SO DOES THIS MEAN THAT TRUMP’S PLAN TO MAKE IPHONES IN AMERICA IS A GOOD IDEA, EVEN IF THEY’D COST A COUPLE OF HUNDRED DOLLARS MORE? Your Phone Was Made By Slaves.

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SCIENCE, UNSETTLED: Skipping Breakfast Isn’t Actually Bad For You.

The idea that a hearty breakfast is good for your health dates back to the 1920s, when Edward Bernays, a public relations guru, led a nationwide media campaign encouraging people to start their mornings with bacon and eggs. One of Mr. Bernays’s clients at the time was Beech-Nut Packing Company, which sold bacon and other pork products.

In the decades that followed, dozens of observational studies reported that breakfast eaters tended to be leaner. Though these studies could not show cause and effect, many health authorities and food companies asserted that they proved that eating breakfast protects against weight gain.

But experimental studies that randomly assigned people to eat or skip breakfast have found no such thing.

So much “wisdom” on health and nutrition seems to be like this.

#BLUELIVESMATTER: Officer wounded as shots fired at police station near D.C.

UPDATE: “A police officer was fatally shot in an ‘unprovoked attack’ near a police station in a Maryland suburb of the nation’s capital, authorities said Sunday,” CBS reports. “A second person, not a police officer, also was shot and wounded, police said. Two suspects in the officer’s shooting were in custody. Police identified the slain officer as 28-year-old Jacai Colson, a four-year veteran of the Prince George’s County Police Department who was days shy of his birthday.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: California Bar Requires Unaccredited Law Schools To Disclose Dropout Rates (Collectively, 85%).

THE RISE AND FALL OF ZIGGY STARDUST AND THE VIDEOFREEX FROM MARS. We now take for granted YouTube’s ability to birth DIY performers who eventually acquire large followings and of course, video cameras built into smart phones and tablets have become ubiquitous. But just as DARPA was crafting the notion of an interconnected network of computers in the late 1960s, portable DIY video technology was also being birthed during that period, as authors Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad write near the beginning of their 1985 book Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live. Without Sony’s invention, “It’s possible that the underground [comedy movement, which SNL creator Lorne Michaels tapped into for his first stars and writers] might have bypassed television altogether had it not been for the Sony Corporation’s introduction in the late 1960s of portable video cameras and recorders that were affordable by the public at large:”

That technology spawned a movement known as guerrilla television, which was populated by hundreds of long-hairs carrying Porta-Pak units, nascent auteurs who’d previously had no access to the mechanisms of television production and who set out to invent their own kind of programs. One such guerrilla remembers showing up with his partner at the house of a famous Hollywood writer, hoping to tell him some of their ideas. They were laden with gear, their hair hung well past their shoulders, and they wore fatigue jackets and pants. The memory of the Manson murders was still strong at the time, and the writer’s wife, answering the door and seeing the equipment they were carrying, thought it was some kind of machine gun and ran screaming back inside.

In his latest film review at NRO, Armond White explores the Videofreex, one of the leftwing underground groups producing guerrilla television in the years that preceded SNL, the subject of a new documentary Here Come the Videofreex:

Entitlement is quite different from “Civil Rights,” and Here Come the Videofreex helps us understand how the two things became closely linked and then were tied in with the self-satisfaction of media domination. Directors Jon Nealon and Jenny Raskin observe those Sixties youth who felt that through the then-new video technology they could more accurately address the proletariat — a sense of righteous free expression like the social networking of cell phones, Twitter, and innumerable blogs. They were eventually crushed by corporate media’s ultimate indifference. CBS sacked the Videofreex but let them keep the “worthless” technology, which led to the Videofreex’ brief pirate TV enterprise.

It’s amazing to see this all laid out in an indie documentary while we currently contend with the bewildering, flip-flopping propaganda of MSNBC, Fox Cable News, and the shamelessly pandering CNN — all 21st-century videofreaks with small regard for reporting or objectivity. Their “news” cycles merely exploit American politics.

Co-director Raskin had worked on the 2013 Our Nixon, the most compassionate of all Watergate documentaries, which most reviewers misunderstood — seemingly deliberately. Today’s media politics all result from class privilege: Millionaire newsreaders follow the dictates of their behind-the-scenes tycoon bosses (broadcasters committed to the status quo and partisan politricks). They’re determined to influence the voting and polling patterns of viewers and readers. This is what the now-aged provocateurs of Here Come the Videofreex teach us. Parry Teasdale, Davidson Gigliotti, Skip Blumberg, Chuck Kennedy, Carol Vontobel, Ann Woodward, Bart Friedman, and others recall their pasts without guile, even as they lament their inability to fully “democratize” the U.S. media.

And note this: “When a veteran hippie mused, ‘Turning people on to video was like turning them on to grass,’ it seems stunningly naïve. It’s also au courant.”

Which dovetails well with an encomium to a man who also seemed to singlehandedly craft his own culture during the early 1970s, David Bowie. As Nick Gillespie writes in the latest issue of Reason, “David Bowie Was a Time Traveler from Our Hyper-Personalized Future — The star who made it cool to be a freak,” though a very different “freak” from the Videofreex, needless to say:

In 1987, he returned to West Berlin, where he had made an exceptional set of records in the late 1970s, including several with his muse and protégé Iggy Pop. There he played a concert so loud it could be heard in communist East Berlin. The Internet abounds with footage from the show, which is capped by an absolutely brilliant version of “Heroes,” his ballad of doomed lovers who literally meet in the shadow of the Berlin Wall to steal a moment (“I can remember standing by the wall, and the guns shot above our heads”).

Just days after the concert, President Ronald Reagan also performed in Berlin, delivering one of his most memorable lines: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Who’s to say that the example of Bowie, who personified not only the freedom of expression but the sybaritic desire that the Communists had unsuccessfully tried to stamp out, wasn’t as important to the Wall’s destruction as the arms race? The day after his death, the German government tweeted, “Good-bye, David Bowie…Thank you for helping to bring down the #wall.”

Bowie was exceptionally well-read (his list of 100 favorite books ranges from Madame Bovary to The Gnostic Gospels) and was renowned for his knowledge of blues, folk, jazz, and experimental music. (He introduced U.S. audiences to the German avant garde perfomer Klaus Nomi on Saturday Night Live, of all venues.) Yet only fools look to celebrities and artists—especially rock stars—for moral instruction and political programs. We’re wiser to seek artists for inspiration and ideas on how we might expand our own horizons and think about our own possibilities.

It’s in this sense that Bowie was a time traveler from our own future, where we all feel more comfortable not just being who we are but in trying out different things to see whom we might want to become. Certainly, an entire species of performer, from U2 to Madonna to Lady Gaga to Jay-Z (who sampled “Fame” in his 2001 track “Takeover”) were influenced by him.

And unlike many rock stars, Bowie created continuity with earlier forms of popular music, not only by covering various old songs (“Wild Is the Wind” is a memorable instance) but by incongruously appearing with Bing Crosby on der Bingle’s 1977 Merrie Olde Christmas TV Special, which gave birth to Crosby and Bowie’s enduringly beautiful and strange duet of “Peace on Earth/The Little Drummer Boy.”

Back in 2007, I wrote a piece for the Rand-themed New Individualist magazine titled “Welcome to My.Culture — How Emerging Technologies Allow Anyone to Create His Own Culture.” (Somehow, when the piece went to the Web, the subhead replaced the editor’s original title from the print edition, unfortunately):

Through television, newspapers, radio, and advertising, the mass culture of the twentieth century created easily understandable points of reference for virtually everyone. Often, these were low and crude and coarse. But everyone knew who Ralph Cramden was. Who Batman was. Who Vince Lombardi was. You might not have known who Gene Roddenberry was, but you knew that NBC had a show starring a guy with pointed ears.

Today, however, we’re looking at that shared culture in the rearview mirror, and with mixed emotions. In fact, we’re witnessing the death throes of mass culture. It’s being replaced, not by the elder President Bush’s “thousand points of light,” but by a thousand fractured micro-cultures, each of which knows only a little bit about what’s going on in the next micro-culture thriving on the website next door.

As James Lileks of Lileks.com and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s Buzz.mn told me a couple of years ago: “Take a basically divided populace—the old red and blue paradigm—and then shove that through a prism which splinters it into millions of different individual demographics, each of which have their own music channel, their own website, their own Blogosphere, their own porn preferences delivered daily by email solicitations. I mean, it’s hard to say whether or not there will eventually be a common culture for which we can have sport, other than making fun of the fact that we really lack a common culture.”

This trend has both good and bad aspects. But before we turn our attention to that—and what it may bode for our future—it might be useful first to review how we got here.

Though I have no doubt that I’ll be repulsed by their reactionary socialist-anarchist message, I’m looking forward to seeing the Videofreex documentary, at least when it comes to Amazon Prime or Netflix. Decades before YouTube, iPhones and GoPros, their taking advantage of the first portable video technology was itself the real revolution (a textbook example of McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Message” aphorism). Gillespie makes a very good case that Bowie was a similar sort of revolutionary — and the recording studio technology he (and his frequent producers Tony Visconti and Nile Rodgers) mastered is similarly now available inside of a reasonably-equipped PC. And as old media continues to be an even vaster version of the vast wasteland that JFK’s FCC Chairman Newton Minnow infamously described, making your own culture as an alternative seems more important than ever. Think of it as the Nockian Remnant with iPhones.

NO LOVE FROM SALON: Bill Clinton’s odious presidency: Thomas Frank on the real history of the ’90s: Welfare reform. NAFTA. The crime bill. Prisons. Aides wondered if Bill knew who he was. His legacy is sadly clear.

MARC RANDAZZA: Defend Donald Trump’s right to free speech. Everybody should be able to have a public event without being shut down by people who hate them. And even if you think Trump’s a jerk, there’s no “jerk exception” to free speech. And if one is created, well, I’ve got a little list. . . .

WAIT, WHAT? Bomb-sniffing dog discovers 2 Hellfire missiles bound for Portland. “N1 television said the package with two guided armor-piercing missiles was discovered Saturday by a sniffer dog after an Air Serbia flight from Beirut landed at a Belgrade airport. Serbian media say documents listed the final destination for the AGM-114 Hellfire missiles as Portland. The American-made projectiles can be fired from air, sea or ground platforms against multiple targets.”

SEAN TRENDE ON TRUMP, ELITE DISDAIN, AND AUTHENTICITY:

Trump’s support is also concentrated in counties with high levels of unemployment, high numbers of voters with a high school diploma and nothing more, and low housing values. These are the people that globalization left behind, who fifty years ago would have had decent paying jobs in factories or even performing manual labor, and who could hope that their children would have the same. Instead they see their towns characterized by vacant buildings, drug problems, and government dependence.

But it goes well beyond economic issues. What drives this quest for “authentic” candidates is also cultural. I would ask my readers to consider: How many people who staunchly oppose gay marriage do you know? How many people who are “pure” creationists – who believe that God created the world largely “as-is” – are in your circle of friends?

I would guess that for a large number of readers, the answer is quite close to “none.” Yet these are not obscure viewpoints; in fact, the “pure” evolutionary viewpoint is a minority view in America. The odds of having no one with these views in your circle of friends are, literally, astronomically small. We’ve self-segregated as a society, and people who adhere to what we might call a cosmopolitan worldview or morality system increasingly fail to interact with people who view the world differently. As a result, cultural traditionalists have been otherized.

Cosmopolitans also happen to occupy the commanding heights of American culture, and they’ve become increasingly aggressive in promoting what one of my friends called a “sneering disdain” for traditionalists—an attitude I myself sometimes struggle to keep in check. So it is unsurprising that when the RAND Corporation recently polled candidates’ supporters, “people like me don’t have any say” was the strongest indicator of support for Trump, beyond education, beyond income, and beyond antipathy toward Muslims and Hispanics.

To bring this back around to populism, when people see the genteel politician in a crisp suit talking about the long term economic benefits of immigration and trade, they look around their neighborhoods and see a detachment from reality. They also – and I would say this is of equal importance – see someone who likely looks down his nose at them and believes he is better than them.

So when people look at Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders, with their heavy accents and awkward hairstyles, they see themselves (sure Donald Trump was born wealthy, but he has a distinct nouveau riche affect; he can hardly be described as patrician). And when people mock them for their hair or their straightforward manner of speech, it channels every cultural slight these voters have faced in the past decade. Sadly, this is unlikely to get better before it gets worse; this growing cultural divide shows no signs of abating.

This also goes to the things that Mickey Kaus has written about social vs. economic inequality. Elites are happy to condemn economic inequality, but they pretty much like social inequality the way it is.

HEATHER WILHELM: Defending Boys in a “Girl Power” Age.

HILLARY CLINTON — WARMONGER? European Queens Waged More Wars Than Kings.

There’s an assumption about women in power that you may have heard: that women who lead tend to be more diplomatic than their male counterparts, resulting in a more peaceful world. Psychologist Steven Pinker, for instance, wrote in his 2011 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, “Over the long sweep of history, women have been and will be a pacifying force.” But how much of that is true?

After sifting through historical data on queenly reigns across six centuries, two political scientists have found that it’s more complicated than that. In a recent working paper, New York University scholars Oeindrila Dube and S.P. Harish analyzed 28 European queenly reigns from 1480 to 1913 and found a 27 percent increase in wars when a queen was in power, as compared to the reign of a king. “People have this preconceived idea that states that are led by women engage in less conflict,” Dube told Pacific Standard, but her analysis of the data on European queens suggests another story.

Just compare Hillary to Bernie, or even Trump.

BOMB BLAST IN TURKISH CAPITAL OF ANKARA: AT LEAST 27 DEAD, 75 WOUNDED.

Related: “Ivory Coast hotel shooting: Eye-witness describes how gunmen shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ before gunning down women and children. At least 16 people have died after attackers armed with Kalashnikovs opened fire outside the Hotel Etoile du Sud in Grand-Bassam on the south coast.”

More: Akbar Airbush! The above link to the Ivory Coast hotel shooting goes to the Daily Mirror; I had planned to link to the similar London Daily Mail story I saw earlier today. But as I was assembling this post, the Daily Mail broke out their airbrush after a Drudge-lanche. Fortunately though, their original headline is still cached by Google:

Other than the last name of article’s co-author, their article has been entirely de-ackbarred. The Daily Mail is usually a steaming garbage pail of Website, with salacious Fleet Street-style headlines focusing on the worst aspects of American life and celebrity nihilism — and not coincidentally, it gets more readership than the dull, predictably pious leftwing virtue-signalling New York Times as a result. I wonder why (he asked rhetorically) the Religion of Peace™ gets a PR touch-up there?

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ROGER SIMON: Election 2016: Billionaires Battle For America’s Soul.

Donald Trump isn’t the only billionaire in the eye of a seemingly treacherous Florida hurricane that threatens to destroy us all or at least change our world as we know it. Three others – one or more of them far richer than Trump – are singing “Bye, bye, Miss American Pie.” Only it’s not a Chevy they are taking to the levee. It’s a Tesla.

They are Peter B. Lewis of Progressive Corp., Linda Pritzker of Hyatt Hotels, and, of course, George Soros of practically everything. These three billionaires are the principal backers of MoveOn.org, an organization whose devotion to our constitutional republic, specifically its first amendment, is somewhere between suspect and non-existent. It is MoveOn that has instigated many of the demonstrations against Trump and may be inspiring “lone wolves,” one of whom may sooner or later do what “lone wolves” are prone to do.

I’m so old I can remember when money in politics was supposed to be bad. Plus:

These supporting billionaires are fueled by a moral narcissism that knows no bounds, so convinced are they that they are “right” on practically everything. They have enabled the (most often) young people at MoveOn who undoubtedly believe that they too are “right” and have the “right” to suppress the speech of those with whom they disagree. They behave as if they think it their noble duty. This is the not-so-royal road to totalitarianism and is the tragic consequence of the miseducation of our young for which those billionaires are also, in part, culpable.

This is not to exonerate Trump, whose language has been, to say the least, challenging. But this is no normal election and we are not in a normal time. Our country has to decide whether it seeks to be like Europe or like America. Although I have lived several wonderful years altogether in Europe and love many things about it, the decline of Europe is evident and on the cusp of irreversible. It is also evident that the Democratic Party, in varying degrees, wishes to take us in that direction. Soros, Lewis and Pritzker are accelerating that process. Whether they are overt supporters or not, they could aptly be called “Billionaires for Sanders.” The irony is palpable – I’ve got mine but none of you will ever get yours.

The thing is, traditional America was good for the bourgeoisie. Europe — or better yet, the Third World — is better for the folks on top.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: Obama’s “Red Line” That Wasn’t.

WEAK, INCOMPETENT, OIKOPHOBIC LEADERSHIP HAS CONSEQUENCES EVERYWHERE: Germany’s Trump-like problem: Right-wing, anti-foreigner movement poised for big election win. “Hasche said the AfD, which is polling between 10% in the rural western state of Rhineland-Palatinate — where a major U.S. air base and about 60,000 Americans are stationed — and 20% in the impoverished eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, has succeeded in tapping support from frustrated voters with low incomes and education the same way that Trump has attracted many such voters in the United States.”

UPDATE: Exit Polls: German state elections: Success for right-wing AfD, losses for Merkel’s CDU. “The so-called ‘Super Sunday’ is largely billed as a referendum on Merkel’s open door policy towards refugees, which saw more than a million people arrive in Germany last year. The policy has proven divisive, both among the German public and within Merkel’s CDU. The chancellor has rejected measures such as imposing a cap on new arrivals, favoring instead a plan to distribute refugees across the 28 European Union member states.”

SEE, I’M NOT THE ONLY ONE WHO FEELS THIS WAY: Five Reasons To Love Daylight Savings Time.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL INFORMS US THAT MEN HAVE BODY ISSUES TOO:

Movies and TV shows full of svelte celebrities. Magazines and websites pushing weight loss and exercise.

It is tough being a man these days.

Just-published research, from one of the largest studies on male body image, shows how much men worry about being thin and muscular: Not quite as much as women agonize about their bodies. But still a lot. And it affects their relationships in surprising ways.

A partner may become resentful that her man slimmed down without her—or jealous of all the new attention he is getting. She may worry he will find someone else. Or he might encourage her to lose weight or work out to feel better, and she could view this as a not-so-subtle hint.

We all make sure our online presence makes us look fantastic. Better tone up the dad bod.

“There’s a much more extreme model today of what a healthy man looks like,” says David Frederick, assistant professor in health psychology at Chapman University, in Orange, Calif., and lead researcher on the new male body-image study.

But don’t worry, because the article concludes with advice . . . on how to make women feel better.

If you’re a man who isn’t comfortable receiving compliments, explain that to your partner. Say: “I like it when you tell me I look great, but too many compliments makes me worry you didn’t find me attractive before.”

A man whose partner is worried or insecure should work to make her more comfortable, says Dawnn Karen, a therapist and professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. Hold her hand tightly when you go out. Compliment her more. And be careful on social media: Shirtless shots that garner a lot of likes aren’t going to help.

So there you are.

UPDATE: Yeah, pretty much.

ANOTHER UPDATE: In the comments, Kim du Toit invokes beefy stars of yesteryear like Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas, which reminds me of this piece from back when Salon was actually worth reading. “Yes Alec Baldwin and John Travolta have aged into the barrel (well, Travolta’s just getting kind of portly), but where are all these men now, or rather, where are the young barrel-chested men of today? They are in the gym, sculpting what could be a perfect barrel into the ‘six-pack’ — one of the worst things to happen to men’s style since bag-off-your-ass pants. . . . Men are now being raised to be harder on the outside and softer on the inside.”

MORE: Oh No! The Appearance of Physical Strength May Be the Look of Leadership: Psychologists found that stronger-looking men were rated as having more ability to lead.

The experiments—conducted by psychologists at the Berkeley and Santa Barbara campuses of the University of California, the University of Portland and Oklahoma State—showed a group of volunteers images of young men and women supposedly hired by a new consulting firm. In the pictures, the young people, who had previously been tested and scored for upper-body strength, wore tank tops that showed off their physiques.

When shown sets of men, the volunteers consistently rated the ones with higher strength scores as having more leadership ability, evidently inferring strength from buff physiques. But when shown sets of women, there was no correlation between perceived strength and leadership qualities. Greater height, on the other hand, made both men and women seem more like leaders (and smarter too), although the leadership effect of height wasn’t as great as that of strength.

A key caveat: If a man looked to the raters as if he were likely to use his strength “in forceful pursuit of self-interest”—if he somehow looked like a bully—it detracted from his leadership aura.

The researchers didn’t ask the raters about something as vague as “leadership skills.” Instead, they hypothesized that people see “physical formidability” as a measure of the ability to perform specific leadership roles. Sure enough, the experiments revealed that the more muscular men were rated as more likely to enforce rules and norms within a group and to represent that group effectively in encounters with other groups.

I’m sure this is mostly a problem for women, too.

THE SOLUTION, ULTIMATELY, IS TO CREATE BETTER TESTS: When Gene Tests for Breast Cancer Reveal Grim Data but No Guidance.

ADVANCES IN RADIATIVE COOLING. “In 2014, the group published a paper in Nature in which they showed that a device designed to combine the optical properties of three different materials, arranged in stack of multiple layers, cooled to nearly 5 °C below the ambient air temperature.” Hmm. I’m skeptical, but if it works, it works.

COOL: Just Chuck This Ball at a Fire to Put It Out With an Explosion.

THE VIRAL LINKEDIN PHOTO THAT SPARKED A DEBATE ABOUT FAITH AT WORK.