KIRA DAVIS: The Term “People Of Color” Hijacks Black America’s Hard-Earned Legacy And I’m Sick Of It.

I’m fine if other minority groups want to lump themselves in with each other with this whole POC thing. There’s a shorthand in it all that’s valuable and I get that. I just don’t think Black Americans want or deserve to be tied to their watered-down version of “the struggle.”

Because that’s what this is – a naked attempt to hijack the unique civil rights struggles of Black America in order to hitch a ride to Victim Town. When women like Pressley are forced to lump her heritage and American experience in with those who are not “African-American/Black” she is being forced to pour water into her ancestral soup. She is forced to be brown instead of Black.

There is so much power in blackness that these women and others like them on the Left are desperate to pretend they know the struggle to siphon off even a little bit of that power.

They have no right, and I won’t participate in it.

One of my favorite things about Kira is her sunny disposition, but I think I like her when she’s angry.

THIS WEEK IN CALI MADNESS: Saving the Planet from Natural Gas. “Are you tired of paying too little for clean-burning energy that reduces carbon emissions? Then has Berkeley got a deal for you!”

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Ilhan Omar Happened Because Media Chose to Lie to You. “Three years ago, most American newsrooms picked Ilhan Omar — despite her crawling Jew-hatred and evidence of an extensive criminal past — to be the transcendent face America needed to fight bigotry and federal corruption. Reporters apparently chose to lie about Omar to help birth a more trusting country.”

Just click over already.

GET THAT MAN AN UMBRELLA AND A GATORADE, STAT: Can’t Stand the Heat? Biden Looks & Sounds Terrible on the Trail Today.

BOTTOM STORY OF THE DAY: Booker says he felt disrespected in his verbal tussle with Biden.

PRIVACY: Read this before using FaceApp — you give up more personal data than you realize on this Russian-made app.

FaceApp, a smartphone app that allows users to apply filters onto selfies they upload, has grown in popularity again thanks to a feature that allows users to make themselves look older.

But cybersecurity experts have raised several red flags about FaceApp. It’s made by a Wireless Lab, a small company based in Russia and, according to its terms and conditions, your photos could be used in unexpected ways.

FaceApp’s privacy policy notes its affiliates and service providers “may transfer information that we collect about you, including personal information across borders and from your country or jurisdiction to other countries or jurisdictions around the world.”

FaceApp essentially owns images uploaded to its service and can use them in any way it wants. That could include anything from splashing your photo across a billboard to using it in the development of facial recognition technology.

Machine learning requires tons of data, which users have been happily uploading in droves in exchange for “free” apps and services.

NOAH ROTHMAN: The Outrage Economy.

The commodification of outrage has become a business model. Nike’s sales surged after it joined forces with its controversial spokesman and his campaign against standing for the singing of the national anthem. The carmaker Audi, too, enjoyed a sales bump when it advanced in a Super Bowl spot the flawed notion that women only make a fraction of what men make for the same work. The razor-maker Gillette’s two-minute-long web-based advertisement appealing to stereotypes to imply that conventional male socialization was transforming young men into abusers and sexual harassers generated a firestorm of controversy and a 6 percent increase in Procter & Gamble’s stock price.

Surveys routinely show that consumers will patronize firms based not on the products they produce but the “social or political issues” they embrace. People want to (literally) wear their politics on their sleeves. The controversies around which brands organize their outrage campaigns are, however, often chimerical.

“I think a lot of people in today’s day and age want to know, ‘What are we supposed to be outraged about,’” said a former employee of the anger-stoking Millennial media company Mic.com. The site specialized in controversies you didn’t even know you should be mad about. It advised its readers that they should be outraged over the sexism evident in the BBC’s description of one of its anchors as a “mother of three” and the racism in the television industry exposed by an African-American comedian’s decision to leave NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.”

What horrible people.

SKYNET SMILES: Brains scale better than CPUs. So Intel is building brains. “Neuromorphic hardware is proving able to handle tasks organic brains excel at much more efficiently than conventional processors or GPUs can. Visual object recognition is perhaps the most widely realized task where neural networks excel, but other examples include playing foosball, adding kinesthetic intelligence to prosthetic limbs, and even understanding skin touch in ways similar to how a human or animal might understand it.”

TYLER O’NEIL: Hidden Motives Behind the Huge 2020 Democratic Primary.

Every presidential candidate receives free hours of TV, radio, and internet attention, with the promise of bigger things to come. “Even if you lose, you exponentially increase your marketability,” aa Republican consultant said in 2015. How much more true is this for Democrats, whose liberal ideology dominates Hollywood, most of the mainstream media, and universities?

As in 2016 with Republicans, the cashing in has already begun. Kamala Harris received a $446,875 advance for her political memoir The Truths We Hold, along with an additional $49,9000 for a young reader’s edition, POLITICO reported. She also got $60,000 for her children’s book Superheroes Are Everywhere. She reported gaining $320,000 for books in her 2018 tax return submitted in April.

Bernie Sanders reported $391,000 in book royalties between 2018 and spring 2019. Ironically, Sanders became one of those “millionaihrs” he loves to hate — by running for president. Amy Klobuchar received a $27,000 advance for an upcoming book, and took in less than $200 in royalties for her 2015 memoir The Senator Next Door.

It’s all about the money, honey.

HEALTH: Ebola Epidemic in Congo Declared a Global Health Emergency. “World Health Organization says outbreak has infected more than 2,500 people and killed nearly 1,700 of them.”

BUT: Measles is killing more people in the DRC than Ebola — and faster. “‘Frankly, I am embarrassed to talk only about Ebola,’ WHO director-general says.”

CBS “NEWS”: These are the Republicans who voted to condemn President Trump’s racist tweets.

That’s an OK (if incorrect) headline for an opinion piece, but Jason Silverstein’s brief item is written up and presented as straight news. But as Glenn noted last night, there’s a lot of that going on.

OOPS: Bill Gates accidentally makes the case to regulate the hell out of platform companies.

I want to focus on what Gates said next, because it is incredibly relevant to the current conversation about platforms, regulation, and antitrust. Here it is, with my emphasis in bold:

It’s very tricky for platforms… these are winner-take-all markets. It really is winner-take-all. If you’re there with half as many apps or 90 percent as many apps, you’re on your way to complete doom. There’s room for exactly one non-Apple operating system and what’s that worth? $400 billion that would be transferred from company G to company M.

What Gates is describing is commonly referred to as the network effect, which says that the value of the platform to users is really created by all the other people on that network. There’s been a lot of great work exploring how this plays out over the past few years — you might be familiar with Ben Thompson, who has laid out a very refined argument about the network effect called “Aggregation Theory.”

The important thing to know is that it’s well-established that the network effect enables the winning platforms to achieve massive scale and preclude competition. It’s a devastating combination that Gates calls “complete doom.” There’s a reason so many tech markets tend toward monopoly or duopoly, like Android and iOS, or Google search, or Facebook, or Uber and Lyft — the network effect makes it basically impossible to build a competitor because you can’t populate the network. And you can’t buy your way out of this problem: Microsoft famously paid app developers to write Windows Phone apps when there weren’t enough users to otherwise draw developer attention, and… it didn’t work.

This is actually from three weeks ago, but I missed it then. Libertarian/conservative economic theory is sadly out of date when it comes to network effects, but maybe that’s changing.

WELL: Off the record, House Dems tell CNN’s Tapper that Trump was ‘brilliant’ snookering Dems into letting The Squad become their symbol.

Instapundit readers have known this since early Sunday evening.

Advantage: Instapundit.

PLUS: Their desperation is palpable, and it’s kind of sad that some Republicans still can’t — or won’t? — sense it.

AND DON’T QUESTION HER PATRIOTISM: AOC Silent After Antifa Terrorist Echoes Her ‘Concentration Camps’ Rhetoric on ICE Centers.

GOOD ENOUGH FOR ME: Ben Carson Says Trump and His Tweets Aren’t Racist.

YOU THINK THEY’LL LET HER IN? Ilhan Omar introduces pro-boycott resolution, announces visit to Israel.

Omar’s resolution revealed on Wednesday, cosponsored by Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) and Rep. John Lewis (D-Georgia), seeks to oppose “unconstitutional legislative efforts to limit the use of boycotts to further civil rights at home and abroad,” and “urges Congress, States, and civil rights leaders from all communities to endeavor to preserve the freedom of advocacy for all by opposing anti-boycott resolutions and legislation.”

Rep. Brad Sherman (D-California) told The Jerusalem Post that Omar’s resolution should not be taken seriously.

“I can’t imagine that any committee is going to mark up or take seriously any pro-BDS resolution,” Sherman said. “Am I worried about the overall BDS movement worldwide as an economic matter? No. As an effort to delegitimize Israel, of course. The comments here today are a tiny part of that delegitimizing effort.”

Honestly, I hope they do let her in, and require her to be questioned by Israeli airport security in the way the American press won’t.

UGH: American cancels more flights as Boeing’s 737 Max fleet may stay grounded for longer than expected. “It said it ‘remains confident’ that the Boeing plane will be recertified this year. But some airline executives are growing doubtful about that timetable.”

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Crowd at Trump Rally Wants to Send Ilhan Omar Back. “The media was freaking out (I know, how can you tell?) because Trump was dragging Congress’s four intersectional princesses (THE SQUAD) at his North Carolina rally. Was anyone surprised? The crowd chanted “send her back” when Trump mentioned Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) which I thought was exciting because I knew I would see all the woke, Pulitzer-winning corporate cable media heads explode like in that movie ‘Scanners’.”

ELI LAKE: China’s Campaign Against the Uighurs Demands a Response. “The evidence is mounting of China’s despicable strategy of cultural persecution in Xinjiang Province.”

This week the Washington Free Beacon reported that a separatist Uighur organization known as the East Turkistan National Awakening Movement has identified a network of 124 re-education camps in the province, almost all of them built since 2016. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute has identified 28 such camps, noting that media reports have identified up to 180.

Last summer, United Nations investigators estimated that 1 million Uighurs were in the camps. In May, Randall Schriver, the U.S. assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific security, estimated that at least 3 million Uighurs are being detained. (Other U.S. officials tell me this larger estimate includes people who are compelled to visit a re-education facility but still live in their homes.)

The Chinese claim the new centers are for vocational training. Survivors describe something closer to concentration camps. One, Mihrigul Tursun, told Congress last fall that she was forced to sit for hours in a chair where she suffered electric shocks and sleep deprivation.

This is, in effect, a campaign of mass child abduction. The grim details are laid bare in a study published this month by researcher Adrian Zenz in the Journal of Political Risk. Citing official documents, he writes that the government plan is “designed to systematically boost the ability of the state to house children of all ages in increasingly centralized and highly securitized educational boarding facilities.”

Might I suggest export controls on the Western technology (primarily from Google) being used to run China’s ever-growing surveillance/social-control state? The business they do with Beijing is the high-tech version of selling guns and barbed wire to Stalin’s GULAG, or genetic testing kits to Hitler’s SS.

BAD GUYS: Iran seizes foreign tanker with 12 crew accused of smuggling oil. “It comes days after an oil tanker based in the United Arab Emirates disappeared off trackers in Iranian national waters.”

DAVID HARSANYI: Why CNN’s Normalizing Of A White Nationalist Matters. “It’s transparent partisan attempt to smear Republican voters.”

Which brings me to the purpose of CNN featuring white supremacist Richard Spencer on as a pundit yesterday. These are kinds of people, you see, who say “love it or leave it.” These are the kinds of people who support the president. Literally, the chyron read, “White Nationalist who once backed Trump calls Trump’s racist tweets ‘red meat.’”

Spencer was there to reiterate a point. CNN and other networks have decided that Trump’s tweets are objectively racist and they will repeat that his tweets are racist hundreds of times a day just in case anyone disagrees. They won’t make the same kind of journalistic judgments about the anti-Semitism that infects a sizable faction of the progressive left. They won’t do the same for Ilhan Omar’s tweets.

Well, white nationalists get a “jolt” from Republicans winning elections in the same way terrorist Hamas or Antifa goons get a “jolt” from Democrats winning elections. CNN would never ask an Islamic radical or masked leftist arsonist to talk about Ilhan Omar’s anti-American sentiments in an effort to tacitly tie her to those groups.

There are plenty of articulate conservatives out there who don’t melt down every time the president tweets something stupid. Whether you agree with them or not, they could easily have provided a pro-Trump perspective (which is what I imagine CNN was looking for, but didn’t get, from Spencer).

What they got was arguably even “better,” since the headline impression of Spencer’s appearance was that Trump had gone too far even for him.

ELON MUSK, CALL YOUR OFFICE: NASA’s large SLS rocket unlikely to fly before at least late 2021. “NASA has not been good at setting realistic budget and schedules.”

I think it was Glenn who said a short while back that if NASA insists on SLS and Orion to go back to the Moon, then NASA isn’t going back to the Moon.

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: Washington Lays All the Ugly Cards on the Table—and at Last We Have Clarity.

By forcing the pace, Trump obviously hopes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her companions will blurt out their unvarnished reactions in velocity veritas and it seems to be working. Despite the unpleasantness, the result has been clarity: Washington has laid all the ugly cards on the table, for once the capital is free of artifice and every seething emotion is on display. The choices are stark even if they are not very edifying.

What a scene it presents. On the one hand is a group of people who think America is the source of all evil that should spend the rest of its historical existence atoning for the mischief it has loosed in the world. On the other hand is a group who believe that for all its faults it is the greatest country in the world and that those who want to destroy it should go back to Somalia. Whichever point of view you subscribe to (or neither) it’s hard to deny that these factions have existed for some time and are only now coming to grips in the open.

Needless to say, read the whole thing.

WHAT’S NEXT, AN ANCHOR-OF-THE-MONTH-CLUB? Norah O’Donnell Sinks as Anchor of ‘CBS Evening News.’ “You can’t pin all the blame on O’Donnell, since CBS’s news division has been an underperformer for a long time. Nevertheless, it’s telling that the well-known newsreader couldn’t generate even a one-night buzz, given all that positive press and one seriously hot-button issue (Trump’s tweets) for a headline story.”

BECAUSE WE CAN’T HAVE GOVERNMENT USING LEGAL TERMS: Ilhan Omar’s Orwellian Bill Would Prohibit Federal Agencies From Saying ‘Illegal Alien.’