HMM: Judge won’t dismiss Amazon’s claim that Trump interfered with $10B cloud contract. “Amazon was seen as a frontrunner for the contract prior to Microsoft winning the deal in October 2019. Amazon protested that decision, alleging that Trump’s personal animus toward the company improperly influenced the outcome. The Department of Defense reviewed the decision after a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction. Following the review, the DoD reaffirmed the decision in September.”

I figure if our woke Pentagon wouldn’t go with Amazon, then Microsoft must have had the much better offer.

TYLER O’NEIL: A Post-Christian America Is Bad News for Everyone. “ The New Atheists may have partly achieved their goal, but declining church attendance and religious affiliation haven’t exactly translated into more peace and rational discourse. A rising ‘woke’ orthodoxy among secularists has even targeted ‘New Atheist’ Richard Dawkins himself for excommunication — over one tweet.”

The progressive god is a jealous god.

COLD DRINKS, HOT TAKES. Pour a Drink, Grab a Seat: We’re Liveblogging Presidentish Biden’s First Joint Address to Congress.

PJ MEDIA VIP WRAP: Bryan Preston on How to Defeat Today’s Woke Puritans. “If and when they’re defeated they’ll be compared to the Puritans of old, and will not come off well in the comparison.”

Plus Matt Margolis: PolitiFact’s ‘Fact Check’ of Ted Cruz on Court-Packing Is 100 Percent WRONG. “Neither of those situations were examples of court-packing, which is what Cruz was talking about here.”

And Yours Truly: The Journolist Is Already Spinning the Speech Joe Biden Hasn’t Given. “While Biden was never a terrific orator, it wasn’t until recent months that his attempts at drama consist of nothing better than barking out a few words loudly and angrily before going back to his now-familiar overly-moist mush-mouth style.”

If you’ve been thinking about becoming a supporter, don’t forget to use that VODKAPUNDIT promo code.

OH: Dem Gov Accused of Misusing Taxpayer Funds to Fight Sexual Assault Claim.

WITCH HUNT: Federal Agents Raid Rudy Giuliani’s NYC Apartment Looking for ‘Lobbying’ Crimes.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): A friend texts: “Speaking of investigations of dealings with Ukraine, where’s the one on Hunter and Big Guy stand?”

HEY JOE: China’s Making A Bold Military Statement -Are You Planning To Answer It?

PORKULUS II: THE REVENGE. Biden Aides Talking With GOP Senators About Infrastructure Bill. “Dollar-wise, the two sides probably aren’t very far apart. There has been talk about funding an infrastructure bill since the Obama administration. But Biden’s $1.8 trillion monstrosity has little to do with ‘infrastructure.’”

2+2 ONLY SOMETIMES EQUALS 4, COMRADE: Media Hungry Health Advisers Now Support The Same Masking Policies That Scott Atlas Was Ousted For Promoting.

IN A ONE-PARTY STATE, PARTY MEMBERS DON’T HAVE TO BE VERY GOOD OR EVEN VERY SMART: Calif. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Clueless Reaction to His Recall Officially Going to Voters Explains Everything.

A CONSERVATIVE IS A LIBERAL WHO’S BEEN MUGGED BY REALITY: People in Brooklyn Center feel differently about riots and looting than people in DC. “The respondents closest to the “unrest” aren’t very tolerant of the idea that riots and looting are acceptable forms of protest. In fact, they suggest the people who are doing those things are outside agitators and opportunists. Meanwhile, the folks who answered in DC repeatedly defend rioting as the last means of expressions for groups trying to make a point.”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): And note this bit:

The subtext here is that most of the respondents in Brooklyn Center, the ones who aren’t rioting fans, are black. “When something like this goes on the opportunistic people come out and they try to dehumanize this,” a man wearing a “veteran” cap said.

Meanwhile, most of the respondents in DC, the ones defending riots, are white women.

Is anyone really surprised by this?

VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR DAILY INSANITY WRAP: College Kids of Color Oppressed by Racist Soap Dispensers.

Insanity Wrap needs to know: When you have to find racism in soap dispensers, have you ever found any serious racism anywhere?

Answer: No. Next question?

Before we get to the sordid details, a quick preview of today’s Wrap.

• They’re cracking down on Antifa in… Portland?
• High school athlete breaks record, nearly breaks neck at finish line from wearing a mask
• Re-introducing the modern leftists even a conservative can work with

Bonus Sanity: There’s still one business in the business of running their business without poking into everybody else’s private business.

And so much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.

ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK: NYC Father Moves Daughter to Florida to Escape Critical Race Theory Curriculum.

CAROLINE GLICK: The Thomas-Greenfield Doctrine of U.S. Foreign Policy. “The only way to understand Biden foreign policy doctrine is by recognizing that it isn’t a foreign policy doctrine at all. It is an extension of Biden’s domestic genuflection to the radicals who control his own party. This genuflection takes the Biden administration’s embrace of critical race theory in domestic law enforcement, public health, immigration and economic policies and projects it out onto the world stage. The purpose is not to advance America’s interests in the world. Rather, the purpose is to signal to the fanatical progressives who run the modern Democratic Party that Biden is their man in the White House.”

Well, he is.

BUT IT’S A PROFITABLE GRIFT. Never-Trump Grift Is Back: Republican Accountability Project Is Even More Tone Deaf, Ridiculous, and Irrelevant. “One can assume the goal is to affect the reelection of those they disagree with in the coming cycle. To demonstrate how out of touch Never Trump is with the Republican Party, only 14 congressional GOP members received an ‘A’ grade, and 136 received an ‘F’ from the group. To give you a flavor of who their pet Republicans are, one is Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) in the House. In the Senate, they are fans of Lisa Murkowski (Alaska). Of course, Sen. Mitt Romney (Utah) also gets top marks.”

JOHN MCWHORTER: Do Black People Enjoy Being Told They Are Weak and Dumb? The Elect Hope so.

This KenDiAngelonianism, in its infantilization of black people for purposes of white self-congratulation, is racist, as I have discussed in this space recently. Perhaps the only way to discourage its takeover of our educational institutions will be for black people to start protesting against it on those terms, because abjuring being racist is what The Elect consider a paramount, dealbreaker reason for living. But there is a crucial obstacle to this.

Namely, many black people – and especially more educated ones, overrepresented in education, academia, and the media — accept being treated the way Tom Taylors prefer to treat us.

Why do so many of us accept this condescension as a compliment, almost enjoying being told we are too dumb to be truly educated, to be specific, or to be subject to genuine competition? Psychology has an answer to this question: a personal trait called the tendency for interpersonal victimhood, or an embrace of victimhood status.

Read the whole thing.

FACT CHECK: Awkward Viral Video of NYPD Officer Beaten With a Stick Is Real.

PRIVACY: With 4 Words, Apple Just Exposed the Biggest Problem With Facebook.

On Monday, Apple finally released iOS 14.5, and, I checked, Facebook still opens on my iPhone. The world didn’t come to an end for digital advertisers, small businesses, or anyone else. In fact, no one really knows how much of a difference the change will make to anyone.

I suppose we’ll find out soon. AppsFlyer, an ad attribution measurement firm, says that the average opt-in rate in its testing is around 26 percent. That means that almost three-quarters of users are likely to opt out of allowing Facebook and other apps to track their activity.

Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, told The Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern that the company’s goal is to “give users a choice.” Those four words are at the core of the problem with the position Facebook has taken since Apple announced the changes last year at its developer conference.

Apple’s motivation might not be anything “nobler” than sticking it to a rival or increasing the value of its own ad platform, but the benefits to any consumers concerned about privacy are clear.

VICTORIA TAFT: Here Are Down and Dirty Reasons Why California Lost a Congressional Seat and Texas and Florida Added in Census. “For the first time in 170 years, California has lost congressional representation because of a diminishing population.”

NOW THIS IS MORE LIKE THE 21ST CENTURY I WAS HOPING FOR: The Moon is going to get its own 4G network, thanks to this rugged lunar rover.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Americans Waking Up to Fact That Kamala Harris Is An Idiot. “Because nothing matters anymore and Joe Biden has the IQ of cheap vodka, he decided that the best person to back up his puppet presidency was the woman who the Democrats couldn’t wait to get rid of less than a year earlier.”

DOG BITES MAN: Google Promised Its Contact Tracing App Was Completely Private — But It Wasn’t.

Google and Apple provided assurances that the data generated through the apps—people’s movements, who they might have come in contact with, and whether they reported testing positive for COVID-19—would be anonymized and would never be shared with anyone other than public health agencies.

But The Markup has learned that not only does the Android version of the contact tracing tool contain a privacy flaw, but when researchers from the privacy analysis firm AppCensus alerted Google to the problem back in February of this year, Google failed to change it. AppCensus was testing the system as part of a contract with the Department of Homeland Security. The company found no similar issues with the iPhone version of the framework.

“This fix is a one-line thing where you remove a line that logs sensitive information to the system log. It doesn’t impact the program, it doesn’t change how it works, ” said Joel Reardon, co-founder and forensics lead of AppCensus. “It’s such an obvious fix, and I was flabbergasted that it wasn’t seen as that.”

Don’t trust Google. Google is asshole.

MAYBE HE THOUGHT THEY PROTECTED HIM FROM INTERNET VIRUSES: The White House Gives a Pathetic Excuse for Biden Wearing a Mask During the Virtual Climate Summit.

UGH: Meet the Swiss Billionaire Behind Arabella Advisors’ ‘Dark Money’ Empire. “New York Times reporter Ken Vogel recently revealed the efforts by Swiss billionaire and leftist mega-donor Hansjörg Wyss to purchase the parent company of the Chicago Tribune and other failing newspapers around the country. It’s laudable to see such genuine investigative journalism—especially since it likely led the billionaire to withdraw his $100 million bid. When so many framed Wyss as a liberal white knight bent on saving a venerable American industry, the reality couldn’t have been more different.”

Where are the right-leaning billionaires when there are big-name media outlets practically begging to bought up cheap?

NOTHING GOOD: If ‘Get Woke Go Broke’ Is True, What Might That Mean for the Future of the U.S. Military?