SO HOW DO YOU THINK TRUMP’S DOING? Discuss in the comments.

THE SECRET THAT BLIND SHEIK LAWYER LYNNE STEWART TOOK TO HER GRAVE: “Radical lawyer Lynne Stewart, who died of cancer on Tuesday, took to her grave a bizarre mystery: What did an aging leftist find so all-fired attractive in a leader in the war that is being waged against America in the name of radical Islam?”

Must have been the unfortunate disparity between how women fare in repressed America versus the Progressive and Woke Middle East, but I may just be projecting all of the International Women’s Day headlines onto Stewart.

THE HAPPIEST PLACE ON EARTH: This Hotel Wants to Be a Disneyland For Beer Lovers.

WHAT, YOU MEAN THEY DIDN’T GO ON STRIKE TODAY? These Kurdish, Assyrian, Arab Women are Taking Down ISIS in Their Capital — On International Women’s Day, women are destroying the terrorists whose oppression they survived.

No word yet if spinach pancakes are in their c-rations, however.

SORRY, BUT I DON’T THINK SMOKING POT WHILE WORKING OUT is a good strategy.

I THINK WE’VE REACHED A TIPPING POINT WHERE SO MANY PEOPLE ARE FAT THAT NOBODY CARES ANYMORE. Is Dieting Passe? Study Finds Fewer Overweight People Try To Lose Weight.

FLASHBACK: DAYS OF RAGE:

Days of Rage is important, because this stuff is forgotten and it shouldn’t be. The 1970s underground wasn’t small. It was hundreds of people becoming urban guerrillas. Bombing buildings: the Pentagon, the Capitol, courthouses, restaurants, corporations. Robbing banks. Assassinating police. People really thought that revolution was imminent, and thought violence would bring it about.

One thing that Burrough returns to in Days of Rage, over and over and over, is how forgotten so much of this stuff is. Puerto Rican separatists bombed NYC like 300 times, killed people, shot up Congress, tried to kill POTUS (Truman). Nobody remembers it.

Also, people don’t want to remember how much leftist violence was actively supported by mainstream leftist infrastructure. I’ll say this much for righty terrorist Eric Rudolph: the sonofabitch was caught dumpster-diving in a rare break from hiding in the woods. During his fugitive days, Weatherman’s Bill Ayers was on a nice houseboat paid for by radical lawyers.

And then he helped a fellow leftist take the White House.

CREDIBILITY: Almost half of voters think journalists ‘make up’ anonymous sources.

“7 OF 9” FANS HURT MOST: Scientist Shows What Space Aliens Will Really Look Like.

DOESN’T THAT MAKE IT DIFFICULT TO READ? Cate Blanchett: My Moral Compass ‘Is In My Vagina’

Alternate take: Pray she isn’t “Method.”

WHAT GOOD IS THE WASHINGTON POST’S GLOBAL WARMING COVERAGE, IF IT CAN’T EVEN CONVINCE ITS BOSS TO CHANGE HIS WARMIST WAYS?

Shot: The electoral college is thwarting our ability to battle global warming.

—Headline, the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post, December 19th, 2016. (Link safe, goes to Truth Revolt.)

Chaser: Amazon Greenlights 24-Hour Car Race Series ‘Le Mans: Racing Is Everything.’

—Headline, the Internet Movie Database, Monday.

As Jonah Goldberg sardonically quipped when the smash Pixar film Cars debuted a decade ago, “The No. 1 movie in America today is a fun, family-friendly romp of a cartoon about sending Jews to the gas chamber:”

Just kidding.

It’s actually the movie “Cars” by Pixar. But according to some people, there’s not much difference. Indeed, the No. 1 movie in the hearts of liberals and environmentalists is “An Inconvenient Truth,” starring Al Gore, a man who believes that the threat posed by the internal combustion engine is not only the gravest peril mankind faces, but that defeating it is a moral imperative equal to stopping the Holocaust.

* * * * * * * *

Al Gore and his confreres argue time and again that Americans must change their habits and culture to avoid the ecological holocaust. Chief among these changes is for Americans to give up their addiction to driving or driving “unnecessarily.” Surely a film that teaches young children to love cars is a great moral crime given the supposed moral stakes. Similarly, why isn’t Gore – or anybody else in the Democratic Party – denouncing NASCAR? If global warming is the moral equivalent of the Holocaust, aren’t NASCAR races the moral equivalent of corporate-sponsored, televised neo-Nazi rallies? NASCAR creates greenhouse gasses for pure entertainment. Millions of people drive to these races, poisoning the atmosphere, to watch grown men poison the atmosphere even more. Where is the condemnation?

I know I’ll hear from all sorts of angry readers for taking Gore’s position to the extreme. But this has it backwards. I’m merely taking Gore’s extreme position seriously.

To paraphrase Glenn Reynolds, I’d be much more willing to believe the people who tell me that global warming is a crisis, when they’re able to convince their bosses that it’s a crisis, first. And based on Amazon’s latest video offering – and the massive air-conditioned server farms that house it, not to mention the giant warehouses and fleets of aircraft and trucks that deliver Bezos’ physical product – Bezos could well strike many as that dreaded figure on the left: the carbon-wastrel “climate skeptic.” At a minimum, unlike Al Gore, he appears to believe that global warming is no “Ecological Kristallnacht.”

AND YET THE REAL “HEALTHCARE GAP” IS HOW MUCH MORE HEALTHCARE SPENDING GOES TO WOMEN RATHER THAN MEN: For women of color, the ‘healthcare gap’ is real and deadly. You think I’m kidding? I’m not: “Per capita health care spending for females was 32 percent more than for males.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE: 4 Ways to Entertain Your Toddler Without Getting Up from the Couch.

Not on the list? Get a puppy.

BILLY JOEL, THE DONALD TRUMP OF POP MUSIC?

“I have met only a very few people—and most of these were not Americans—who had any real desire to be free,” James Baldwin wrote in The Fire Next Time. “Freedom is hard to bear. It can be objected that I am speaking of political freedom in spiritual terms, but the political institutions of any nation are always menaced and are ultimately controlled by the spiritual state of that nation. We are controlled here by our confusion, far more than we know, and the American dream has therefore become something much more closely resembling a nightmare, on the private, domestic, and international levels.”

James Baldwin was right. I know, because I saw the great American nightmare—the vapid confusion, the spiritual decay—in Madison Square Garden last week. Its name was Billy Joel.

The singer’s profound awfulness is hardly news. Ron Rosenbaum was being charitable when he crowned Joel “the worst pop singer ever,” and I myself have spent more time than an emotionally stable person should musing about Joel’s solipsistic and soulless schlock. And I might’ve let him walk gently into the good night if my friend and former Tablet colleague Adam Chandler hadn’t enticed me to go and behold Joel in person, and if that concert hadn’t taken place just a month after the inauguration of Donald John Trump to the presidency of the United States of America, and if I didn’t come to believe, cowering in the arena among the mid-aged boppers who were there to give “Uptown Girl” one more stroll down memory lane, that Billy Joel is not an individual artist but a symptom of more or less everything that is wrong with America today.

Really? Joel has an impressive back catalog of hit songs, and enough adoring fans to buy tickets and fill up sports arenas, so it seems like an equitable transaction between pop artist and consumer. Tablet has run some excellent articles, but this piece attacks the hapless Joel — and his fans — with a chainsaw. As with the millions of gallons of ink from sniffy “Not Our Class, Dear” elites who have slagged the other fellow namechecked in its headline (dating back at least to the Spy magazine days of the 1980s), it’s giving me strange new respect to an artist I’ve never really cared much for, beyond the occasional well-crafted song such as “Pressure” and “My Life.”

Related: People Who Like Céline Dion Are People, Too.

WOW: Rabbit hole leads to incredible 700-year-old Knights Templar cave complex.

WELL, YES: The “Day Without a Woman” strike is going to be mostly a day without privileged women. When I had lunch at Shoney’s today, all the waitresses seemed to be there. It’s mostly teachers taking “personal” days and professors cancelling classes, it looks like.

STUDY: Americans Are Eating Too Much Bacon and Too Few Nuts.

Considering how often these studies are found to be useless or just plain wrong, try adding more nuts and more bacon to your diet.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Huge Rise in Personality Disorders Among Millennials.

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, call your office.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How To Mentally Manipulate Your Fellow Drivers.

I’M SO OLD, I CAN REMEMBER WHEN REPUBLICANS WERE CALLED THE “EAT YOUR SPINACH” PARTY: ‘Like something my dog threw up’: Chelsea Clinton’s spinach pancake recipe is grossing people out:

(Classical allusion in headline.)

AMY ALKON: “Why Must Some Feminists Be So Patronizing?”

POLITICO: How ‘A Day Without a Woman’ Could Backfire. “First off, are women really attempting to show their value in the workplace by refusing to work? This seems like a risky strategy. No worker is truly indispensable, and going on strike could invite employers to consider just how replaceable you are. Not to mention that parents thrown into the lurch due to last-minute school cancellations for petty political games will surely be tempted to consider other educational choices, too. . . . In fact,all Wednesday’s meaningless demonstration does is hand the Republican Party a wide-open opportunity to dismiss it as a hysterical hissy fit, staged by left-wing activists still mourning Hillary Clinton’s loss.”

Well, that’s because that’s all it is.

QUESTION ASKED: Is A Second OPEC Cut On The Cards?

The supply-cut deal has so far resulted in a surprisingly high OPEC compliance of more than 90 percent, thanks to the cartel’s leader and biggest producer, Saudi Arabia, which has been cutting deeper than pledged. But the market has already priced in this high compliance, and although oil prices jump for a few hours on every report of ‘extraordinary efforts’ and reassurance that members will strive for ‘full conformity’, they are stuck in a narrow band, kept in check by U.S. shale and record high inventories in America.

A key upside driver for prices would be an extension of the OPEC deal beyond its original expiry date at the end of June. Just over a month had passed since the beginning of the production cut deal when talk of extending the agreement started to intensify. OPEC is said to be prepared to extend the deal, and may also increase the cuts, if inventories fail to drop to a specified level, sources from the group told Reuters.

The current cut got prices up by about $10 a barrel, but also put lots of American shale oil fields back into production. Now that our frackers are leaner than ever, further OPEC cuts might not accomplish too much more than cede market share to our domestic producers.

Cool.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Female former teacher pleads guilty to sexually assaulting students.

Related: Pa. teacher’s aide learns fate for ‘unprotected’ sex with male student.

Plus: Former elementary teacher pleads guilty to sex crimes with 8 minors.

SPYING: The Wikileaks CIA Stash May Prove Interesting, But Not Necessarily for the Hacks: The software tools revealed by the leak are sinister, unsurprising—and could prove politically explosive.