It’s Friday, November 16th, 2018…but before we begin, as Katie Pavlich notes at Townhall.com…

Hamas Just Launched More Than 300 Rockets Into Israel, International Community is Silent

Since we’re on the subject of people the world could do without, Jeff Flake can go…

Do not pass Go, do not collect $200.  As for Flake’s odds of securing the nomination for President from any political party, let alone the GOP, they’re about the same as a snowflake surviving the heat where he’s headed.

Oh,…and while Broward County missed the deadline for submitting recounted ballots by two minutes, thus invalidating results which would only have padded Rick Scott’s lead (the person tasked with forwarding the recount claimed, “he had a hard time uploading the results because he wasn’t familiar with the website used to send them to the secretary of state”), here’s the Palm Beach County recount center 18 hours before the Thursday deadline:

Maybe we can get Susan Bucher and Brenda Snipes seats on either side of Jeff Flake!

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, the editorial board at the WSJ opines on…

Amazon’s Golden Fleecing

The rich company takes New York politicians for a subsidy ride.

“We rarely agree with socialist Congresswoman-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but she’s right to call billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies for Amazon “extremely concerning.” These handouts to one of the richest companies in the history of the world, with an essentially zero cost of capital, is crony capitalism at its worst.

…It’s hard to blame Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos for accepting what politicians give him, though we wonder if he isn’t a tad embarrassed. The man who was able to buy the Washington Post for the equivalent of pocket money hasn’t made more political friends outside of New York and Virginia with this subsidy sweepstakes.

The worst actors here are the politicians who pose as job creators but are essentially job buyers. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo once famously said he’d change his name to Amazon Cuomo if the company located in New York, but he didn’t need to pay such a Queens ransom. Google and other companies have created thousands of jobs in New York without similar subsidies, and Amazon might well have done the same given the city’s intellectual capital.

Mr. Cuomo says the state will make money from Amazon despite the subsidies, but that depends on Amazon’s decisions and long-term success. The Governor also says he had to offer subsidies to compete against states that don’t have an income tax, though that admission underscores the state’s lack of tax competitiveness. Mr. Cuomo taxes New Yorkers at confiscatory levels, giving himself more money to spend. Then he turns around and takes credit for sparing powerful interests from those taxes.

In New York they call this a racket, and with good reason. One of Mr. Cuomo’s closest pals was convicted recently in the “Buffalo Billion” scandal as he and others sought to profit from the Governor’s subsidy scheme to invest $1 billion in the Buffalo area. Amazon’s case is aboveboard, but it still amounts to a company with a market capitalization of nearly $800 billon getting paid to create jobs it would have created somewhere anyway.“

In a related item also courtesy of the Journal, Holman Jenkins details how, unlike tigers, the techie young have begun biting the hands of the elders who feed them:

Google Confronts Its Bolsheviks

Political activists inside the company take aim at the white males at the top.

“We may have to refine our theories of creative destruction. America’s big tech companies—Google in particular—suddenly seem less at risk from nascent competitors than from the politicization of their own employees.

Google’s leaders conspicuously put their tails between their legs in response to employee protests set off by reports that executives were allowed to leave with nest eggs intact after being accused of inappropriate sexual conduct. Companies obviously need to police bad behavior, but Google execs might have pointed out that nobody, not even the protesting workers, would be happy if their accrued pay and benefits could be denied them on the say-so of a coworker. Plus these are contractual matters.

A more telling loss of control was Google’s surrender to mau-mauing employees when it walked away from a Pentagon deal to develop algorithms to speed the extraction of meaningful information from hours of mostly useless drone footage, as well as a chance to participate in a 10-year project to build out the military’s cloud infrastructure.

It should not have to be pointed out that the technological drift of recent decades has been to make war-fighting less lethal to noncombatants and U.S. troops. Or that the purpose of a powerful military is to deter war. Or that Google et al. will themselves be prime military targets on tomorrow’s cyber battlefield.

…The Google protests have been led by a group calling itself the Tech Workers Coalition, whose avowed purposes are ideological rather than strictly work-related. It got its start helping the Teamsters organize subcontractors who operate Silicon Valley’s employee shuttle buses.

…They want politics to be in control of business. That includes deciding which products and services will be developed. According to San Francisco’s KQED, the activist group is reluctant even to name its “founders” due to the word’s “negative associations with what they call the capitalist-driven ethos that has become pervasive in Silicon Valley.”

Organized labor usually is in favor of anything, including Pentagon contracts, that means work for employees. But the goal here is power…

…Notice an irony here: Google’s bosses are shielded from any challenge coming from disappointed shareholders by a special voting-rights lockup. This was justified at the time of Google’s initial public offering as protecting management’s ability to make brave, long-term decisions without concern for short-term market reaction.

Now management seems to be in need of some bravery to defend the company’s long-term interests against a small band of employees who feel entitled to substitute their political hobby horses for their employer’s business priorities.“

Next up, writing at his Morning Jolt, Jim Geraghty gives us a glimpse of life under the all-powerful, completely-controlling government which is the stuff of Progressive dreams:

No, Government Is NOT ‘The Things We Choose To Do Together’

It’s a small miracle that I don’t explode in rage every time I hear the insipid phrase, “Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.” It is often attributed to Barney Frank, the former Democratic representative.

I didn’t choose to pour bleach on food for homeless people, did you?

The Kansas City Health Department threw away and poured bleach on food meant for homeless people.

The food was going to be distributed by a group called Free Hot Soup KC. The Kansas City Star said that the food, which included home-cooked chili, foil wrapped sandwiches and vats of soup, was destroyed on Sunday, Nov. 5, during a coordinated sting at several parks where volunteers had gathered.

The Health Department said the group did not have a permit and was putting people at risk.

“E. coli or salmonella or listeria can grow in the food,” department director Rex Archer said. “And then you give that to homeless people who are more vulnerable, they will (Sorry, “will” or “might“?!?) end up in the ER and even die from that exposure.”

The mayor also agreed with the Health Department, tweeting that “Rules are there to protect the public’s health, and all groups must follow them, no exceptions.” END

Really? This was the only option? There was no way a city inspector could examine the food?

And they’ve got “coordinated sting operations” aimed at programs to feed the homeless? What, is there no real crime in Kansas City anymore? All the other problems in the city are solved, the only real issue left to tackle are these dangerous freelance unregulated programs to feed the hungry?

Here’s the juice: for some 11 years, TLJ and we have been part of a ministry at church which feeds the bodies and spirits of the homeless at a shelter in Baltimore every 3rd Saturday from October to March.  Trust us: ingesting food contaminated with E. coli, salmonella or listeria is the absolute LEAST of their worries.  And unless the Kansas City Health Department can point to family members of these volunteers who recently contracted a home-grown bacterial infection, we’d be willing to bet the kitchens in which these foods were prepared are cleaner than those of most restaurants.

This is just another egregious example of the Nanny State at its worst…or, from the Progressive perspective, its best.

And in the Emily Litella Memorial “Never mind” segment, aka the Environmental Moment, NRO‘s Jack Crowe informs us…

Climate Scientists Discover Error in Major Ocean-Warming Study

“Two researchers have been forced to issue a major correction to a recent study indicating oceans have been warming at a significantly higher rate than previously thought due to climate change.

The paper, published October 31 in the scientific journal Nature, suggested ocean temperatures have risen roughly 60 percent higher than estimated by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But, after errors in the authors’ methodology were identified, they realized their findings were roughly in line with those of the IPPC, after all.

The researchers’ alarming findings were uncritically reported by numerous mainstream-media outlets but Nic Lewis, a mathematician and popular critic of the consensus on man-made climate change, quickly identified errors. “The findings of the…paper were peer reviewed and published in the world’s premier scientific journal and were given wide coverage in the English-speaking media,” Lewis wrote in a critique of the paper. “Despite this, a quick review of the first page of the paper was sufficient to raise doubts as to the accuracy of its results.”

Ralph Keeling, a climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography who co-authored the paper, said he and his partner, Laure Resplandy of Princeton, quickly realized the implications of their mistake once Lewis pointed it out. “When we were confronted with his insight it became immediately clear there was an issue there,” he said. “We’re grateful to have it be pointed out quickly so that we could correct it quickly.”

After correcting their mistake, Keeling said their research indicates oceans are warming only slightly faster than previously thought, not dramatically faster as they initially reported…”

In other words, though their error was so basic a critic detected it in the first page of their report, we’re to assume the rest of it is dead on, balls accurate.  Yeah,…

Then there’s this scientific bombshell from yet another NASA climate expert, brought to us by Bill Meisen:

Lack of sunspots to bring record cold, warns NASA scientist

Wait a minute…you mean the Earth can be impacted by solar activity?!?  Who’d have ever DREAMED a little thing like the Sun, a fusion reactor some 864,337 miles in diameter and by far the most important source of energy for life on the planet, could impact our climate, weather and surface temperatures to such a degree?!? 

Which brings us once more to The Lighter Side:

Then there’s these three memorable memes forwarded by Mark Foster:

Finally, we mark the passing of a true “comic” genius: