HILLARY CLINTON: ‘I’m a Bit of a Paula Revere’ on Russian Election Meddling.

I don’t recall Paul Revere having been bought and paid for by British mineral interests, but whatever helps you sleep through the night, Hill.

RETAIL BLUES: Toys ‘R’ Us Will Live Because Mattel and Hasbro Can’t Let It Die.

The toy chain filed for bankruptcy-court protection Monday night, another in a string of specialty retailers felled by Wal-Mart Stores Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and the rest of the online onslaught. Toys “R” Us had been hobbled by more than $5 billion in debt, which required more th$400 million a year to service.

Yet, the company, which operates about 1,600 stores globally, will likely survive because manufacturers such as Mattel Inc., Hasbro Inc. and closely held MGA Entertainment Inc. need the last remaining toy chain. These vendors are eager for whatever remaining leverage they have against the might of Amazon and Wal-Mart, the bane of all companies focused on a single category of shopping.

“Oh my God, they are very important, and people don’t understand,” Isaac Larian, founder and chief executive officer of MGA, said of the toy chain. “That’s the only place where kids can go and just buy toys. There is no toy business without Toys ‘R’ Us.”

If the specialty retailer model has been broken, then how long can Mattel and Hasbro afford to pump money into it?

INSERT SKYNET JOKE HERE: These Robots Can Merge and Split Their Brains to Form New Modular Bots.

HAVING A KEY MAY BE, ERM, KEY: BMW is looking at the potential for a car without any sort of key or fob, just a smartphone app. Before they go any further, perhaps they should consult Golden Krishna, who suggests that the best interface is no interface, with special attention to cars and smartphones.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO LIE ABOUT RAPE (CONT): Student jailed for falsely accusing taxi driver of sex attack.

She was an aspiring police officer.

DUMB: Most-wanted criminal arrested after posting Instagram video of himself.

HE SUPPORTS THE FIRST AMENDMENT AND BOOBS: Clay Travis May Run for the Senate in Tennessee.

USING THE PHRASE “ACCORDING TO SCIENCE” IS RIGHT UP THERE: Here’s 13 Things That Make People Dislike You Immediately, According to Science.

THE NEW SHADOW WAR: Cyber Assaults on Democracy’s ‘Brain-Space’ are Here to Stay.

Information warfare involves the deliberate use of information to confuse, mislead, and affect the choices and decisions that the adversary makes. Cyber-enabled information warfare (CEIW) takes advantage of the features of information technologies and the internet: high connectivity, low latency, high degrees of anonymity, insensitivity to distance and national borders, democratized access to publishing capabilities, and inexpensive production and consumption of information content.

These aspects of modern information technologies enable foreign practitioners of information warfare to use automated Twitter accounts to amplify one-sided messages, to communicate with large populations at low cost without accountability, and at the same time to tailor political messages in a manner highly customized to narrow audiences. And because democracies place a greater emphasis on free expression and speech than do their authoritarian adversaries, democracies have fewer and more porous defenses against CEIW.

CEIW is hostile, but it is not warfare in any sense recognized under the United Nations Charter or the laws of armed conflict. The process emphasizes soft power, leveraging propaganda, persuasion, culture, social forces, confusion, and deception. If the patron saint of traditional warfare is Clausewitz, the patron saint of CEIW is Sun Tzu, who once wrote, “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”

And there is probably no one more susceptible to this kind of anti-republican (small-r) manipulation than today’s social-media crybullies.

VIDEO: Mexico Earthquake from a Riverboat.

THAT “PROPRIETARY” THING MIGHT MAKE SENSE: It’s now becoming apparent that the Equifax security breach was made possible by the use of open-source code, and while the company knew about the vulnerability, it might not have patched it properly. This is a bug, not a feature of open-source:

There are a number of reasons why companies don’t move quickly to install fixes for their open-source vulnerabilities, said [Lou] Shipley [of Black Duck Software]. There is the pressure developers feel to get products to market quickly, and he said that pressure intensifies as more of the world’s business relies on software to be transacted.

Another reason is, unlike software from companies such as Microsoft, Oracle or SAP SE that send notices of when new patches and fixes are available, there are no notices sent with open-source software updates, he said. Companies go through an evolution of whether to retire some apps and when to do so, and some do a better job than others of staying on top of this task, he said.

One of the people who is hopping mad over the Equifax breach is Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who wants to hold Equifax executives accountable, which is all well and good. Corporate executives who mess up should be punished by the market and by the law if they were negligent to the extent that people are harmed. But there’s currently a provision in the NDAA to force the DOD to use open-source software in all new technology.

Who is the author of this provision? Step forward, Senator Elizabeth Warren.

GEORGE WASHINGTON GETS A FACELIFT: Carrier Overhaul Brings New Weapons & F-35. “The Navy and Huntington Ingalls Industries are beginning a massive upgrade and technical adjustment to its USS George Washington Nimitz-Class aircraft carrier — to enable the ship to operate the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter aircraft and serve for 25-more years with newly configured structures, weapons systems, defenses, propulsion, computer automation and advanced digital networking technology.”

So it’s a little deeper than a facelift.

RISE OF THE MACHINES: Eliminating Human Interaction. “I have a theory that much recent tech development and innovation over the last decade or so has an unspoken overarching agenda. It has been about creating the possibility of a world with less human interaction.”

Perhaps it’s because the people developing it are socially awkward.

WELL, GOOD: Tillerson Backs Off Asking Israel to Return $75 Million in Aid.

THE ANSWER TO THE QUESTION NO ONE WAS ASKING? Dear God, Toyota is Building a Souped-up Prius.

President Akio Toyoda seemed to take personal offense at the notion that his company was renowned for producing quality machines without offering much in the way of zest. He’s made it his mission to spice things up, but a performance variant of the Prius is not something anyone could have anticipated.

However, “performance” is a relative term when discussing the Prius GR Sport because it offers no additional power output.

Oh. Just when I was about to welcome some of our Prius-owning friends back into the world of high-output fun.

RUSH LIMBAUGH ON THE WIRETAP NEWS: “This is much worse than Watergate, folks. That was a third-rate burglary that went awry.” “Trump was called a liar. He was mocked for tweeting about Trump Tower being wiretapped. David Gergen, you’ll hear on the sound bites today, practically chokes when confronted with the news that Trump was right and doesn’t quite know what to say about it. But, I tell you what, folks, in many ways it’s worse than Watergate, and it’s still going on even with Trump in the White House. Richard Nixon was accused of spying on the DNC, but Nixon never ordered any such spying. In fact, he didn’t know anything about it. He was accused of using the IRS against his political opponents, but he never did. We know for a fact that Obama did both of these things, used the IRS against political opponents and probably more. There’s no outrage in the media on this. They think it’s great that Manafort’s lock was picked. The New York Times reports this as though it’s something that happens every day. Yep, the FBI showed up, they picked the lock of Manafort’s front door in Virginia and walked in and woke him up along with his family and then started demanding things and taking things….”

THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING, THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING! “They’re coming to buy targeted ads on Facebook. There’s no invasion in the offing. A distant foreign power coaxes us to eat away at ourselves from the inside. And Hillary urges us to gnaw away.”

NOAH ROTHMAN: Both Students and Their Mentors Deserve Blame for America’s Violent Streak.

“Here’s the problem with suggesting that upsetting speech warrants ‘safe spaces,’ or otherwise conflating mere words with physical assault: If speech is violence, then violence becomes a justifiable response to speech,” Rampell writes. Indeed, this observation has been proposed by those who have watched the storm clouds on the horizon for years now (cough). Rampell should, however, not limit her critique to colleges. These authoritarian ideas didn’t dawn on these teenagers like an epiphany ex nihilo. They were imparted.

In the modern age, the intellectual foundations needed to transform even murderous violence as an understandable, if not entirely acceptable, response to provocation were laid years ago by a frustrated class of activists trapped in ivy-covered cages on campuses. It was an impulse that began to seep out into the national consciousness when the editors and cartoonists of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo were slaughtered by the Islamist terrorists they deliberately offended. We were treated to a series of hand-wringing treatise from earnest liberals lamenting the effects of a society that “perversely” “valorizes free speech for its own sake.”

Even former Secretary of State John Kerry gave credence to this ideal. Following the bloody November 2015 attack on various locations in Paris, Kerry called the violence senseless—unlike the attacks on Charlie Hebdo. The Charlie Hebdo murderers, he said, had “a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, ‘Okay, they’re really angry because of this and that.’” That same logic can been seen today in the cowardice of adult men and women who scold their young charges for inviting the likes of Milo Yiannopoulos, Ben Shapiro, Ann Coulter, Condoleezza Rice, Christina Hoff Sommers, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Charles Murray, or any number of pop culture figures, intellectuals, and conservative authors onto campus. Don’t they know they’re just asking for it?

The crybully’s tears were always crocodile.

FIGHT THE CORRUPTION! Jaclyn Cashman: Trump should muzzle million $$ speaker fees.

President George W. Bush signed sweeping lobbying legislation to cut down on corruption in 2007 with the “Honest Leadership and Open Government Act.”

The law forced ex-senators and top executive branch officials to wait two years before they could lobby Congress after their Capitol Hill jobs ended. Former Representatives had to wait only one year.

At the time, rising star Barack Obama, then a U.S. Senator, called it “the most sweeping ethics reform since Watergate.”

Trump should simply make an amendment to that rule and address the issue of huge speaking fees.

Doesn’t it seem a bit cozy that Obama is making more than most people make in a year during all these speeches to the finance sector? A little distance between the Oval Office and Wall Street could further put Americans at ease that the commander in chief and top staffers care more about Main Street than landing gigs once they depart.

How do we know that decisions made on the way out didn’t benefit the companies now cutting checks to top officials for doing little work in return?

Even Massachusetts U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren called Obama’s first paid speech troubling.

During the presidential election, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders criticized Hillary Clinton’s bank account filled with six-figure checks from Wall Street.

It would appear Trump could get bipartisan support on such a law.

It would be super-amusing.

TUCKER CARLSON: Were We Lied to About Wiretapping, Or Did FBI Go Rogue?

According to a new report from CNN, Paul Manafort, who for a time last year was the Trump campaign chairman, was indeed wiretapped by the federal government, both before and after the election.

Manafort, it ought to be noted, had an apartment inside Trump Tower at that time, so it is virtually certain that surveillance of him would have included other members of the Trump campaign staff, maybe even Trump himself. In other words, it looks like Trump’s tweet may have been right. So why did three top members of Congress from both parties, and the country’s top law enforcement officers all assure us that the surveillance didn’t happen? That there wasn’t a shred of evidence to suggest it had happened? Were they lying or did they simply not know?

Neither answer is comforting.

Nope.

BATTLE OF THE SEXES MOVIE: BILLIE JEAN KING SINGS, ‘I AM WOMAN, HEAR ME BORE.’ “The directors of the new movie don’t seem to realize that Bobby Riggs is the one viewers want to hang out with:”

It’s impossible not to think of John McEnroe’s comment that Serena Williams would be ranked no. 700 if she played in the men’s circuit. Riggs, though a Wimbledon champion in his youth, is now 55 and out of shape. Instead of training, he parties. He isn’t close to being one of the top 700 male tennis players in the world. When he goes on to play King, he manages to win ten games over three sets and proves a perfectly creditable opponent. The movie’s implied contention that women’s tennis offers the same quality of play as men’s simply doesn’t withstand acquaintance with the facts.

Moreover, that point is made in the dullest way imaginable. Simon Beaufoy is one of the most accomplished screenwriters working today, with The Full Monty and Slumdog Millionaire to his vast credit, but he falls into the earnest-message-movie trap and keeps having his characters state, restate and re-restate the themes of the film in one on-the-nose scene after another. The directors, the wife-and-husband team of Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton, who made Little Miss Sunshine in 2006 but haven’t had a hit since, don’t seem to realize that the irrepressible Riggs — he’s such a born entertainer that he wears scuba flippers for one match and plays another with a dog on a leash — is the one we want to hang out with. King is simply a grind, a classic student-council nerd who stays home and does her homework while Riggs, the class clown, is out there making the world giggle with outrageous stunts and insult comedy.

According to Wikipedia, “Principal photography on the film began in Los Angeles on April 13, 2016.” Of course it was intended as a parable for the presidential election – except as usually happens, the person who appears to be having more fun on the campaign trail ends up the winner. Did Hillary look like she was having any fun at all plonking along the campaign trail?

ROGER SIMON ON THE BACK TO BACK CONTRAST OF TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME AT THE EMMYS AND TRUMP HIMSELF AT THE UN.

Read the whole thing.

(Something tells me Scott Adams’ next blog post has just written itself as well.)

INCLUSIVITY: Activist in Seminar: All White People Are Racist and Always Will Be.

I’m not certain she’s thought this through.