SEVEN MOVIE PRESIDENTS GONE BAD.

Missing from the list, the 1933 film financed by William Randolph Hearst with FDR as technical advisor, and more recently name-dropped in Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, Walter Huston’s Gabriel Over the White House:

The legendary media tycoon William Randolph Hearst believed America needed a strongman and that Franklin D. Roosevelt would fit the bill. He ordered his newspapers to support FDR and the New Deal. At his direction, Hearst’s political allies rallied around Roosevelt at the Democratic convention, which some believe sealed the deal for Roosevelt’s nomination.

But all that wasn’t enough. Hearst also believed the voters had to be made to see what could be gained from a president with a free hand. So he financed the film Gabriel Over the White House, starring Walter Huston. The film depicts an FDR look-alike president who, after a coma-inducing car accident, is transformed from a passive Warren Harding type into a hands-on dictator. The reborn commander-in-chief suspends the Constitution, violently wipes out corruption, and revives the economy through a national socialist agenda. When Congress tries to impeach him, he dissolves Congress.

The Library of Congress summarizes the film nicely. “The good news: He reduces unemployment, lifts the country out of the Depression, battles gangsters and Congress, and brings about world peace. The bad news: He’s Mussolini.”

Or “FDR on speed,” as one wag at the Independent Film Channel described the film in 2010. But then as Jonah noted above, FDR likely viewed the movie as a coming attractions preview for his administration. Or as Gene Healy, the author of The Cult of the Presidency says in the CATO Institute’s version of the popular “Trailers From Hell” YouTube series, “I think by the end of FDR’s 12 years, you really see a presidency that’s something like reality imitating fiction:”

[vimeo 2058075]

(For what it’s worth, Huston would later go on to star in the infamous 1943 pro-Soviet Union propaganda film also commissioned by FDR, Mission to Moscow.)

WIRED: Sea Level Rise Is Predictable. It Will Be Anything From Bad to Awful.

That’s why we need to Tax The Blue Zones. Before it’s too late!

GIVEN THAT THEY MADE TRUMP SIGN A PLEDGE NOT TO RUN THIRD-PARTY, ISN’T THIS KIND OF CHEESY: Top conservatives gather to plot third-party run against Trump.

WHERE THE DONALD DOES BEST: ‘Mobile Home Owners for Trump.’

Because not everybody wishes to live in a 90-square-foot Manhattan apartment.

WELL DONE: This One Strange Fact About Donald Trump Disqualifies Him From the Presidency.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Survival Expert Breaks Down Everything You Need in Your ‘Bug-Out Bag’ to Survive an Emergency.

Related: Bugout bag essentials. Also, stuff to keep in your car or SUV. More here. Honestly, these are better lists than the one posted up top.

WHY ARE DEMOCRAT-CONTROLLED INDUSTRIES SUCH CESSPITS OF RACISM? Ang Lee, Other Asian Oscar Winners Protest ‘Racist Stereotypes’ to Academy.

Meanwhile, “Black stunt performers: Hollywood’s other* race scandal: The concept of ‘blackface’ feels like an outdated taboo — but white stuntmen and women are still being ‘painted down’ to resemble black stars.”

There’s only one or two racial scandals in Hollywood? Now who’s being naive, Kay?

If we can’t nuke the site from orbit, to borrow a phrase from what in retrospect seems like a Hollywood era as bygone as the days of Bogart, Cary Grant, and Orson Welles, we should definitely repeal the Hollywood tax cuts at a bare minimum. Or bear minimum, as Leonardo Di Caprio would suggest.

PREPARING FOR THE POST-APOCALYPTIC CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT.

Like I said the other day, think of it as a high-tech Nockian Remnant.

UPDATE FROM THE INTERNET OF THINGS:

I’m in London for Kubecon right now, and the hotel I’m staying at has decided that light switches are unfashionable and replaced them with a series of Android tablets.

One was embedded in the wall, but the two next to the bed had convenient looking ethernet cables plugged into the wall. So.

I managed to borrow a couple of USB ethernet adapters, set up a transparent bridge (brctl addbr br0; brctl addif br0 enp0s20f0u1; brctl addif br0 enp0s20f0u2; ifconfig br0 up) and then stuck my laptop between the tablet and the wall. tcpdump -i br0 showed traffic, and wireshark revealed that it was Modbus over TCP. Modbus is a pretty trivial protocol, and notably has no authentication whatsoever. tcpdump showed that traffic was being sent to 172.16.207.14, and pymodbus let me start controlling my lights, turning the TV on and off and even making my curtains open and close. What fun!

And then I noticed something. My room number is 714. The IP address I was communicating with was 172.16.207.14. They wouldn’t, would they?

I mean yes obviously they would.

Matthew Garrett didn’t mess with any other rooms, and was kind enough to let the hotel know that their IoT system had practically zero security. Management was smart enough not to brush him off. Not every home or business will be so lucky.

(H/T, Dave Mark.)

AT AMAZON, Save $20 on Fire Kids’ Edition.

Plus, Big Savings on AmazonBasics 10-Piece Cookware Set.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Free market needs some ‘Sunshine:’ Private sector businesses like Twitter and Facebook far from models of transparency.

FASTER, PLEASE: House Unanimously Puts Pressure on White House, Declares Killing of Christians Genocide.

In contrast, despite this being the last year of Obama’s presidency, I still find this admission shocking:

Later, the president would say that he had failed to fully appreciate the fear many Americans were experiencing about the possibility of a Paris-style attack in the U.S. Great distance, a frantic schedule, and the jet-lag haze that envelops a globe-spanning presidential trip were working against him. But he has never believed that terrorism poses a threat to America commensurate with the fear it generates. Even during the period in 2014 when isis was executing its American captives in Syria, his emotions were in check. Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s closest adviser, told him people were worried that the group would soon take its beheading campaign to the U.S. “They’re not coming here to chop our heads off,” he reassured her. Obama frequently reminds his staff that terrorism takes far fewer lives in America than handguns, car accidents, and falls in bathtubs do. Several years ago, he expressed to me his admiration for Israelis’ “resilience” in the face of constant terrorism, and it is clear that he would like to see resilience replace panic in American society. Nevertheless, his advisers are fighting a constant rearguard action to keep Obama from placing terrorism in what he considers its “proper” perspective, out of concern that he will seem insensitive to the fears of the American people.

I wonder if late at night, Obama says something along the lines of, “See Michelle, I told you that Americans can ‘absorb’ another terrorist attack, and Fort Hood, Boston, Garland, Chattanooga, and San Bernardino just keep proving me right.”

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Tampons Are Not A Human Right.

WHY TRUMP? WHY HIM? WHY NOW? John Podhoretz posits that he’s the reckoning for 2008:

Further, imagine that serious proposals arose that the 8 percent of homeowners who had defaulted on their home loans be forgiven their debts—the very proposal in 2009 that led investor Peter Schiff to call for a new “tea party” uprising on the part of the 92 percent who paid their bills on time. Only this time Schiff’s comments had been spoken in 2007. Imagine all these things. And then imagine the presidential race that would have followed. Does the rise of Trump and Bernie Sanders suddenly make all the sense in the world? Of course.

But of course the meltdown didn’t happen in 2006. It took place a mere seven weeks before an election. A presidential race that was a dead heat the week before Lehman Brothers went bankrupt turned into an 8-point rout. Barack Obama may have been a “change” candidate, but he had no idea the change would involve repairing the international finance system until that was thrust upon him by circumstance.

The Obama election had a distorting effect on the American response to the meltdown of 2008. The next seven years in American political life came to revolve around him. His actions in the wake of the crisis—a $1 trillion stimulus, the partial nationalization of the auto industry, and Obamacare—became the policy focus of American politics. Republicans opposed them and stopped him dead with the midterm shellacking of 2010. Democrats fought back and secured his reelection in 2012.

As the elections seesawed, Washington froze.

Read the whole thing, which is yet another reminder that Trump is the mirror universe version of an earlier reality show candidate, who similarly served “as a blank screen, on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views,” even as he goaded his supporters to “argue with neighbors, get in their faces,” “punch back twice as hard,” and bring guns to knife fights:

Update: Don’t Blame Trump for Divisiveness, When the Left Says Stuff Like This.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Disrupting law school: How disruptive innovation will revolutionize the legal world.

I DUNNO, I MAY HAVE TO ADD THIS TO THE OPEN-BAR PLANS FOR MY FUNERAL: China Says Please Stop Hiring Funeral Strippers.

GALLERY: 29 of the most surreal landscapes on the planet.

THAT’S OKAY, BECAUSE THE EFFORT ISN’T ACTUALLY AIMED AT TERRORISTS: IT’S AIMED AT YOU. Why The Government Can’t Actually Stop Terrorists From Using Encryption. Obama kind of gave it away when he talked about enforcing tax laws.

THE GREAT IRAQ WAR MOVIE SCAM: “Show business is always a business … until the filmmakers have a message to send. Then, the industry ignores reality and cries, ‘action!’ It’s what [Rob] Reiner is about to do once more,” with his latest anti-Iraq War movie, Christian Toto writes.

As Samuel Goldwyn was famously attributed as saying, if you want to send a message to the movie-going audience, use Western Union instead. Though for the past 15 years, the audience — an Army of Eberts! — can send themselves messages as well, thanks to the Internet. They’ve been known to quickly sink a film when the audience discovers it’s just another leftwing sucker punch, as Toto’s long list of Iraq war flops (and the few successes that praised the troops, such as American Sniper) have proven.

21ST CENTURY MEDICINE: Fitbit for Addicts Could Predict Relapse.

A PHOTOGRAPHIC TOUR OF THE STERLING COOPER & PARTNERS OFFICE. Mad Men’s incredible production design and costuming perfectly evoked the atmosphere of the 1960s while rarely descending into cliché; I would have loved to have seen that cast inside that production design in service to more watchable television, however. Or as one critic wrote about the series last year, “We have a term called ‘hate-watch’ because we are sometimes compelled to watch shows we hate. We do not have a term called ‘apathy-watch,’ because it doesn’t exist. You might tune into a train wreck for the schadenfreude, but you’re not going to put effort into a show that doesn’t make you care.”

Oh I don’t know – having enjoyed the show’s first season or two, I felt like I did a lot of apathy-watching as it progressed, particularly after series creator/showrunner Matthew Weiner told one interviewer, “There is nothing to laugh at by the time you’re in the late ‘60s.” If you can’t laugh at the era of hippies, Hubert Humphrey, and as Iowahawk would say, “Leonard Bernstein’s weekly Black Panther Fondue & Twister parties,” what can you laugh at?

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Man and his three female lovers open up about living under the same roof as a ‘polyfamily.’

THERE HAS BEEN A DISTINCT SHORTAGE OF PROSECUTORIAL ACCOUNTABILITY FOR QUITE SOME TIME: Holding Prosecutors Responsible in an Insider Trading Investigation. “The Roman poet Juvenal posed the question ‘quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’ or ‘who will guard the guards themselves?’ That issue surfaced last week as part of a lawsuit filed by a hedge fund owner against a number of F.B.I. agents and federal prosecutors in Manhattan, including the United States attorney in Manhattan, Preet Bharara, accusing them of making deliberate misrepresentations in an affidavit used to obtain a search warrant in an insider trading case that ended up putting the hedge fund out of business.”

Bahrara isn’t a sympathetic character. Prosecutorial immunity is a judge-created fiction, so I suppose it could be judicially abolished, too. But that’s not the way to bet.

IT’S ANOTHER CASE IN WHICH DISTRUST IN THE ESTABLISHMENT IS EXACTING A PRICE: Richard Epstein: The Rise Of American Protectionism.

HOPE: After K-9 slain, young girl sends Ohio PD her allowance for vests.

Clicking this link comes with a two-hanky warning.