I THINK YOU NEED SOME OF BOTH: To Keep Obesity at Bay, Exercise May Trump Diet.

ART VS. JUNK — THE GUGGENHEIM IS EXHIBITING A WORKING SOLID GOLD TOILET:

Hooters played a mean trick on a waitress more than a decade ago. It told her that, as the winner of a beer-selling contest, she would get a new Toyota. She was led blindfolded to the parking lot—where she was given a new toy Yoda doll from the “Star Wars” franchise.

This was not very nice, and her subsequent lawsuit produced a settlement and a new car. But there are worse things than perpetrating an adolescent prank on one unsuspecting victim. Such as perpetrating an adolescent prank on millions of them.

In a few days the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan will unveil a new work of art, or rather a new work of “art”: a functioning, solid gold toilet, which will be installed in one of the bathrooms. It is by Maurizio Cattelan, whom The New York Times describes as “one of the most expensive living artists,” and is titled “Maurizio Cattelan: ‘America’.” That is tiresomely predictable, and about as clever as Internet trolls referring to Barack Obama as “Obummer.” But like “Obummer,” it flatters the dogmas of its intended audience.

The political angle matters less than the aesthetic one, though. A gold toilet is to real art what a toy Yoda is to a new automobile. But there is a sad difference between these two cases: Everyone at Hooters knew the toy Yoda was not an actual car. Nobody pretended the stuffed doll and the Japanese automobile belonged to the same taxonomic or ontological category.

Too much contemporary art tries, with a great deal of seriousness and self-regard, to claim just that.

I’m not sure how “contemporary” this, since Marcel Duchamp kicked off the dada movement a century ago via a urinal he called “Fountain,” which Duchamp created for an avant-garde exhibition in New York. But then, as original National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live writer Anne Beatts said over 40 years ago, you can only be avant-garde for so long until you become garde.

And note this passage in the New York Times:

It will, instead, be installed in early May just off one of the ramps of the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan, in a small, humble room where visitors often feel the urge to spend some time alone. The room has tiles, a sink, a mirror and a lock on the door. And now, instead of its standard Kohler toilet, it will have a solid 18-karat-gold working replica of one, a preposterously scatological apotheosis of wealth whose form is completed in its function: You could go into the restroom just to bask in its glow, Mr. Cattelan said, but it becomes an artwork only with someone sitting on it or standing over it, answering nature’s call.

As James Lileks memorably wrote in early Screedblog, “If art contains shit, we should take it at its word.”

I WAS EXPECTING AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: The Time Bobby Kennedy Watched the Smallest Nuclear Explosion Ever. “There was nothing funny about the XM-388, though. The device had an explosive yield the equivalent of 10 to 20 tons of TNT. This was far, far less than the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, which had a yield of about 16,000 tons, but Davy Crockett had a different purpose. It was designed to be used against enemy armored forces at bottlenecks such as valleys or mountain passes, where wrecked enemy armor and lingering, lethal radiation would create impassable areas. The XM-388 projectile was launched from the XM-28 recoilless rifle. A small, man-portable recoilless rifle, the XM-28 had a range of just 1.24 miles. An improved launcher, the XM-29, had a range of 2.5 miles. Both were operated by a three-man crew and an a M151 jeep could carry the entire system.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE: What not to name your Wi-Fi hotspot: “Earlier this week, a female passenger boarded a Qantas flight in Melbourne, Australia, heading to Perth. Not long after she boarded the plane, she found something troubling on her phone’s Wi-Fi menu — a hotspot with the name ‘Mobile Detonation Device.’”

‘FAT-SHAMING’ EDITOR OF MARIE CLAIRE GETS AN EPIC LESSON IN TROLLING FROM CONSERVATIVES.

Flashback: Glenn Reynolds is right: conservatives should buy glossy women’s magazines.

IF YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF “TIBET 5100 WATER RESOURCES, LTD,” YOU’RE NOT ALONE: It’s a Chinese firm doing business in Tibet as “Tibet Water.” Secretary of State John Kerry knows about it because a family trust of his wife, Teresa Heinz, is invested in the company that bottles Tibetan glacial water and sells it in Europe as an alternative to Evian and Perrier.

Tibet is the world’s highest land and home to Mt. Everest and Tibetan Bhuddism.  It’s also long been the object of Chinese imperialism and is under Beijing’s heavy-handed rule today. Thanks to the thousands of glaciers in Tibet, the land has lots of water, which is why Tibet Water is there. Tibet Water is closely linked to the Chinese government and to the Communist Party that controls it.

So why is the U.S. Secretary of State’s family invested in a company that is exploiting the natural resources of a poor neighbor, an exploitation, by the way, that could not occur without the approval of the government of China? Good question. The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Richard Pollock, who exclusively reported the investment today, has asked Kerry’s spokesman for an explanation.

NEW PURITANISM UPDATE: Mayor who waged war on salt, sodas succeeded by mayor who tells citizens where they shouldn’t eat. “Champion of the common man de Blasio isn’t hesitating from telling the citizens where not to eat, but not for health reasons. Rather, de Blasio told New York magazine that he would not be patronizing the first Chick-fil-A franchises to open within city limits, and he urged citizens to follow his lead.”

In 2008, when the L.A. city council proposed banning smoking outdoors, raconteur, bon vivant and then-PJ Media contributor Rich Miniter wrote, “In the 1950s, the most puritanical place in America was somewhere in Kansas. Today it is Los Angeles.”

But in the years since, close-minded prudishness has certainly spread to plenty other blue state alcoves. Or as Iowahawk tweets, “It’s getting hard to tell who the fundamentalist Puritan preachers are anymore.”

ROGER KIMBALL: Why The Worst Get On Top.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1092.

I’M CALLING IT: SOCIAL NETWORKING IS OVER:

Confusion about the difference between social networking and social media is why most people haven’t noticed the decline of social networking. People don’t stop to think about the difference.

The sharing of social media — professionally produced videos, articles, podcasts and photos — is gradually replacing the sharing of personal content about one’s life.

For example, as you read my column, this article is being shared on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and other so-called “social networking” sites. But that isn’t social networking; it’s social media.

Just ask Twitter

Micro-blogging, micro-schmogging. No matter what you call it, Twitter is included in every roundup, comparison or article about social networking. It’s universally included in the “social network” category.

That’s why it’s telling that Twitter last week reportedly recategorized itself in Apple’s App Store. The company removed its app from the “social networking” category and put it into the “news” category.

The move transformed Twitter from the No. 5 social networking app in the App Store to the No. 1 news app. The move also redefines Twitter: It’s no longer a place where people connect with other people to talk about their lives; it’s now a place where people get news.

Well, whatever news Twitter deigns to share with them, given that earlier this year, Twitter exited both social networking and social media to become social justice warriors.

As is usually the case when a company exits its core function to go full-on SJW, fewer and fewer investors are being social when it comes to trading their stock.

Related: Facebook admits to censoring Conservative websites while freely promoting left-wing ones.

Earlier: Ebay Blocks ‘Draw Mohammed’ Winning Cartoon from Auction.

RANDY BARNETT: How John Roberts Gave Us Donald Trump.

JOHN SCHINDLER: The World Needs to Know What Really Happened Last November: Important questions linger about what went down in Paris. “While none can doubt that operatives linked with ISIS—some of them tightly so—executed that atrocity, who was in control of the plot is considered an open question by several Western intelligence services. To anybody versed in counterintelligence, key matters—Who designed the rather complex plot? Who paid for it and arranged the multinational logistics? Who provided training and related clandestine support?—remain unexplained to date. Yet such questions deserve real answers, given the atrocity visited on Paris. Then there is the matter of the gang’s complex preparations for mass murder.” As is usually the case, the triggermen were no smarter than they had to be. So who was the planner?

MAYBE GIVE ‘EM A FREE PASS TO THE LOVE HOTELS? Beijing Compels Economists to Be More Optimistic.

Beijing has resorted to various measures to prop up China’s ailing economy lately, like pumping lots of money into struggling industries to inflate demand. But it’s also trying another tactic: browbeating economists and business reporters into being more optimistic about the state of the Chinese economy. . . .

In a country with notoriously unreliable official statistics, it’s especially problematic that finance and economics experts could be editing their reports based on factors separate from the underlying analysis.

China’s efforts to brighten the picture artificially suggest something else too: top officials are worried. If the economy was in fact healthy, there would be no need to press experts to say as much. As Xi Jinping’s regime gets more restrictive and authoritarian, it sends a signal that all is not well in the Middle Kingdom.

Remember when Argentina was prosecuting people for accurately reporting inflation rates?

ED MORRISSEY: Trump’s Hard Truth for the GOP: Conservatism Doesn’t Matter. Well, after the two Bushes, McCain, and Romney, the GOP hasn’t been acting as if it does for decades. And, to be honest, they resisted Reagan, too. On the other hand, the Tea Party had pretty good luck with state and Congressional races.

THE RACE IS NOT ALWAYS TO THE SWIFT OF MIND: More on Justin Trudeau from David Solway:

What all this serves to prove is that the Qoheleth was right, the race is not to the swift. But in the case we are discussing now, the race went to a slow-witted pretender whose lack of prior accomplishment, educational truancy (he failed to complete the two university degrees for which he had enrolled) and “smoke and mirrors” manipulativeness gave him a commanding lead. But he was certainly humble, confessing that he could not recite pi to the 19th decibel. Additionally, as we’ve seen, a sequence of fortuitous events and the support of powerful backers enabled him to breast the tape first.

Solway dubs Trudeau “Obama North,” and as he writes, the two political poseurs have much in common. Read the whole thing.

THE MARRIAGE OF REASON AND NIGHTMARE: “Novelist J. G. Ballard exposes the fragility of the affluent society,” Theodore Dalrymple wrote in 2008 at City Journal; the Website links to that article in a “From the Archive” link on their current homepage:

All of Ballard’s novels have a Robinson Crusoe theme: What happens to man when the props of civilization are removed from him, as they so easily are, by external circumstances or by the operation of his secret desires or by both in concert? Ballard’s past gave him an awareness of the fragility of things, even when they appear most solid; and in the introduction to his collected short stories, he tells us that he is “interested in the real future that I could see approaching.” His method: extrapolate something—a trend, a feeling of dissatisfaction—that he detects in the present; magnify it; and then examine its consequences. He is a recorder of what he calls “the visionary present,” a sociological Swift who claims (half-mistakenly, I think) that he does not write with a moral purpose but instead serves as “a scout who is sent on ahead to see if the water is drinkable or not.”

* * * * * * *

This represents an important insight. When I briefly served as a kind of vulgarity correspondent for a British newspaper—it sent me anywhere the British gathered to behave badly—I discovered to my surprise that the middle classes behaved in crowds with the same menacing disinhibition as their supposed social and educational inferiors. They swore and screamed abuse and made fascistic gestures and urinated in the street with the same abandon that they attributed to the proletarians. It was Ballard who first spotted that the bourgeoisie wanted to proletarianize itself without losing its economic privileges or political power.

In Millennium People, the residents of an affluent housing project called Chelsea Marina “had set about dismantling their middle-class world. They lit bonfires of books and paintings, educational toys and videos. . . . They had quietly discarded their world as if putting out their rubbish for collection. All over England an entire professional caste was rejecting everything it had worked so hard to secure.”

This strikes me as a suggestive metaphor for much that has happened over the last four decades, not only in England (though especially here) but also throughout parts of Western society. We have become bored with what we have inherited, to which, for lack of talent, we have contributed so humiliatingly little.

Ballard died at age 78 in 2009, a year after Dalrymple’s encomium. England may soon wish it could go back to bored once again — and remind itself how much it once took for granted.

CHANGE: China’s Getting Into the Love Hotel Business, Which Means Attitudes About Sex Are Changing.

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HANNA-BARBERA — HISTORY’S GREATEST MONSTERS! Tom and Jerry are blamed for ISIS: Head of Egypt’s Information Service blames cartoon characters for teaching children that you can blow people up and encouraging extremism.

Wait ’til he discovers Itchy and Scratchy. Still though, give the man some credit — as moral equivalence and obfuscation goes, it beats blaming Esther Williams, Ricardo Montalban, and “Baby Its Cold Outside” for your ideology’s woes.

PRESIDENT ASH CARTER DISAGREES WITH RETIRED PREDECESSOR OBAMA, Says ISIS Fight ‘Far From Over.’

HE’S MADE SIMILAR STATEMENTS IN ’08 AND ’12. THIRD TIME’S THE CHARM? Rush: I’ve got a hunch that Trump is headed for a landslide over Hillary.

ANDREW SULLIVAN HATES THE AMERICA THAT ANDREW SULLIVAN HELPED CREATE. As Jim Geraghty wrote on Tuesday: “The sub headline of Andrew Sullivan’s lengthy essay in New York magazine on the state of American democracy declares, ‘America is a breeding ground for tyranny:’”

Who is responsible for this new tyranny? The rich, the elites, the powerful, the well-connected, and the Republicans. That, of course, is a heavy judgment — and one that Sullivan never quite gets around to proving. Sure, he makes the case that Donald Trump is on the verge of riding some ugly sentiments to the Republican nomination, but it almost seems as though Sullivan hasn’t noticed that a progressive trailblazer — Barack Obama — has been working from the Oval Office these last seven-and-a-half years. Tyranny is generally described as a repressive and arbitrarily cruel regime; and to be a tyrant, you need power. The subset of Republicans who are voting for Trump are driven by their sense of powerlessness — that’s not exactly your prototypical foundation for tyranny.

Trump’s fans are coming out because they feel like they have so little control over their own lives, and they fear this might be their last shot. Even Donald J. Trump — reality-TV star, erstwhile bankrupt, and sometime real-estate mogul that he is — isn’t all that powerful, at least not yet. Trump has wealth, and when he talks, the media broadcasts it, but he can’t make the laws. For all of his flaws — you may have noticed National Review pointing them out from time to time — he didn’t create this mess of a government, and he’s only one economic actor among millions in the modern economy.

Of course, Andrew has been thumping the “America is a breeding ground for tyranny” theme for quite some time; in 2007, he excoriated then-President Bush as “The Weimar President.”

Since that would mean that President Bush was the 21st century equivalent of Paul von Hindenburg, as I wrote at the time, “I can only guess that Andrew believes that President Bush is an elderly figurehead leading a weakened but relatively benign quasi-socialist administration suffering the ravages of hyper-inflation and that Hillary, Obama or whoever his successor is, is the next Hitler, about to install a terribly malevolent war machine and concurrent massive welfare state?”

OK, 2016 isn’t that bad.* But in a new article at City Journal, Fred Siegel adds, “Most of the maladies Sullivan attributes to Trump were incorporated into American politics by the man he deeply admires, the man whose face alone, Sullivan suggested, proved his worth—Barack Obama. Sullivan rightly sees the danger of ‘democracy willingly, even impetuously,’ repealing itself. That repeal began under the man sitting in the Oval Office today.” Siegel’s article is titled “Andrew Sullivan’s Blind Spot.”

How big is that blind spot?

Following the equation of Bush to Hindenburg, Andrew described a speech by Obama in May of 2009 as “a conservative one by a conservative president.” In 2004, when John Kerry was running for the White House, he described John Kerry as “the right man – and the conservative choice – for a difficult and perilous time.” If those are Andrew’s best examples of conservatism,  perhaps, as Jim Geraghty writes, he might just be looking for tyranny in all the wrong places.

* But the year is still young!

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: Al Qaeda Is About to Establish an Emirate in Northern Syria.

Al Qaeda has big ambitions in Syria. For the past three years, an unprecedented number of veteran figures belonging to the group have arrived in the country, in what can only be described as the covert revitalization of al Qaeda’s central leadership on Europe’s doorstep. Now the jihadi group’s Syrian affiliate, the Nusra Front — having spent nearly five years slowly building deep roots in the country — is laying the groundwork for al Qaeda’s first sovereign state.

I had been assured that al Qaeda was decimated and on the run.

HOW WOMEN VOTED IN INDIANA:

The Republican Party returned to a more narrow gender gap, with 53 percent of the primary electorate made up of men and 47 percent made up of women. Both sexes voted for Trump. More men than women voted for Trump, 59 percent to 47 percent. That’s a gender gap of 12 points.

Cruz came in second, but it was a distant second with men (33 percent) and a closer second with women (41 percent voted for the Texas senator).

The Democratic primary electorate faced a much wider gender gap, as has been the norm this election. Fifty-nine percent of Democratic primary voters in Indiana were women, and just 41 percent were men, for a gender gap of 18 points.

Sanders won over 57 percent of men, but women split evenly. . . . Sanders doesn’t usually do this well with women voters in close elections, but it could be a sign that Clinton isn’t going to run away with the female vote as easily as she thought.

The Republican primary has effectively ended, but Democrats will face off next in California, Nebraska and West Virginia.

Stay tuned.