MUST-SEE TV: Bill Whittle on Notre Dame.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Things That Can’t Go on Forever Simply Don’t. ”

For history’s rare multiracial and multiethnic republics, an “e pluribus unum” cohesion is essential. Each particular tribe must owe greater allegiance to the commonwealth than to those who superficially look or worship alike.

Yet over the last 20 years we have deprecated “unity” and championed “diversity.” Americans are being urged by popular culture, universities, schools and government to emphasize their innate differences rather than their common similarities.

Sometimes the strained effort turns comical. Some hyphenate or add accents or foreign pronunciations to their names. Others fabricate phony ethnic pedigrees in hopes of gaining an edge in job-seeking or admissions.

The common theme is to be anything other than just normal Americans for whom race, gender and ethnicity are incidental rather than essential to their character.

But unchecked tribalism historically leads to nihilism.

Needless to say, read the whole thing.

I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT SHE’S TRYING TO SAY HERE: AOC Blames Fox News for Flood of Calls to Her Office: ‘Like They Do It with Their Breakfast or Something.’

TROLL LEVEL: SCHLICHTER.

I’m not sure they actually need the encouragement, but it sure is fun.

NERD HEAVEN: You can now download the source code for all Infocom text adventure classics.

The code was uploaded by Jason Scott, an archivist who is the proprietor of textfiles.com. His website describes itself as “a glimpse into the history of writers and artists bound by the 128 characters that the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) allowed them”—in particular those of the 1980s. He announced the GitHub uploads on Twitter earlier this week.

The games were written in the LISP-esque “Zork Implementation Language,” or ZIL, which you could be forgiven for not being intimately familiar with already. Fortunately, Scott also tweeted a link to a helpful manual for the language on archive.org.

Dive in and you’ll find that things are very different now than they were then. At the time Infocom was active, personal computers did not have a widely shared architecture, so the path ZIL’s architects took was to allow game creators to write instructions for a virtual machine called the Z-machine, which was then brought to the various platforms of the day. There are interpreters available today for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android, among other platforms.

After 30-plus years, it sure would be nice to finally beat “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”

WE DON’T. WE REALLY DON’T. 2020 Candidate Andrew Yang Says U.S. Needs a Value Added Tax (VAT).

MICHAEL LEDEEN: Is Notre Dame a Bad Omen or a Sign of the Strength of Western Civilization?

JOHN HINDERAKER on the ongoing collusion meme: “One of the Democrats’ basic problems is that ‘attempting’ to obstruct the investigation doesn’t make a lot of sense. If Trump had really wanted to obstruct the investigation, he could simply have terminated it. And Mueller acknowledges that the administration fully cooperated with the investigation in every way. So the ‘attempts to obstruct’ come down to Trump expressing outrage at the fact that a baseless, partisan investigation was hampering his administration. Arguably Trump should have brought the Mueller farce to an end, but he didn’t.”

WELL, THAT’S A TAKE: MSNBC’S Nicolle D Wallace says, “We know it wasn’t a criminal conspiracy with the Russians, but then what was it? Because Robert Mueller spent 22 months looking at it, and if there was nothing, I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have taken 22 months to say nothing.”

Keep digging, there’s must be a pony under there somewhere.

Video at the Twitter link.

BLUE CITY BLUES: New York City’s Population Dips for First Time in Over a Decade.

International migration into New York City’s five boroughs tapered off, as more residents left, shrinking the city’s population in 2017 and 2018, according to U.S. Census Bureau numbers released Thursday.

New York’s population dropped 0.47% to 8.4 million by July 2018, compared with the previous year. Census officials previously estimated that New York’s population grew by about 7,000 in 2017, but revised figures show it actually dipped by about 38,000, a 0.45% decline from the prior year.

The city isn’t run as well as it once was, to say the least.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Robert Francis O’Rourke Hates America (But Wants to Be President Anyway).

TO BE FAIR, IT’S BUZZFEED:

HMM: It’s time for the US and Europe to ask what sort of world China wants to build.

NO, IT WAS DRIVEN BY HATRED FOR ALL THINGS REPUBLICAN: Was Mueller probe driven by political bias against Trump?

WHOA: Prosecutors Ask To Present Evidence That NXIVM Sex Cult Leaders Illegally Bundled Money For Hillary Clinton Campaign. “Prosecutors have asked to present evidence in the NXIVM sex cult racketeering trial showing that NXIVM leaders including Nancy Salzman and Clare Bronfman illegally bundled money for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign by compelling members to donate to Clinton and then reimbursing the members.”

Developing…

SPIN, SPIN, SPIN: ‘Propaganda,’ ‘a Farce,’ and ‘a Disgrace’: 2020 Dems Slam AG Barr’s Press Conference.

I’m so old I can remember when we were told we must accept the results of the Mueller investigation.

WELL, THAT’S PRETTY CLEAR: No Collusion, No Obstruction, AG Barr Confirms in Press Conference. “‘The investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government and its election interference activities,’ Barr quoted from the Mueller report.”

PLUS: Andy McCarthy on Fox just now: “The special counsel did not resolve the prosecutorial decision on obstruction, so this is a decision for Barr to make.”

Anything else is just spin, spin, spin.

JAMES P. PINKERTON: The Democrats’ Coming Sister Souljah Moment. “Sooner or later, they’ll need to distance themselves from the radicalism of Ilhan Omar.”

Given the current Corbynization of the party, is that still a possibility? Bill Clinton — he of the famous Sister Souljah moment — is too centrist for today’s Democrats.

ANTISOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter blocks EFF tweet that criticized bogus takedown of a previous tweet. “Starz filed bogus takedown requests—Twitter eventually restored blocked tweets.”

I DON’T NEED TO SEE THAT: Judge halts prosecutors’ efforts to release police surveillance video of Patriots owner Robert Kraft, others inside spa rooms.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Special Mueller Report Edition and Much, Much More. “All the major media outlets have ‘guides’ about how to read/what it means/what you need to know about the Mueller Report. You don’t need to read anything those clowns have prepared because they don’t know what the [redacted] they are talking about.”

Solid advice.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): In the coming weeks, I think the big story will be the investigation into how we got here, and the political weaponization of the intelligence and criminal-justice against Trump under the Obama Administration.

GOOD QUESTION: Will Tocqueville’s Dilemma Crash America?

Tocqueville insisted that old regime aristocrats felt compelled by laws and customs to take some care of their servants, that they were bound, however distantly, to their peasants by the land they shared and their regular interactions. The new industrial oligarchs would find themselves free of even these weak bonds. Tocqueville was not arguing for a return to feudalism; he was trying to show just how bad the new oligarchs would be. Workers and masters would see one another only at the factory and otherwise have no point of contact and certainly no sense of responsibility. “The manufacturing aristocracy of our day,” remarked Tocqueville, “after having impoverished and brutalized the men whom it uses, leaves them to be nourished by public charity in times of crisis. This results naturally from what precedes. Between worker and master relations are frequent, but there is no genuine association.”

Perhaps the state, by reducing material insecurity and regulating industry, could offer a partial escape from the logic of Tocqueville’s argument. But it would not fully counter the dynamic that concerned him unless it also somehow brought into existence the “genuine association” that he thought was necessary for true freedom. The more pessimistic second volume of Democracy in America presses us to worry, however, that a state powerful and centralized enough to effectively regulate the industrial economy would also, by virtue of its power and centralization, crowd out the local politics most conducive to the arts of association.

Federalism was the Founders’ attempt to balance local politics with a national government, but progressivism tipped the balance far in Washington’s favor, and seeks to tip it even further.

Still, an interesting piece and worth your time.

JON CALDERA: The Colorado legislature snatched your Trump tax cut.

Your Colorado income tax is based solely on your “taxable income” from your federal 1040 form. For your Colorado state income tax form you take your federal taxable income and multiply by our flat income tax rate, 4.63 percent.

But, for most folks, that federal taxable income actually goes up because there are now fewer allowed itemized deductions. For instance, you can only deduct so much interest from a home loan. This larger taxable income isn’t an issue because the new income tax rates are so much lower, your overall federal tax bill goes down.

But when you use that same, now larger, federal taxable income number for your state taxes, your state tax bill goes up because, wait for it, the Colorado state legislature didn’t lower the state tax rate to adjust for the new Trump Bump. A bill to do so passed out of last year’s Republican controlled Senate to, of course, die in the Democrat controlled House.

So, this year you get to pay for yet another tax increase you didn’t get to vote for.

Fortunately, there is a safety valve in our Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR) to make sure excess revenue, like that coming from the Trump Bump, goes back to you the taxpayer in a refund. When the state takes in more revenue than what it did the previous year, plus inflation and population growth, it has to refund that money back to you.

So, the Trump Bump should still be refunded back to you. But, wait for it, it won’t.

Because Democrats.

And do read the whole thing.

KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON: Ilhan Omar: A Hostage Situation.

The Democrats are in a political pickle. They would very much prefer that the Jew-hating caucus shut up, and they are not crazy about the fact that the public face of the Democratic party is, at the moment, risible and demented amateurs such as Representative Omar and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, i.e., the people who are even crazier than Senator Sanders. But intersectionality is a jealous god, and they cannot simply tell Representative Omar et al. to sit down and clam up. All they can really do is to try to raise the price of criticizing the nut cutlets on the Democrats’ menu by insisting that criticism of Representative Omar is an attack on Muslims as such, that criticism of Representative Ocasio-Cortez is an attack on Latinas who don’t know how a bill becomes a law, that criticism of Robert Francis O’Rourke is an attack on . . . whatever it is that “Beto” is pretending to be this week. The New York Times et al. are reliable allies on that front.

This is, incidentally, what all those fake hate crimes are really about: Redefining criticism of Democratic politicians and constituencies as violence. When there isn’t enough violence to make that case in a sufficiently dramatic fashion, then violence can simply be invented — and, if the case of Jussie Smollett is anything to go by, the cost of doing so is pretty low. When’s the last time you heard of a prosecutor dropping a 16-felony indictment in exchange for a firm handshake?

That’s a neat trick, really: to be the hostage and the hostage-taker at the same time.

All is proceeding exactly as Mel Brooks has foreseen.

IT’S JUST A FRIENDLY LOBBYING ORGANIZATION FOUNDED TO FIGHT ANTI-ISLAM SENTIMENT AFTER 9/11: CAIR Official Said He Wished Hitler Was Still Around To Murder Jewish People.