WHY NOT RUBBER DUCKS: The internet has united to photoshop Isis fighters as rubber ducks.

IT’S NOT THE TOOL, IT’S THE ART: Man doesn’t want to waste money on software, creates brilliant illustrations on Excel instead.

AND PEOPLE WONDER WHY MY DESK HAS A HEAD-SHAPED DENT: The Week in Pictures: Climate Terror Edition.

IT’S SANITY THAT WOULD SURPRISE ME: Prepare to Be Blindsided in 2016.

THEY’LL BURN THEIR FINGERS: Feds finding ways to grab control of Internet.

UH OH.  WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO: Short of developing bi-location, of course. Sitting further away from your boss makes you a better worker, study suggests.

PURSUING THE ELUSIVE WILL: Shakespeare’s kitchen discovered in dig.

BARONESS MUNCHAUSEN CLINTON: Hillary Clinton’s million little lies.

IF IT WEREN’T FOR DOUBLE STANDARDS, THE MEDIA WOULD HAVE NO STANDARDS:MSM Memes Radical Islam vs Planned Parenthood.

WHY A DUCK? Why the internet is putting rubber ducks on heads of Isil fighters.

AT AMAZON, trade in your used Video Games.

ASHE SCHOW: Thanksgiving Dinner With the 2016 Presidential Candidates.

BUT THAT WOULD MEAN GIVING UP ON SO MANY OPPORTUNITIES FOR GRAFT AND SELF-IMPORTANCE AND CONTROL OVER OTHERS: The Food Cops and Their Ever-Changing Menu of Taboos; After decades of failure, maybe government should get out of the business of giving dietary advice.

With the release of the eighth edition of the U.S. government’s Dietary Guidelines expected by year’s end, it seems reasonable to consider—with the “obesity plague” upon us and Americans arguably less healthy than ever before—whether the guidelines are to be trusted and even whether they have done more harm than good.

Many Americans have lost trust in the science behind the guidelines since they seem to change dramatically every five years. In February, for example, the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee declared that certain fats and eggs are no longer the enemy and that cholesterol is “not considered a nutrient of concern for overconsumption.” This, after decades of advising Americans to “watch their cholesterol.”

Such controversy is nothing new. U.S. Dietary Guidelines were first released by the Agriculture Department and the Department of Health and Human Services in 1980. One nutrition expert at the time, Edward “Pete” Ahrens, a groundbreaking researcher on fat and cholesterol metabolism, called the guidelines “a nutritional experiment with the American public as subjects . . . treating them like a homogeneous group of Sprague-Dawley rats.”

The original goals were to: 1) increase Americans’ carbohydrate consumption to 55%-60% of caloric intake; 2) reduce fat consumption to less than 30% from 40% of caloric intake; 3) reduce saturated fat to 10% of calories and increase poly- and monounsaturated fats each to 10% of calories; 4) reduce cholesterol intake to less than 300 milligrams a day; 5) reduce sugar intake by 40%; and 6) reduce salt consumption by 50%-80%.

These six goals, viewed in the context of what we know today, could hardly be more misdirected.

If only we could hold them liable the way we would if they were pharmaceutical companies that produced similarly defective and harmful products.

PRESIDENT OBAMA’S hypocrisy on Syria. “In 2008, Barack Obama won the presidency promising that he would heal our political divisions. Instead, Mr. Obama has been as polarizing as any president in the history of modern polling. The debate over the Syrian refugee crisis illustrates why.”

AT AMAZON, gifts for the Grill Master.

Plus, Family Games.

OKLAHOMA WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT: This is Not a Day Care. It’s a University! “If you want to be enabled rather than confronted, there are many universities across the land (in Missouri and elsewhere) that will give you exactly what you want, but Oklahoma Wesleyan isn’t one of them.”

BRENDAN O’NEILL: It’s Time To End The Domestic Imperialism Of The Welfare State.

Welfarism should be radically rethought not in order to save a few billion quid but in order to reverse the state’s spread into communities and to repair the self-belief and independence of working-class and poorer sections of society.

Both the right and left are failing on welfarism. The right ought to oppose it in the name of shrinking state interventionism. And the left ought to oppose it for the reason that many working-class institutions did oppose it when it was first being developed in the early twentieth century: because it makes people unproductive, and rips them from the society they live in, and because we should have full employment not paternalistic handouts.

The end result of this right/left failure is acquiescence to the rise of a new feudalism: millions of middle-class people employed by the state to look after millions of poor people. It is a scandal. It is domestic imperialism.

And, like the old-fashioned variety of imperialism, it provides employment for the unimpressive offspring of the gentry, as well as splendid opportunities for graft.

KATHLEEN PARKER: Trump is the Personification of America’s Vices.

Funny, that’s what many of us were saying about the candidate Parker endorsed in 2008 after years of posing as a conservative.

THE 21st CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I’D EXPECTED: People having sex with horses is on the rise in Switzerland.

TRIBALISM IS NOT SCIENCE. SO YEAH. ‘I was tossed out of the tribe’: climate scientist Judith Curry interviewed.

I EXPECT THESE CALLS TO GROW LOUDER — AND, POSSIBLY, TO COME FROM OUTSIDE OF GERMANY AS WELL: Leader of German anti-immigrant party calls on Merkel to resign.

WE TELL OURSELVES STORIES IN ORDER TO LIVE: At City Journal, Ian Penman reviews a new biography of Joan Didion that isn’t quite up to its subject; Penman’s own profile of Didion is a great read, though:

If Didion possessed a quieter sensibility, it would be a mistake to peg it as a more defiantly “feminine”—or even feminist—one. Friends in liberal circles were delighted when she sent up “pretty” Nancy Reagan; less pleased when she did the same thing with some of the more starry-eyed avatars of the Women’s Liberation movement. She already had a sharp eye (and ear) for the little fudges and blind spots in ideological syntax on both sides of the street. As a working mother herself, she naturally saw the need for certain pragmatic political demands, but she talked also of “the coarsening of moral imagination to which . . . social idealism so often leads.” She seemed ill at ease with the all-or-nothing verities of an emergent identity politics: “The idea that fiction has certain irreducible ambiguities seemed never to occur to these women, nor should it have, for fiction is in most ways hostile to ideology.” And while it’s probably fair to say that she was never going to run for, or place, in any kind of Republican Mom-of-the-Year contest, she could offer scathing put-downs of her own gilded social circle: “[t]he public life of liberal Hollywood comprises a kind of dictatorship of good intentions, a social contract in which actual and irreconcilable disagreement is as taboo as failure or bad teeth, a climate devoid of irony.”

She certainly had Woody Allen’s number in the late 1970s; while most critics were dazzled by Manhattan’s gorgeous black and white cinematography and Gershwin score, Didion was astute enough to write:

This notion of oneself as a kind of continuing career — something to work at, work on, “make an effort” for and subject to an hour a day of emotional Nautilus training, all in the interests not of attaining grace but of improving one’s “relationships” — is fairly recent in the world, at least in the world not inhabited entirely by adolescents. In fact the paradigm for the action in these recent Woody Allen movies is high school. The characters in Manhattan and Annie Hall and Interiors are, with one exception, presented as adults, as sentient men and women in the most productive years of their lives, but their concerns and conversations are those of clever children, “class brains,” acting out a yearbook fantasy of adult life. (The one exception is “Tracy,” the Mariel Hemingway part in Manhattan, another kind of adolescent fantasy. Tracy actually is a high-school senior, at the Dalton School, and has perfect skin, perfect wisdom, perfect sex, and no visible family.

Tracy’s mother and father are covered in a single line: they are said to be in London, finding Tracy an apartment. When Tracy wants to go to JFK she calls a limo. Tracy put me in mind of an American-International Pictures executive who once advised me, by way of pointing out the absence of adult characters in AIP beach movies, that nobody ever paid $3 to see a parent.)

These faux adults of Woody Allen’s have dinner at Elaine’s, and argue art versus ethics. They share sodas, and wonder “what love is.” They have “interesting” occupations, none of which intrudes in any serious way on their dating. Many characters in these pictures “write,” usually on tape recorders. In Manhattan, Woody Allen quits his job as a television writer and is later seen dictating an “idea” for a short story, an idea which, I am afraid, is also the “idea” for the picture itself: “People in Manhattan are constantly creating these real unnecessary neurotic problems for themselves that keep them from dealing with more terrifying unsolvable problems about the universe.”

And the grownups would be in short supply ever since.

(By the way, fans of Virginia Postrel’s The Power of Glamour will find much to appreciate in Penman’s discussion of the timeless semiotics of the photo that accompanies his review.)

SEEMS PLAUSIBLE: “I want to advance a simple thesis: perhaps the central reason that liberalism is in historic decline globally is because the left is self-indulging itself into irrelevance.”

CHAOS ON THE BRIDGE: Late Thanksgiving night, I watched a surprisingly enjoyable documentary recently added to Netflix titled William Shatner Presents: Chaos On The Bridge, in which a curiously subdued Shatner* interviews the cast and many of the surviving — and still battle-scarred production team members of Star Trek: The Next Generation, to explain why the show was so cringe-worthy in its first two seasons. I started to write a post on it for Instapundit last night, then decided that given its length, it would be more suitable at Ed Driscoll.com — please beam over** and read the whole thing.

* Because Shatner himself has to have some amazing stories about butting heads with Roddenberry and discovering in 1986 that he wouldn’t be starring in its first spin-off TV series.

** Sorry — but I really let my inner Trekkie out in the actual post.

FALLEN ANGELS WAS JUST A SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL, RIGHT GUYS? RIGHT? GUYS? Obama Sees Need for More US Icebreakers: Former Coast Guard Commandant.

(Via James Taranto.)