TREATING CANCER WITH MARLBOROS: Amid soaring inflation, Venezuela’s Maduro increases minimum wage by 50 percent.

REVIEW: 2018 Toyota Camry: Made in America, great again.

J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS: ‘Civil Whites Act’: White-Guilt Sunday Brunch Begins in Philadelphia.

SHOCKER: Taco Bell Is … Healthy?

We’re culturally appropriating stoner health food.

IMPORTANT NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: The claim that hot water freezes faster than cold water just got even weirder.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Mediocrity Lobby Angry Because Grades for Schools Expose Their Incompetence. “When do we begin to talk about the fact that poor and minority children are not held down half so much by mean rich people as by glad-handing mediocrats who earn their livings off the bones of failed childhoods?”

Preach it.

CHANGE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN: President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for education secretary has had a key role with her husband in creating a public charter school in western Michigan.

The nonprofit charter school has grown from 80 students in rundown office space at Gerald R. Ford International Airport to its own building with 600 students from seven counties. Some kids ride three public buses to get to the suburban airport. One teen stays with friends in the Grand Rapids area and commutes 150 miles to home on weekends. A public lottery is held each spring if applications exceed openings.

The school seems to fit Betsy DeVos’ philosophy about education and what she’s pledging to promote in Washington.

If Washington must have a role in K-12 education, it should be in reinforcing successes like West Michigan Aviation Academy.

READER BOOK PLUG: From reader Paul Kapur, Jihad as Grand Strategy: Islamist Militancy, National Security, and the Pakistani State.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Fracking Protesters Are Putin Puppets.

Fracking is clearly in America’s national interest. There is broad political consensus that the United States would be better off relying on ourselves and our closest allies (like Canada) for energy, rather than on Middle Eastern countries who can be only charitably described as “frenemies.”

In other words, compared to the status quo, fracking is good for the planet and bad for our enemies. Russia’s economy, which is largely dependent on exporting fossil fuels, could face collapse if oil and gas prices fall too far. That is why RT is fearmongering about fracking; it wants to decrease the global supply of fossil fuels (which keeps prices artificially high) as part of a strategy to keep Russia’s economy alive.

Thus, environmentalists like Joe Romm and the protesters who block fracking and the construction of pipelines, such as Keystone XL and Dakota Access, are serving as “useful idiots” for Vladimir Putin. They falsely believe they are doing good for America and the planet when, in reality, they are only doing good for the Kremlin.

Don’t be too sure that they believe it.

COUNTERTERRORISM AND MYTHICAL INFIDELS IN INDONESIA.

“PEOPLE WHO ARE REALLY SERIOUS ABOUT SOFTWARE SHOULD MAKE THEIR OWN HARDWARE:” Waymo Shows Off Its Do-It-Yourself Robocar Hardware.

WHY ARE LEFTY-DOMINATED UNIVERSITIES SUCH HOTBEDS OF HATE AND VIOLENCE? Berkeley Murder Suspect Pablo Gomez Harassed College Republicans Last Year.

IT’S ON: MMA President Not Letting Meryl Streep’s Nasty ‘Not the Arts’ Comment Slide.

As I said on Twitter yesterday, anyone who doesn’t think sport is art didn’t see Willie McGee in Game 3 of the ’82 World Series.

YAHOO? Marissa Mayer to depart; company to be renamed Altaba.

The high-profile Mayer, who was brought in to save the Internet icon in 2012; Filo, who co-founded the company at Stanford University in 1994; board chairman Maynard Webb; and three others are departing. It is unclear, however, if Mayer will remain in some capacity.

Eric Brandt, a new member of Yahoo’s 11-member board, was named chairman immediately.

In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing late today, Yahoo said the resignations are “not due to any disagreement with the Company on any matter relating to the Company’s operations, policies or practices.”

The filing also said the company would be renamed Altaba after the Verizon deal closes.

Altaba?

THIS IS CNN:

That’s how the narrative is crafted.

OUR ASTEROID DEFENSES AREN’T UP TO SNUFF: An Asteroid Just Barely Missed Earth, Flying Closer Than the Moon. And we spotted it only two days ago.

As somebody said, an asteroid near-miss is nature’s way of saying “Hey, how’s that space program coming along?”

OF COURSE HE DOES: The Star Witness On Sessions’ ‘Racism’ Has Deeply Troubled History.

ASHE SCHOW: In campus rape cases, colleges to learn sexual advances go both ways.

Thanks to federal guidance documents (which aren’t legally binding but carry heavy threats including the loss of federal funding), schools are forced to adjudicate accusations. Sexual assault is a felony, but campus hearings do not afford accused students proper due process rights such as attorney representation and cross-examination.

These limits, along with a campus culture that insists women never lie about sexual assault and that the issue is so prevalent that schools must take swift action to punish the accused, lead to many male students being expelled.

For the past half decade, more and more lawsuits from these male students have been filed, alleging schools violated the anti-sex discrimination statute known as Title IX by discrimination against male students, ironically in the name of correcting Title IX violations against female students.

Farrer’s case is different for two reasons. One, most male students file as “John Doe” to avoid having their names put in print, and two, Farrer is suing his accuser for defamation and intentional infliction of harm.

Good for him. Male victims of unwanted sexual advances shouldn’t feel any more ashamed than female victims.

NOW YOU KNOW HOW THE REST OF AMERICA FELT FOR EIGHT YEARS: Obama staffers can’t find work in Trump’s DC: ‘There are no jobs.’

STILL NOT GETTING IT DEP’T: Celebrities Head to D.C. for Trump Protest.

How many more new Trump voters will they inspire?

PETER SAVODNIK: The Secret Source of Putin’s Evil.

Dostoevsky foresaw Russia destroying itself with the clandestine, or not so clandestine, support of the West. The clearest illustration of this self-destruction comes in The Brothers Karamazov. The novel, the longest whodunit ever written, revolves around the murder of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov. One of Karamazov’s three legitimate sons, Mitya, is accused and found guilty of the murder. But the real murderer is Karamazov’s mentally challenged, bastard son, Smerdyakov—and the real murderer behind Smerdyakov (the zakashik, or orderer) is Ivan, the most successful and Westernized of the Karamazov brothers. It is Ivan, full of his newfangled Western ideas, who tears apart his family (and, metaphorically, Russia), and it is the last remaining legitimate Karamazov son, Lyosha, who is left to rebuild it. Not incidentally, Lyosha is the youngest, most religious, and most self-effacing of the Karamazov clan. The way forward is actually the way backward—all the way to the ancient, Russian sobornost, the spiritual community that, in the Slavophile mind, used to bind Russia together. This, all these years later, is Putin’s Russia.

The Soviet perplex, viewed through a Karamazov prism, is not the cause of post-Soviet Russia’s woes but the effect of the same calamity that still bedevils Russia: the identity crisis bequeathed to it by its original Westernizer, Peter. Russia spent the 1990s devouring itself—selling off its biggest oil assets, handing over its elections to the C.I.A., allowing NATO to encroach upon its borders—and, only under Putin, has it retaken possession of itself.

Putin is playing a very long game — going back three centuries.

JESSE WALKER ON MARGARET SULLIVAN AND “FAKE NEWS.” “Once you’ve started slapping the ‘fake news’ label on anything that looks like sloppy reporting or ideological bias in the alternative press, you’ve pretty much guaranteed that people will start flinging it when they think they’ve spotted sloppy reporting or ideological bias in the mainstream. No media-machine efficiency was required. Ask the right who taught them how to do this stuff, and they can look up from their bed and tell you: You, all right? I learned it by watching you!”

ANTONIA OKAFOR: Contrary to Obama’s Claims, Race Relations Have Gotten Worse On His Watch. Her points on black employment rates, etc. are also good.

IT’S POSSIBLE TO IMAGINE A LEFT THAT’S NEITHER RACIST NOR IGNORANT OF BASIC FACTS. BUT IT’S NOT EASY TO DO SO.

She’s his granddaughter. And didn’t lefties do the same thing to Mitt Romney?