AT AMAZON, top deals on Valentine’s Day gifts.

Also, Winter Deals in Home & Kitchen.

IF YOU STRIKE ME DOWN. . . . The impact of Charlie Hebdo: Americans now back Muhammad cartoons.

REMY: I Need A Hashtag.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Can Israel Survive? Traditional pillars of the tiny democracy’s security have begun to erode. If I were the Israelis, I’d build a doomsday device, to give everyone a stake in my survival. Maybe several devices. But that’s just me. . . .

HAVEN’T YOU, AT SOME POINT, RAISED ENOUGH MONEY? Charitable Donations to Colleges Reached All-Time High in 2014 ($38 Billion). Perhaps Congress should cap endowments, and enact some other schemes to spread the charitable wealth around. I think everyone’s better off when you spread the wealth around.

RON CAPSHAW: Flipping The Hollywood Blacklist Narrative.

Once on a British talk show in the early 1970s, anticommunist actor John Wayne startled the host by acknowledging that there was indeed a Hollywood blacklist. Wayne’s follow-up, however, made the host’s jaw drop even farther; the blacklist, he stated, wasn’t wielded by industry anticommunists against Communist Party members, but by the reverse. It was for this reason, Wayne stated, that he enlisted in the anticommunist fight in order to defend conservative screenwriters and get them back on the payroll.

Wayne, regarded by the Old and New Left, as a fascist, was in actuality more of a rebel against the establishment than they ever would be. The “establishment” in this case was Left Coast Hollywood, already entrenched by the early 70s, who, taking a leaf from the Hollywood communist narrative, asserted that the blacklisted were liberals battling fascism in the form of industry anticommunists. Upholders of free speech rather than the Stalinists they were, they paid the consequences for their New Deal liberalism by going to jail and being denied employment in the industry for two decades. Their eventual triumph wasn’t just in overturning the blacklist, but in getting modern day Hollywood, academia and liberals to accept their narrative. Hence, anticommunist movie stars like Robert Taylor have had their names removed from buildings, while blacklisted screenwriters such as Dalton Trumbo have free speech fountains at colleges dedicated to them.

This spin is nourished by the memoirs of the children of the blacklisted, who give the narrative more poignancy by showing how the blacklist warped their childhoods. These recollections all follow the same theme: assertions by the children that their parents were not knee jerk Stalinists; followed by a strong, loving family unit (no affairs or alcoholism are allowed into this narrative); then the unit is warped while at the same time being brought closer together as the blacklist hits; then a decade of near-poverty, school yard bullying, and a redemptive move toward leftist politics.

More than honoring the memory of their parents is involved here. As with Left Coast Hollywood, they have followed the narrative by continuing how they were used by their parents in protests against their jail terms—displayed with placards bearing how their parents were going to jail while their parents stood piously by.

By contrast, the children of their anticommunist foes have stayed silent. But Allen Ryskind, the son of the blacklisted’s bete noir, Academy-awarding screenwriter Morrie Ryskind, does not engage in self-pity or strumming the violin in Hollywood Traitors. While he notes that his father was the victim of the blacklist Wayne spoke of, he doesn’t play on it. Nor does he use the example of his father—a Jew and member of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and the Screenwriters’ Guild as well as a two-time voter for FDR—to refute the Left’s charge that their opponents were anti-Semites, anti-labor and anti-New Deal.

Only one of those three things is dishonorable. Here’s a related piece from Tim Cavanaugh, and here’s more on the subject of Hollywood’s “missing movies.”

Meanwhile, the book is Hollywood Traitors: Blacklisted Screenwriters — Agents of Stalin, Allies of Hitler.

PEJMAN YOUSEFZADEH says goodbye to Andrew Sullivan. Actually, I suspect Sullivan will be back. In my observation, it’s easier to quit blogging than it is to stay quit.

SPYING: Spying On Sharing: Canada’s Intelligence Agency Collecting Data And IP Addresses From Free File-Sharing Sites.

IN D.C., THEIR GREED IS SURPASSED ONLY BY THEIR INCOMPETENCE: DC’s traffic cameras catching fewer offences—because they’re broken: Officials insisted drivers were just being safer, but that’s not the whole story.

AT AMAZON, coupons galore in Health Care.

Also in Vitamins & Dietary Supplements.

HMM: Oklahoma worries over swarm of earthquakes and connection to oil industry.

But Connecticut is also experiencing swarms of small earthquakes, and it doesn’t have an oil industry. Could it just be better detection technology, noticing swarms that were always there, but previously unnoted?

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Why the Time Seems Right for a Space-Based Internet Service.

OFF THE 3-D PRINTER, Practice Parts For The Surgeon. “That first model helped him to decide what might need to be done and to discuss his treatment plan with her family. Three more 3-D printouts closer to the operation allowed Dr. Meara to rotate the model skull in directions he could not manage with a picture and would not attempt with a patient on the operating table. Then he was able to cut and manipulate the plastic model to determine the best way to push her eye sockets more than an inch closer together.”

DRIVING THE 2017 Jaguar XE.

CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS LECTURES AT YALE: Trigger Warnings, Male-Shaming & Moral Panic: It’s Time to Reboot Feminism.

SPACE: NASA’s Pluto-Bound Spacecraft Has Arrived.

STEPHEN GREEN: Quarter Pounder Blues.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 630. It’s a big one today.

FOR SCHOOL CHOICE WEEK: 5 Facts About Charter Schools.

Also, for those interested in school choice, here’s some recommended reading.

MEGAN MCARDLE: Moral Panics Won’t End Campus Rape.

The sexual abuse of children is not an imaginary problem. It is one of the worst crimes known to our society, and it happens all too tragically often. But somehow, in the 1980s, we became convinced that it was an omnipresent threat, and that we must go to any lengths to eradicate it — up to, and including, believing in the impossible. Many people seem to have swallowed their doubts about these stories for fear of being denounced — just as folks such as Richard Bradley, who first raised questions about the Rolling Stone story, were accused of “rape denial” and being “truthers.”

When people are in the grip of a moral panic, going up against them to question the extent of a threat, even by doubting so much as a single case, can become dangerous. Questioning any expression of the panic is not seen as a logical debate over statistics or the details of a particular instance, but as somehow defending the threatening behavior. Note how careful many people who wrote skeptically about the UVA case were to say that they believe campus rape happens, and it is terrible. People who write that they think an accused murderer may be innocent rarely feel compelled to affirm that yes, they sure do believe that murder happens, and boy, are they against that. This ought to go without saying, and unless we are in the middle of a moral panic, it usually does.

Yet once moral panic sets in, an accusation can also become sufficient evidence unto itself to trigger a severe response: no need to see what the brothers might have to say, or to wait for a police investigation, before you write that op-ed article about rape culture — or start throwing bricks.

Unfortunately, our panicked determination to believe does not ultimately help the cause; in fact, such determination hurts the cause, as well as the innocent people whose names are tarnished along the way. As Judith Levine wrote in the aftermath of the UVA revelations, “feminism can handle the truth.”

Two points: (1) No, they really can’t, it seems; and (2) Solving the problem of campus rape isn’t the agenda here. Remember, “moral panics” don’t just happen. They are created.

ED MORRISSEY: Obama’s Enemies List Targets Red State Voters. “While solidly red states like Mississippi and Texas saw average cuts of 40 percent in federal grants, reliably blue states – and even more importantly, swing states – did much better in disbursements from the federal government.”

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR MITT ROMNEY, THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT WOULD PRESSURE COLLEGES INTO BECOMING ISLANDS OF JOYLESS PURITANISM. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! Dartmouth To Establish New Sex Rules, Ban Liquor On Campus Even For Those Of Legal Drinking Age.

IT DOES SEEM THAT WAY: White House Unhinged Over Netanyahu Speech.

UPDATE: From the comments:

Let’s hope the speech kills the talks.

The outline of a potential deal has long been clear:

Iran pretends they don’t have a nuclear weapon program.

And we pretend to believe them.

Yeah, pretty much.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Middle School Reading Lists 100 Years Ago vs. Today Show How Far American Educational Standards Have Declined.