OVERREACTION: Boy arrested for ‘joking’ about shooting up school on social media.

The boy, who attends nearby Chesterton Middle School, reportedly told Siri “I am going to shoot up a school.” Siri helpfully responded with a list of schools in the Valparaiso area, where the boy was at the time. The boy took a screenshot and posted it to social media.

Some of his contacts alerted the police in Chesterton, who in turn notified Valparaiso cops.

The boy said that the post was a joke, and subsequent investigation revealed that he had no access to weapons. There was no sign that the boy had any particular school in mind when he made the comment.

“The threat is not believed to be credible at this time,” Valparaiso Police wrote in their Facebook post.

The kid did something not-too-smart, but I hope this doesn’t follow him around for years.

CORN, POPPED: Covington Boy’s Lawyers Send Preservation Letters to Over 50 Media Entities. “Including NYT, WaPo, CNN, NPA, TMZ, Elizabeth Warren, Alyssa Milano, Kathy Griffin, Maggie Haberman, Ana Cabrera, David Brooks…”

CHRIS QUEEN: The Beatles’ Ten Most Interesting Spiritual Songs.

OH NO, WILLIAM & MARY WON’T DO: William & Mary Cancels Northam Appearance amid Yearbook Scandal.

(Hat tip, Will Collier.)

BRAZIL: Jair Bolsonaro faces congressional test for radical reforms. “Brazil’s president attempts pension and tax overhauls that have eluded his predecessors.”

Since he took office on January 1 he has used decree powers to relax restrictions on gun ownership and to make it easier for government officials to deny access to information, previously guaranteed by a 2012 freedom of information law.

Mr Bolsonaro’s supporters say they will quickly push ahead with reforms.

“Our whole project is a liberal project,” said Luciano Bivar, president of Mr Bolsonaro’s party, the PSL. “We will push for an open market economy, all the liberal reforms, with a lot of force.”

Among Mr Bolsonaro’s electoral promises was a plan to do away with Brazil’s separate system of labour courts and another to simplify the country’s labyrinthine municipal, state and federal tax systems into single national rates of income and value added tax.

I like the cut of his jib.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: ‘Soak the Rich’ Resonates with Majority of Americans.

MICHAEL LEDEEN: Iran’s Mullahs Can See Their Destiny Acted Out in Venezuela. “I’m not a betting man, but if I were, I’d lay long odds that the Iranian regime is highly penetrated, by us, by the Saudis, by the Israelis, and all the rest you can conjure up in a few minutes. But the really profound penetration, about which I’ve been writing and speaking for many years, is political and ideological. The masses, all over the country, have had it with the regime. They want regime change, and the regime knows and fears it.”

Faster, please — and do read the whole thing.

PROPUBLICA: Facebook Moves to Block Ad Transparency Tools — Including Ours. “Our tool had let the public see exactly how users were being targeted by advertisers. The social media giant urged us to shut it down last year.”

ProPublica, Mozilla and Who Targets Me have all noticed their tools stopped working this month after Facebook inserted code in its website that blocks them.

“This is very concerning,” said Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., who has co-sponsored the Honest Ads Act, which would require transparency on Facebook ads. “Investigative groups like ProPublica need access to this information in order to track and report on the opaque and frequently deceptive world of online advertising.”

For the past year and a half, ProPublica has been building a searchable database of political ads and the segments of the population advertisers are paying to reach. We did this by enlisting thousands of volunteers who installed a web browser extension. The tool shared the ads users see as well as Facebook’s details on why the users were targeted.

In a statement to ProPublica, Facebook said the change was meant to simply enforce its terms of service. (The Guardian also published a story Sunday flagging the change.)

“We regularly improve the ways we prevent unauthorized access by third parties like web browser plugins to keep people’s information safe,” Facebook spokesperson Beth Gautier said. “This was a routine update and applied to ad blocking and ad scraping plugins, which can expose people’s information to bad actors in ways they did not expect.”

Facebook has made minor tweaks before that broke our tool. But this time, Facebook blocked the ability to automatically pull ad targeting information.

For a service built on sharing, Facebook certainly doesn’t like to do much of that itself.

CHANGE YOU’LL BE REQUIRED TO BELIEVE IN: Land, jobs are top priorities for radical S. African party.

A former ANC member, Malema founded the EFF in 2013, and his radical programme rules out “compromises” allegedly agreed to by ANC leaders with the white minority.

Malema, 37, has begun to eat away at ANC support amid chronic unemployment that now stands at 27 percent of the workforce.

But his keystone issue is land redistribution.

“The economy is in the hands of the white community, we want to change that,” he told the crowd to cheers and raised fists.

“We are going to place all land under the custodianship of the state, for equal redistribution to all,” he pledged.

Prediction: They’ll take the land and lose the jobs — but that’s an easy one.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Is Northam In or Out and Much, Much More. “WaPo spends major coin during the Super Bowl for commercial celebrating themselves.”

If not them, who?

HARDEN THE GRID: China’s EMP Weapons Pose Grave Threat to America, Newly Declassified Report Shows.

HMM: China’s Slowdown Is Starting to Hit Where It Hurts: Employment.

At a meeting in July 2018, the Chinese Communist Party’s Politburo analyzed the current economic situation and proposed stabilizing employment, finance, foreign trade, and investment to tackle external changes and ensure stable economic operations effectively. Within that list, the Politburo ranked “stabilizing employment” as the first and most important task. In addition, the report of the 19th National Congress of the CCP also stated that employment is pivotal to people’s well-being, noting that instability in employment will affect the standard of living and may ultimately affect social stability.

From this perspective, stabilizing employment is tantamount to safeguarding social stability from economic risk. China’s employment situation is generally stable and improving, but there are changes and difficulties in maintaining stability, Zhang Yizhen, vice minister of human resources and social security, said at a regular policy briefing of the State Council on December 5. The Hong Kong media said that the rare use of the phrase “difficulties in maintaining stability” was a grim omen for China’s employment situation.

The reality confirms the grim employment situation in China. The internet industry is experiencing a downturn at the moment. Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent (often collectively referred to as BAT), China’s internet giants, are a desirable place for job seekers. But since September, the news of Alibaba scaling back its campus recruitment program has caused an uproar on the internet. At the same time, news spread that Baidu and JD.com have stopped social recruitment and that Tencent will lay off about 6,000 of its staff.

During his George W. Bush’s first term, I remember a news item where he told then-Chinese President Hu Jintao that if the economy didn’t produce at least four million jobs, he wouldn’t win reelection. Hu replied that he had to deliver 25 million jobs each year to avoid unrest.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Facebook’s business model exploits YOU and Mark Zuckerberg could care less.

No rhetorical sleight of hand, such as Zuckerberg’s disingenuous claim that “we don’t sell your data,” can obfuscate that fact. His claim makes a technical distinction. Obviously, Facebook does not part ways with the data we give it in exchange for money from advertisers. They hold onto this precious commodity and sell insights into who we are and what we do to advertisers, treating it as a renewable and recyclable resource.

Indeed, Facebook’s business model relies on amassing as much personal information as possible. Zuckerberg admits this in his piece, saying Facebook aims to collect “what pages people like, what they click on, and other signals.” The latest illustration of this intent appeared in a recent New York Times report that Facebook plans to integrate Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp into a unified platform, which will dramatically increase their holistic knowledge and insights of users and their behavior.

All of this is emblematic of Apple CEO Tim Cook’s stark warning that we have allowed companies to create a “data industrial complex” in which “companies know you better than you may know yourself.”

Let’s not be fooled or distracted by semantic debate. We are being monetized and sold.

Yes, but… it’s working: Facebook’s Stock Surges 7 Percent on Huge Q4 Sales, Massive User Growth.

A HIGH-TECH FISKING: We dismantle Facebook’s memo defending its ‘Research.’

ENDGAME? Protesters rally in Venezuela; general defects from Maduro.

The street protesters in Caracas on Saturday were mostly backing opposition leader Guaido, who the United States has also recognized as interim president. They were pushing for Maduro’s ouster from power at home while signaling to other nations to consider supporting Guaido as the country’s leader, The Washington Post reported.

Before the protests, Venezuelan Air Force General Francisco Esteban Yanez Rodgriguez broke with Maduro and called on the military to back Guaido.

About the only thing worse than a military junta is a properly elected, energetic socialist.

VIDEO: Covington Teen’s Lawyer Releases Brutal 14-Minute Video Showcasing Lies of Nathan Phillips and Media. “Nathan Phillips had better lawyer up.”

Corn, popped.

BRUCE BAWER: The Privileged Elitist Who Saw Blackface, Not Black Lung. “Drop down the memory hole what may well be the only remaining image of some of those coal miners, the sole record of their lives of labor, in order to satisfy the sensitivities, reasonable or not, of one man who happened to be in that restaurant one evening for a party.”

DC DATING: My Boyfriend of a Year Had a Separate Life and Two Other Girlfriends. “Besides his name, I don’t know if anything he told me was true.”

UPDATE: Kenji López-Alt Backtracks After Saying His Restaurant Won’t Serve MAGA Hat Wearers.

(Hat tip, Eugene Volokh.)

VIDEO: Gowdy Roasts Rep. Adam Schiff After His Trump Jr. Conspiracy Theory Goes Down in Flames.

[The links wasn’t working for me so I updated it. Sorry! — Charlie]

UM… Lesbian Feminist Slams Transgender Superhero as a Symbol of Patriarchy. “Only men can be women, basically.”

Actually, she has a point, especially concerning athletics, where Y-chromosome-enhanced “women” compete at a distinct advantage against XX women.

ADDICTION: Unredacted lawsuit against OxyContin maker reveals they pushed opioid as a low-addiction risk.

CHANGE: Google+ accounts and pages will be shut down April 2nd.

I tried Google+ when it first rolled out, but only briefly. It seemed like social media for OCD types more interested in organizing their relationships with people than in interacting with people.

OH: Fusion GPS Had Nellie Ohr Digging for Dirt on Trump Kids in 2016. “Nellie Ohr is married to Bruce Ohr, who was serving as associate deputy attorney general at the time.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Parents Having Sex Save Their Relationships One Quickie at a Time.