CRACKDOWN: YouTube tightens the rules around creator monetization and partnerships.

This might assure marketers that their ads are less likely to run on random, fly-by-night channels, but as Google’s Paul Muret writes, “Of course, size alone is not enough to determine whether a channel is suitable for advertising.”

So in addition, he said:

We will closely monitor signals like community strikes, spam, and other abuse flags to ensure they comply with our policies. Both new and existing YPP channels will be automatically evaluated under this strict criteria and if we find a channel repeatedly or egregiously violates our community guidelines, we will remove that channel from YPP. As always, if the account has been issued three community guidelines strikes, we will remove that user’s accounts and channels from YouTube.

Muret also described changes planned for the more exclusive Google Preferred program, which is supposed to be limited to the best and most popular content. Vlogger Logan Paul was part of Google Preferred until the controversy over his “suicide forest” video got him kicked out last week — a story that suggests some of the limitations to Google’s approach.

Moving forward, Muret said the program will offer “not only … the most popular content on YouTube, but also the most vetted.”

And you can be sure that these new rules will be applied fairly and without bias.

SANCTUARY STATES AREN’T CHEAP, YOU KNOW: Incoming New Jersey Governor Wants to Create an Entire Agency to Protect Illegal Immigrants.

BUG: Chromecast and Google Homes reportedly overloading home Wi-Fi.

WiFi is great, but for streaming HD or 4k video, I prefer Roku Ultra or Apple TV which both have ethernet ports.

TREY GOWDY: ‘I Have Seen No Evidence of Collusion Between the Russians and President Trump.’

JOE KATZMAN: How To Trump The Media: Avoid Conservatives’ Biggest Mistake.

Do you really think it’s a coincidence that leftism and its “Diversity Pokemon Points” amount to a full caste system?

Do you have any doubt about The left’s hatred for those who will not stay in their assigned status?

Have you noticed their quickness to turn on their own allies? Fail to follow the latest fad, and your status is demoted.

Perhaps you’ve noticed that endlessly callous virtue signaling is the identifying badge of our modern try-hard Striver Class.

Maybe that’s because American public education is now a 20-year Milgram Experiment. Where the meta-message inside political correctness is to override your own judgement, in favor of deliberately-shifting judgements from people with higher status.

These aren’t accidents. They’re clues.

Leftism isn’t a policy machine or an economic machine. Its economic results would tell you that much in a hurry. But the machine keeps running. Which means it must work for something. The correct question is: in what way does it work?

Read the whole thing.

PAULA BOLYARD: The Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT), Ohio’s largest online charter school provider, could shut down as early as next week.

YOU WOULD THINK: ‘Getting Completely Naked’ In Ansari’s Apartment Is A ‘Pretty Solid Non-Verbal Cue.’

HEH: Why Are the Iranian Protesters Islamophobes? “Criticizing sharia? What a bunch of bigots.”

WOW: The incredible moment a meteorite bursts through the atmosphere and lights up the night sky over Detroit before causing an EARTHQUAKE as it crashes down to earth.

DENNIS PRAGER: 10 Thoughts on the President and the ‘S—hole Countries.’

As Guatemalan columnist Claudia Nunez wrote on Trump in the Guatemalan newspaper Siglio 21: “The epithets he uses to describe certain groups are unfortunate and exemplify the decadence of the current political scene. But he has also said things that are true, for example, that it is we citizens of migration countries who have accommodated ourselves to the need to export people, as we have calmly allowed excessive levels of corruption to grow for decades.”

Though many wonderful immigrants come from the world’s worst places, there is some connection between the moral state of an immigrant’s country and the immigrant’s contribution to America. According to data from the Center for Immigration Studies, 73 percent of households headed by Central American and Mexican immigrants use one or more welfare programs, as do 51 percent of Caribbean immigrants and 48 percent of African immigrants. Contrast that with 32 percent of East Asians and 26 percent of Europeans.

Those numbers validate a lot of complaints about our immigration priorities.

QUESTION ASKED: What if diversity isn’t America’s strength?

I once heard Jesse Jackson explain that racial integration of the NBA made it stronger and better. He was right. But would gender integration of the NBA have the same effect? Would diversifying professional basketball by height? Probably not.

All of these analogies can take you only so far. Thomas Sowell once said, “The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.”

There’s a growing body of evidence that even if diversity— the kind that results from immigration — once made America stronger, it may not be doing so anymore. Robert Putnam, a liberal sociologist at Harvard, found that increased diversity corrodes civil society by eroding shared values, customs and institutions. People tend to “hunker down” and retreat from civil society, at least in the short and medium term.

I think the real culprit here isn’t immigration or diversity in general, but the rising stigma against assimilation. Particularly on college campuses, but also in large swaths of mainstream journalism and in the louder corners of the fever swamp right, the idea that people of all backgrounds should embrace a single conception of “Americanism” is increasingly taboo.

Anyone of any race or national origin can be an American, but it requires effort and desire from both the individual and the larger society. There’s a shortage of both these days.

Indeed.

CHANGE MORE OF THE SAME: Senate Dems at 50-Vote Mark to Block FCC’s Net Neutrality Repeal.

This report is from Bridget Johnson, whose unexplained and unacknowledged Twitter banishment remains unexplained and unacknowledged by Twitter management.

IT’S ALMOST AS THOUGH PEOPLE DON’T WANT TO BUY THINGS THEY DON’T WANT TO BUY: After Four Years of Obamacare Implementation, Uninsured Rate Hits 12.2%. “Uninsured rate highest for Americans ages 26 to 34 at 20.1 percent.”

THAT’S DISCONCERTING: Pentagon Document Confirms Existence of Russian Doomsday Torpedo.

Kanyon is reportedly a very long range autonomous underwater vehicle that has a range 6,200 miles, a maximum depth of 3,280 feet, and a speed of 100 knots according to claims in leaked Russian documents.

But what really makes Kanyon nightmare fuel is the drone torpedo’s payload: a 100-megaton thermonuclear weapon. By way of comparison, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima was 16 kilotons, or the equivalent of 16,000 tons of TNT. Kanyon’s nuke would be the equivalent of 100,000,000 tons of TNT. That’s twice as powerful as Tsar Bomba, the most powerful thermonuclear weapon ever tested. Dropped on New York City, a 100-megaton bomb would kill 8 million people outright and injure 6 million more.

Kanyon is designed to attack coastal areas, destroying cities, naval bases, and ports. The mega-bomb would also generate an artificial tsunami that would surge inland, spreading radioactive contamination with the advancing water. To make matters worse there are reports the warhead is “salted” with the radioactive isotope Cobalt-60. Contaminated areas would be off-limits to humanity for up to 100 years.

And being sea-based makes it immune to ballistic missile defense.

WELL, GOOD: Ex-C.I.A. Officer Suspected of Compromising Chinese Informants Is Arrested.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Clean Bill of Health, Sh*thole ‘Complicit,’ and Much, Much More.

Tyler O’Neil is filling in for Liz today.

OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY: Officials are raising the projected cost of the first phase of California’s bullet train by 35 percent, to $10.6 billion.

The extra $2.8 billion comes on a 199-mile segment in the Central Valley that is partly under construction. The California High Speed Rail Authority board discussed the increase Tuesday.

The added cost is due to delays in obtaining rights of way and barriers needed along parts of the track, among other things.

It boosts the overall cost of the project to nearly $67 billion, which officials say they hope to recover later.

Keep in mind two things. The first is that the $10.6 billion first phase is the “high-speed train to nowhere” connecting Merced to Bakersfield. The second is that much of the money officials hope to recover will probably be “recovered” by extracting it from California taxpayers rather than from fare-paying riders.

SOCIALISM IN TEN WORDS: Venezuela Promises Pregnant Women a Handout That’s Worth Almost Nothing.

Venezuela’s President Nicholas Maduro announced during an annual address that pregnant women will soon be awarded a small cash subsidy. The monthly payment of 700,000 bolivars is, at the current exchange rate, worth about $3.83, according to CNN.

The subsidy would have been worth $17 as recently as last November; hyperinflation amid a collapsing economy is likely to make the subsidy worth even less in the weeks to come.

After the women give birth, their stipend will increase to 1 million bolivars, or $5.48, Maduro said. He did not provide a reason for starting the new payment scheme, which he reportedly expects will apply to 151,000 expecting mothers.

In the end, socialism’s promises are worth less than nothing.

I should also note that Laignee Barron’s report blames Venezuela’s “recession” — really, that’s the word they used — on low oil prices, rather than on the true culprits: Wreckers, hoarders, saboteurs, Trotskyites, kulaks, Yankee Imperialists, counterrevolutionaries, and Jews.

REPORT: Islamic Oppression Fuels Two-Thirds of the Worst Persecution Against Christians.

LUKE ROSIAK: House Report Concluded Pakistanis Made ‘Unauthorized Access’ To Congressional Servers.

House investigators concluded that Democratic IT aides made unauthorized access to congressional servers in 2016, allegedly accessing the data of members for whom they did not work, logging in as members of Congress themselves, and covering their tracks, according to a presentation summarizing the findings of a four-month internal probe.

Their behavior mirrored a “classic method for insiders to exfiltrate data from an organization,” and they continued even after orders to stop, the briefing materials allege. There are indications that numerous members’ data may have been secretly residing not on their designated servers, but instead aggregated onto one server, according to the briefing and other sources. Authorities said that the entire server was then physically stolen.

When acting on the findings, Democratic leadership appear to have misrepresented the issue to their own members as solely a matter of theft, a comparison of the investigators’ findings with Democrats’ recollections and a committee’s public statement shows, leading 44 Democrats to not conduct protective measures typically taken after a breach — including informing constituents whose personal information may have been exposed.

Read the whole, damning thing.

GREG IP: The Antitrust Case Against Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple.

Standard Oil and Co. and American Telephone and Telegraph Co. were the technological titans of their day, commanding more than 80% of their markets.

Today’s tech giants are just as dominant: In the U.S., Alphabet Inc.’s Google drives 89% of internet search; 95% of young adults on the internet use a Facebook Inc. product; and Amazon.com Inc. now accounts for 75% of electronic book sales. Those firms that aren’t monopolists are duopolists: Google and Facebook absorbed 63% of online ad spending last year; Google and Apple Inc. provide 99% of mobile phone operating systems; while Apple and Microsoft Corp. supply 95% of desktop operating systems.

A growing number of critics think these tech giants need to be broken up or regulated as Standard Oil and AT&T once were. Their alleged sins run the gamut from disseminating fake news and fostering addiction to laying waste to small towns’ shopping districts. But antitrust regulators have a narrow test: Does their size leave consumers worse off?

By that standard, there isn’t a clear case for going after big tech—at least for now. They are driving down prices and rolling out new and often improved products and services every week.

That may not be true in the future: if market dominance means fewer competitors and less innovation, consumers will be worse off than if those companies had been restrained.

I’m wary of antitrust, particularly in the cases of Amazon and Apple. Retailers and gadgetmakers don’t enjoy nearly as much “stickiness” with consumers as social networking and search providers. Facebook and Google on the other hand, enjoy unprecedented access to the most intimate details of unprecedented numbers of consumers.

And those consumers are of course actually their (often unwitting) products.

CHANGE: Iron Fist 2018 Ramps Up Training as Japan Readies 1st Amphibious Unit.

Over the next month, 350 soldiers with the Japan Ground Self Defense Force will train closely with Marines to hone skills that will run the gamut from amphibious reconnaissance and fire-and-maneuver assaults to close-air support and staff planning. They will fire mortars and artillery, land on beaches aboard rubber boats and assault craft and attack and defend “friendly” land from foes in various training scenarios.

The soldiers are members of Western Army Infantry Regiment, a light infantry force that Japan has tasked with creating the first brigade of sea soldiers – with the goal to be ready by April 1, 2018 – that can conduct amphibious operations ultimately as part of a broader “dynamic joint defense force.”

This year’s Iron Fist exercise – it runs from Jan. 12 to Feb. 12 – marks the 13th iteration of the annual training that focuses on amphibious operations, with I Marine Expeditionary Force as a primary host.

With a 2012 decision by Japan to create amphibious rapid deployment brigades, Iron Fist’s training focus has shifted toward building that “go-to” force, as envisioned, to quickly respond when needed to protect Japan’s many islands from threats and harm, whether to its national security or from natural disasters.

Even nicer would be Japan doubling the size of its already-potent little navy.

FOR ONE, HE COULD TAKE UP SMOKING: Reporter to White House Doc: How Can Trump Become as Fit as Obama?

ACTIVIST SLAMS PELOSI: ‘Are You Okay With Having a White Supremacist in Power For Four Years?’ “Focusing on elections instead of impeachment ‘is seriously delusional’.”

The Left eats its own, always.

RESIGNED UNDER THREAT OF TERMINATION, I’D WAGER: Daily Beast reporter resigns after plagiarism revealed.

It seems just about impossible to get away with plagiarism on digital platforms, and yet people still try it.