-automatic shotgun is a superior platform to a pump action.

FUN GIFT: ‘BEST DAD EVER’ Multitool Pocket Knife. #CommissionEarned

NARRATOR: ACTUALLY, GIVEN THIS ADMINISTRATION, YOU WILL. The U.S. Approves Oil Production, but You Won’t Believe Where.

GOOD, STOP LISTENING TO “ACTIVISTS.” Despite pushback, NASA won’t rename the James Webb Space Telescope.

PROMISES MADE, PROMISES KEPT: Fact check: Fauci warned Trump administration in 2017 of surprise infectious disease outbreak.

A Google search of the headline revealed that the screenshot of the article is authentic and came from Healio News, a specialty clinical information website and was, in fact, published on Jan. 11, 2017.

The article, “Fauci: ‘No doubt’ Trump will face surprise infectious disease outbreak,” states Fauci’s remarks came during a forum on pandemic preparedness at Georgetown University.

* * * * * * * *

Healio News reported that, according to experts who spoke at the forum, “preparing the U.S. for pandemics requires proper funding and starts by battling disease outbreaks overseas.”

Fauci said during his remarks that a lesson learned from emerging diseases over the years is that “you have to commit substantial financial and human resources.”

Fact check: US government did not engineer COVID-19

Our ruling: True

The claim that Dr. Anthony Fauci, in 2017, warned the Trump administration of the likelihood of an infectious disease outbreak is TRUE based on our research. Fauci did not warn about the coronavirus specifically, as some posts claim, but rather, that a more general “surprise infectious disease outbreak” would take place.

Earlier: COVID-19 Origins: Investigating a “Complex and Grave Situation” Inside a Wuhan Lab.

THANK YOU, DR. OBVIOUS: If dinosaurs hadn’t gone extinct, world might look “very different.”

NARRATIVE BUSTED: Man Throwing Bricks At NYC Gay Bar Was Actually A Gay Man Enacting ‘Revenge,’ Police Say.

Would you be surprised if a recent string of “hate crimes” against a popular New York City gay bar were actually carried out by a gay man?

Of course not, you’re a reader of The Daily Wire and well-educated on hate crime hoaxes. Nonetheless, let’s talk about a recent story out of the Big Apple.

Over the last month, VERS, a gay bar in Hell’s Kitchen has experienced four separate incidents of an individual throwing bricks through its windows.

Immediately, New York leftists declared it was evidence of something sinister.

“The epidemic of anti-LGBTQ+ violence is national,” Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine tweeted. “A well-known gay bar on Manhattan’s west side has been attacked repeatedly in recent weeks. We can not stand for this.”

As Roger Kimball wrote when Jussie Smollett’s story broke in 2019, “The less hate there is in the United States, the more hate crimes must be manufactured in order to keep the Fraternal Order of Victims afloat.”

FASTER, PLEASE: The new pain treatments that may finally stem the need for opioids.

A girl who worked at our gym got an electrostim implant in her spine. Haven’t seen her since she left for the operation, so I don’t know how it’s turned out.

YE GADS: Kanye West Canceled Himself.

That brings us to this week’s outrage: On Tuesday, Kanye dined with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, and brought along as his guest the notorious Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, who showered Trump with flattery. Trump now says that he didn’t know who Fuentes was, which is entirely plausible but (if true) suggests the complete breakdown of competent staffing around the former president as he ramps up a 2024 campaign. In fact, during his presidency and prior campaigns, Trump often seemed to prefer not to know who his supporters were, so long as they supported him. Fuentes is not exactly a household name and mostly known only to people who are Too Online, but it would not take a very long Google search to figure out what he is. Even Breitbart News published an appalled item by Jerome Hudson and Matthew Boyle on the dinner under the headline “Trump Dined at Mar-a-Lago with White Nationalist, Holocaust Denier Nick Fuentes Alongside Kanye West,” in which Hudson and Boyle observed that Trump “seems to have met with an open white nationalist, antisemite, and Holocaust denier in Fuentes. Fuentes’ now-shut-down YouTube page is shot-through with racist and antisemitic rants that date as far back as 2014.”

Trump aside, however, Kanye clearly knew who he was there with; indeed, it is entirely possible that listening to Fuentes has fed a lot of West’s current enthusiasm for antisemitism. This is a dark place, from which there is no returning.

Fuentes, and possibly another: Kanye West’s antisemitism inspired by Louis Farrakhan. “Unbeknownst to many, West and Farrakhan have been publicly connected for years. In July 2005, West accepted the ‘Million Man March Image Award’ at the NOI headquarters in Chicago. In 2013, when West first drew attention for antisemitism when he lamented that ‘Black people don’t have the same level of connections as Jewish people,’ Farrakhan defended him and told him not to ‘bow to pressure to apologize.’ Two years later, West took his family to meet Farrakhan, and his song All Day, released that same year, boasted: ‘Just talked to Farrakhan, that’s sensei.’”

SO EXPENSIVE, INTRUSIVE, AND INEFFECTIVE? Battle against RSV in schools recalls COVID-19 fight.

ALL QUIET ON THE NETFLIX FRONT: My review of the new German remake of the 1930 Lewis Milestone movie adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s classic anti-war novel.

“CREEPY JOE STRIKES AGAIN:” President Biden peers through Nantucket restaurant window for kids’ selfies during Thanksgiving break at billionaire friend’s house. “But some on social media were not so amused by the president’s child-centric antics. ‘This is not normal. Stop trying to normalize this. If this was any other old man, you would all be freaking out, too,’ wrote one user on Instagram, responding to a post from the Nantucket Current.”

HOW IT STARTED: Presumed President-elect Joe Biden lays out Main Street recovery plan for small businesses.

How it’s going: Bidenomics: 41% of small businesses can’t pay rent this month, report warns.

CYBER MONDAY DEAL: Instant Pot Duo Crisp 11-in-1 Air Fryer. #CommissionEarned