WHO ARE YOU GOING TO BELIEVE, THE WASHINGTON POST OR YOUR LYING EYES? So You Thought Trump Had a Good Day Yesterday? — The Post, scourge of The Donald, is here to tell you different, Michael Walsh writes.

CLOWN KAEPERNICK NOW WEARING SOCKS DEPICTING POLICE AS PIGS: “This ass**** is just begging to be cut, which he probably soon will be, so then he can cry racism,” JWF writes, linking to a CBS Sports article that notes, “It appears that over the past few weeks, Kaepernick has been wearing socks that show a pig in a cop’s hat. The quarterback has been wearing them since at least Aug. 10.”

The L.A. Times confirms that’s indeed what they are, but helpfully adds, “Kaepernick says the pigs on his socks were only meant to represent ‘rogue cops.’”

As Scott McKay of the American Spectator writes, Kaepernick is beclowning himself “according to the cultural Marxist playbook:”

Black Lives Matter masks failure. The Left has proven that practice works. So when one of the cultural Left’s protégés, a San Francisco radio DJ and MTV host named Nessa Diab, an ethnic Egyptian whose ideological curriculum vitae includes Islam, Fidel Castro fandom, and Black Lives Matter agitation, found her way into the life of San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick as his girlfriend since last year, the stage was set for the conversion of a prominent athlete into perhaps America’s most high-profile meltdown.

Read the whole thing. In the wake of 1985’s Live Aid, it was fascinating to watch one superstar rock star after another cash in his chips for whatever the cause du jour was — usually PETA, Amnesty International, the rain forest, and/or an attack on this week’s Emmanuel Goldstein — Reagan, Thatcher, Gingrich, Bush, etc. Once a performer morphed into what we would now call a fullblown SJW, it was a sign his career as a creative artist was over. He had built up his fan base, didn’t need to worry about offending new potential fans, as he could play the hockey arena circuit forever, and could stop focusing on any pretensions towards art and channel his energy into fundraising and cocktail parties with Bianca and Yoko and John Kerry.*

Kaepernick seems to have accelerated the process exponentially, once he was benched last year and replaced by former Jacksonville Jaguar QB Blaine Gabbert. This preseason, as McKay writes, “the business decision for San Francisco is obviously to find a way to cut Kaepernick loose for football reasons; he’s a declining player with a negative attitude whose on-field performance doesn’t match his compensation, and having a brooding ex-star in the locker room is poison to team chemistry.”

What happens next for Kaepernick? Well, according to sports blog Bleacher Report, “If you thought fans on Twitter were upset about Colin Kaepernick, you should talk to some people around the NFL…. Across NFL front offices, there are team officials who are not offended, and even embrace, the controversial position of Colin Kaepernick. They are out there. Statistically, they have to be. But they are keeping a low profile. They seem to be far outnumbered by the members of NFL front offices who despise him. Truly, truly hate him. ‘I don’t want him anywhere near my team,’ one front office executive said. ‘He’s a traitor.’”

If Kaepernick was a linebacker in the Ray Lewis mold, or a DB ala “They call me assassin” Jack Tatum, he might be able to get away more with the SJW performance art. But the QB is supposed to be the clean-cut face of the team, the guy who sells the most jerseys, is plastered on the most magazine covers. Historically, the most controversial thing front offices wanted to see from their quarterback was that he was reported out late in a bar having fun and entertaining the fans, ala Kenny Stabler, Terry Bradshaw, or Dandy Don Meredith. To build your franchise around a guy who alienates half your potential ticket and merchandise buyers doesn’t seem to be very smart from a PR or marketing stance. But as Scott McKay writes at the Spectator, “perhaps the politically correct NFL league office will exhort some team to give him another chance next year lest the league look like reactionaries. None of which would make him a good quarterback, after all. That throwing motion still stinks, and he never did fix it.”

But as with Hollywood perpetually handing roles to box office poison like Sean Penn and Alec Baldwin, perhaps politics trumps performance in the NFL these days as well.

* See also: the fellow who once sang backups on a song that noted, “if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain’t going to make it with anyone anyhow,” before selling out a half century later to a zillionaire dowager typically photographed wearing a Mao suit.

HOW SMILING undercuts racism.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!

NO ONE IN EUROPE SHOULD BE DISARMING NOW: Swiss tell EU: Hands off veterans’ assault rifles.

NO HILLARY JOKES, PLEASE: 3.7-billion-year-old fossils may be the oldest signs of life on Earth.

It’s a stunning announcement in a scientific field that is always contentious. But if confirmed, this would push the established fossil record more than 200 million years deeper into the Earth’s early history, and provide support for the view that life appeared very soon after the Earth formed and may be commonplace throughout the universe.

A team of Australian geologists announced their discovery in a paper titled “Rapid emergence of life shown by discovery of 3,700-million-year-old microbial structures,” published Wednesday in Nature.

I hope this finding pans out.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Hollywood’s Summertime Bombs Got a Lot More Disastrous This Year.

Summer moviegoing, from the first weekend in May through Labor Day, is a vital stretch for Hollywood, when studios release many of their biggest pictures and generate about 40 percent of annual sales. This year’s results reveal flaws in the industry’s focus on costly remakes and sequels, casting doubt on a strategy they’ll be relying on for years.

“Overall it was pretty awful,” said Doug Creutz, an analyst at Cowen & Co. “We have been talking about the increasingly bad ecosystem that we see theatrically and I think it definitely played out this summer.”

Of 32 summer movies released through Aug. 19 by the six major studios, 17 lost a total of $915.6 million, according to The Numbers, which looks at film costs and projects revenue for movies all the way through their release on commercial TV. Last year the studios released a total of 15 bombs with losses of $546.3 million.

It’s fun having a decent superhero movie or two to take my young sons to see each summer, but there’s precious little else, even for a grownup who likes big dumb summer movies.

WAS THERE AS MUCH GOVERNMENT INCOMPETENCE BACK THEN? In Reaction to Zika Outbreak, Echoes of Polio.

HEH, INDEED: “Donald Trump has now held more press conferences in Mexico than Hillary has held in the USA.”

To understand the media’s silence on Hillary’s silence, just think of them as Democrat activists with bylines, and it all makes sense.

AT AMAZON, Happy Belly Nut and Trail Mix Snacks.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE. Prof: Republicans Are Like ‘Thugs,’ So I’ll Tell Students To Vote Democrat.

Huh — I’m so old, I can remember when the left declared “Thugs” to be the new N-word.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Is The ABA Using Dallas, Ave Maria Law Schools As Scapegoats To Deflect Criticism From Department Of Education?

THIS WILL CONFIRM A FEW SUSPICIONS: Top Jeb Bush donor says he’s with Clinton.

READ ‘EM AND WEEP: These badly-placed ads and headline clashes are the most hilarious magazine and newspaper layout fails ever.

FASTER, PLEASE: Test Of Experimental Alzheimer’s Drug Finds Progress Against Brain Plaques.

“COMRADES, RELAX! THE HOUSE IS ON FIRE!” The hidden horrors of Soviet life:

Western public opinion has never come to terms with the crimes of Communism. Every school child knows about the Holocaust, Apartheid, and American slavery, as they should. But Pol Pot’s murder of a quarter of Cambodia’s population has not dimmed academic enthusiasm for the Marxism his henchmen studied in Paris. Neither the Chinese Cultural Revolution nor the Great Purges seem to have cast a shadow on the leftists who apologized for them. Quite the contrary, university classes typically blame the Cold War on American “paranoia” about communism and still picture Bolsheviks as idealists in too great a hurry. Being leftwing means never having to say you’re sorry.

In 1997 Stéphane Courtois published (in French) The Black Book of Communism, an anthology in which experts document, country by country, how many people Marxist–Leninists killed. With suitable academic equanimity, contributors ask whether the deliberate starvation of millions of Ukrainians, or the deportation of all Chechens to central Asia that took the lives of one person in three, qualifies as “genocide.” The only sign of real emotional urgency occurs in Courtois’s introduction, which breaks intellectual taboos by drawing parallels with Nazism, questioning Socialists’ frequent alliances with Communists, and, above all, wondering why intellectuals continue to apologize for Communist murders.

Some figures speak for themselves. The volume’s scholars estimate twenty million deaths in the USSR, sixty-five million in China, two million each in Cambodia and North Korea, 1.7 million in Mengistu’s Ethiopia and other African countries, and so on, to a total of about one hundred million. (Eerily, the chief revolutionary in Dostoevsky’s novel The Possessed predicts that the cost of perfect equality will be “a hundred million heads.”) So far as I can tell, these estimates are understatements. For example, the most authoritative study of Stalin’s war against the peasantry in the early 1930s, Robert Conquest’s Harvest of Sorrow, arrives at a figure twice the one in this volume. The difference between the two estimates—the margin of error—equals the number of Jews killed by the Nazis.

Read the whole thing.

VIDEO: From Mark Rippetoe, a discussion of the light weights/ high repetition study.

YOU MIGHT NOT BE INTERESTED IN THE GLEICHSCHALTUNG, BUT THE GLEICHSCHALTUNG IS INTERESTED IN YOUR MARVEL COMIC BOOK COLLECTION: Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau Appears On New Marvel Comic Book Cover.

“Sadly, he won’t be shirtless,” Time magazine’s Abigail Abrams breathlessly informs us.