CRYING WOLF: Robert Redford to Esquire: Trump Is ‘Our Fault,’ Worse ‘Than Nixon.’

Flashback: In 2013, Redford endorsed the Weatherman bombings of the Nixon era while promoting his sympathetic movie about them, The Company You Keep:

George Stephanopoulos was so enthusiastic towards Robert Redford and his sympathetic new film about an ex-1960s radical that the actor enthused, “You ought to get on the marketing team!” The aging actor/director appeared on Tuesday’s Good Morning America and endorsed the violent actions of protest groups. Reminiscing on his own past, the liberal Hollywood star recounted, “When I was younger, I was very much aware of the movement. I was more than sympathetic, I was probably empathetic because I believed it was time for a change.”

After Stephanopoulos wondered, “Even when you read about bombings,” Redford responded, “All of it. I knew that it was extreme and I guess movements have to be extreme to some degree.”

Among their other terrorist attacks during the Nixon era, the Weathermen bombed the Pentagon, while Osama bin Laden will still in grade school. What sort of violence does Redford endorse this time around?

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: What the Color of Your Pee Means About Your Health.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Have Colleges Completely Lost Their Minds? “You do have to wonder sometimes if these idiots were actually recruited by Steve Bannon as a covert part of the Trump 2020 campaign.”

Nah, Putin’s behind it. The lefties are all under his control anyway.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Why social media apps should be in your disaster kit.

THE CONSTITUTION FORBIDS CORRUPTION OF BLOOD: Preet Bharara: Let’s investigate the ancestors of DACA opponents, just out of curiosity.

CLIMATE CHANGE IS REAL, AND IT’S VERY, VERY OLD: Himalayan glaciers melting for 400 years, finds BSIP study.

WORLD WAR III BEGAN WHEN THE MAYOR OF BERKELEY GOT HOLD OF A NUCLEAR WARHEAD: Steve Bannon to join Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter at Berkeley ‘Free Speech Week.’

(Classical allusion in headline.)

KATE KLONICK: The Terrifying Power of Internet Censors.

While there have long been worries about internet service providers favoring access to some content over others, there has been less concern about companies further along the pipeline holding an internet on/off switch. In large part, this is because at other points in the pipeline, users have choice. Private companies can make their own rules, and consumers can choose among them. If GoDaddy won’t register your domain, you can go to Bluehost or thousands of other companies.

But the fewer choices you have for the infrastructure you need to stay online, the more serious the consequences when companies refuse service. This is why Cloudflare’s decision to drop The Daily Stormer is so significant. Denying security service to one Nazi website seems fine now, but what if Cloudflare started suspending service for a political candidate that its chief executive didn’t like?

With this move, Cloudflare is wading into the business of evaluating the content of its clients — something sites like Facebook and Twitter have been wrestling with for years, leading them to develop complex rules and procedures that govern what users are and are not allowed to post. Most agree that it’s appropriate for social media companies to take down certain kinds of content — that’s how they ensure our newsfeeds aren’t full of pornography or violence. But that doesn’t mean we don’t want that type of content to be able to exist somewhere on the internet. Ensuring that sites like Cloudflare remain content-neutral might be necessary to guarantee that.

None of this is news to Instapundit readers, but it’s refreshing to see the case for internet First Amendment protection being made on the OpEd page of the New York Times.

ENDORSED. Roger Simon: Nikki Haley for the First Woman President.

FIRST, DEFINE YOUR TERMS: My colleague Wayne Crews asks, “What’s the Difference between “Major,” “Significant,” and all those other Federal Rule Categories?” That’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer. Wayne makes the case that if we want real, deep, lasting regulatory reform we need first of all to streamline those definitions.

WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. Hillary Clinton: The lesson of 1984 is trust your leaders.

To add to the conclusion of Allahpundit’s post, it’s fascinating that Hillary and/or her ghostwriters apparently don’t recall how Hillary’s 2008 campaign was torpedoed by an Obama operative through their own 1984 callback:

THERE’S AN APP FOR THAT: As Florida Fuel Grew Scarce, GasBuddy App Change Filled Gap.

As Glenn previously noted, “The importance of social media in recovery efforts suggests that restoration of cell service — including cellular data — should probably get a higher priority than in the past.”

Indeed.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Here’s What We Can Expect From Apple’s New Push Toward Augmented Reality.

AT AMAZON, deals on Most Wished For Items.

Plus, Hot New Releases – Updated Every Hour.

FASTER, PLEASE: Robots and machine learning can save lives. If the regulators allow it, of course.

RON RADOSH: Steve Bannon Goes into Full Attack Mode on “60 Minutes.”

REPORT: ESPN SUSPENDED LINDA COHN, LET JEMELE HILL SLIDE.

Last night Outkick broke the news that Linda Cohn, one of the most respected women to ever work at ESPN and the person who has hosted more SportsCenters over the past 25 years than any other current employee, was called and told by ESPN president John Skipper not to come to work after she went on the radio in New York City this past April and said as follows:

“They definitely overpaid for many of these products, whether it’s the NBA or starting up networks like the Pac-12 Network and SEC Network,” she said on WABC’s “Bernie and Sid Show.” “It’s well documented … They [also] did not see that they would lose all these subscribers [to competitors like Netflix.]”

* * * * * * * * *

According to multiple sources inside ESPN — Cohn declined comment when reached by Outkick — ESPN president John Skipper called Cohn and screamed at her for having the gall to share her opinion in public and told her to stay at home instead of coming to work that weekend. Why was Cohn to stay at home? So, according to an irate John Skipper, she could have time to think about what she had said.

When Outkick reached out to ESPN seeking comment on the Cohn story, ESPN’s PR staff refused to explain anything about the decision, responding via email: “The last time we responded with an explanation, you called us liars.”

Word of Linda Cohn’s suspension raced through ESPN’s corridors with many employees furious over Skipper’s treatment of the longtime legend at the network. Especially when so many at ESPN disagreed with the direction of the network in general and felt compelled to keep their mouths shut lest they also say something that angered their bosses.

Time after time and employee after employee has reached out to Outkick to express total befuddlement with John Skipper’s incompetence.

“The guy running our company,” said one prominent employee who requested anonymity, “is not good at his job. When is he going to fire himself instead of firing everyone else?”

That last paragraph is an evergreen quote, uttered by the remaining sane employees whenever a CEO decides that being a platform for SJWs is more important than his core business.

Related: That time back in 2008 when Jemele Hill compared Celtics fans to Hitler.

UPDATE: “Clay Travis [author of the above-linked Outkick the Coverage blog post] pointed out on Tucker Carlson last night that Bob Iger, CEO of Disney (ESPN’s parent company) follows only 59 people total on Twitter, and one of them is Jamele Hill.”

OOPS: Could a Pair of Earrings Hurt Waymo’s Lidar Trade Secrets Lawsuit? “According to a recent court filing, Waymo also turns its secret lidar circuit boards into jewelry and gives them away to employees leaving to work for rivals.”

SEND A SCALE TO COLLEGE: Regular weigh-ins may help prevent college weight gain.

WHAT’S OLD IS NEW AGAIN: Nordstrom tries store with stylists, but no clothes.

Nordstrom is opening a new store in California next month that’s significantly smaller than what the department store chain usually builds and — in a twist — won’t be stocking clothing or any inventory at all.

Instead, the Seattle-based company (JWN) said Monday the store will offer shoppers personal stylists to help pick out clothing and accessories, dressing rooms to try them on, online ordering, and services, such as alterations, manicures, wine and beer and hand-delivery of items to customers’ cars.

Sounds like a high-end take on the old catalog showroom stores I remember from the 1970s. That might be a smart move, given that expensive floorspace and (especially) carried inventory costs are two huge disadvantages of traditional retail versus e-commerce.

GOVERNMENT ALMOST KILLED THE COCKTAIL: 80 years after Prohibition, the Dark Ages of drinking are finally coming to an end.

“When you get to 1934,” says Simonson, “it’s just, bam! The old fashioned is this fruited thing. And that’s the way it is everywhere.” The new drink—and it was, essentially, a different drink—had become “a glass of punch. It didn’t look like it had before Prohibition.”

Although no one knows the precise reasons the drink changed the way it did, Simonson speculates that in the chaos following Prohibition, the recipe may have been confused with another drink, or that bartenders piled on fruit and soda in order to conceal the low quality of the liquor that was available at the time. Whatever the reason, the change was sudden and universal.

It wasn’t just the old fashioned that emerged degraded and destroyed. It was the whole of pre-Prohibition cocktail culture—the knowledge, skills, craft, and supply that for decades had informed one of America’s original culinary arts, and even the essential idea of the cocktail itself. In the space of a generation, the entire country went from inventing the cocktail as we know it to forgetting how to make a decent drink.

Read the whole thing.

WELL, GOOD: US Air Force Dusts Off Old Skills to Fight a New Kind of War in Eastern Europe.

It’s a small exercise, tiny in comparison to Zapad 17, but 16 years of “small wars” have meant too little practice for fighting near-peer adversaries.

CLAY TRAVIS: ESPN is Drowning and They’re Not Smart Enough to Recognize it.

WAIT, WHAT?: Legendary Washington socialite Sally Quinn believes she killed three people with magic. You’ll have to dig quite some way into the story to find that out, though – and she jokes that she’s been asked to cast a curse on the President.