“VIRTUALLY TUNING” an automotive audio system.

OH: The Iranian Parliament Chanted ‘Death to America’ as they voted to spend $800 million on ballistic missiles.

LET’S SET FIRE TO THINGS AND BREAK STUFF: The Washington Post — under the fig leaf of “analysis” –rationalizes and justifies mob violence today, saying “Charlottesville showed that liberalism can’t defeat white supremacy. Only direct action can.” A helluva dog whistle kicker:

Segregationists have again assumed their pedestals in the Justice Department, the White House and many other American temples. Paper alone won’t drive them out. Start throwing rocks.

The best part is you can fulfill all your Antifa needs –baseball bats, Antifa masks, helmets and camouflage gear — by ordering them through Amazon! It’s a win-win for Bezos!

READER BOOK PLUG: From Francis Owen Drewry, Heresies.

WHY SOME PEOPLE ARE “CARBOHOLICS.”

CHRISTIAN TOTO: The One Reason Media Refuse to Cite for Bad Box Office.

RELATED: Spielberg-Lucas “Blockbuster Implosion” Omen Prevails.

Spielberg said at the time: “That’s the big danger, and there’s eventually going to be an implosion — or a big meltdown. There’s going to be an implosion where three or four or maybe even a half-dozen mega budget movies are going to go crashing into the ground, and that’s going to change the paradigm.”

Other huge flops this year include “Life” — the sci fi movie no one saw, “Monster Trucks,” which was a monster disaster. “Ghost in the Shell” with Scarlett Johansson also came and went quickly. Plus Will Ferrell’s “The Office” was a total write off, and Sony’s “Rough Night” was an embarrassment.

I’m not counting the $100 million plus lost on “The Promise,” because it was a vanity production.

This year also brought Tom Hanks’s biggest flop in decades, “The Circle.” And of course there were the two misbegotten TV remakes– “Baywatch” and “CHiPs.”

Even blockbusters that seemed like hits weren’t — “Pirates of the Caribbean 5” was a bloated mess. And “Transformers 5” was so bad that critics wondered why it was made. “The Mummy” also reeked of failure and desperation.

Hollywood has a long list of creative ills, but seven-figure vanity productions might be the least excusable.

IRONY THY NAME IS ANDREW KACZYNSKI: CNN dude who threatened to doxx meme maker concern-trolls Nazi fail-doxx.

HEATHER MAC DONALD: Don’t Even Think About Being Evil – Corporate America has managed to make higher education look like an open marketplace of ideas.

Mr. Damore’s fate was foreshadowed by the sacking of Harvard president Larry Summers in 2006. At a conference the previous year, Mr. Summers had hypothesized that the unequal distribution of the highest-level mathematical abilities may contribute to the sex disparity of science faculties. Numerous studies have confirmed that men predominate at the farthest reaches of math skills (high and low).

Mr. Summers’s carefully qualified speculation infamously provoked MIT biology professor Nancy Hopkins to flee the room and tell reporters she “would’ve either blacked out or thrown up” had she stayed. Mr. Summers issued a groveling retraction and ponied up a cool $50 million for more gender-diversity initiatives, but his tenure as president was doomed.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai employed the same bathetic language of injury in his response to Mr. Damore. “The memo has clearly impacted our co-workers, some of whom are hurting and feel judged based on their gender,” he asserted in a memo of his own. Yonatan Zunger, a recently departed Google senior engineer, claimed in an online essay that the speculations of Mr. Damore, a junior employee, have “caused significant harm to people across this company, and to the company’s entire ability to function.” He added that “not all conversations about ideas even have basic legitimacy” (emphasis his).

This is what happens when a multibillion-dollar corporation is run and largely staffed by crybullies.

Plus: “When a gigantic corporation that controls our data and knows us intimately takes a controversial political stance, it ought to make us worry,” the wise man once wrote.

IN THE FUTURE, EVERYONE WILL BE A NAZI FOR 15 MINUTES. AND THIS IS THE FUTURE. James Damore to CNN: ‘I’m a centrist, and they’re calling me a Nazi.’

NEWS YOU CAN USE: 5 Things to Know About the Alabama Senate Primary Elections.

WHAT, INDEED? Salon: What if the DNC Russian “hack” was really a leak after all? If so it will be ignored, because the “hack” narrative is too convenient and well-established.

EXCELLENT ADVICE FOR ACADEMICS: Write No Matter What.

UNITE? YOU KEEP USING THAT WORD… “Unite the Right” leader attacks Trump — for letting his daughter marry a Jew.

RIP: Joe Bologna, Star of “My Favorite Year,” Half of Hollywood’s Most Married (And Happiest) Couple.

My Favorite Year is an under-appreciated gem, and also features one of Peter O’Toole’s most enjoyable performances.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The Anti-Trump Bourbons: Learning and Forgetting Nothing in Time for 2020.

OH: Iran filling vacuum left by IS retreat in Syria, Iraq, Mossad chief warns.

“The areas where Daesh [an Arabic term for IS] presence is decreasing, Iran is working to fill the void,” Mossad chief Yossi Cohen said during a security briefing to cabinet ministers on Sunday.

In late 2014, the terrorist group controlled approximately 100,000 square kilometers (38,610 square miles) of territory in western Iraq and eastern Syria, according to the US-based RAND Corporation think tank. (The group also controlled an additional 10,000 square kilometers in Nigeria, Libya, Afghanistan and Egypt.) It started losing ground in 2015 and currently controls less than half that area, or some 36,200 square kilometers (14,000 square miles), according to the IHS Conflict Monitor intelligence think tank.

Israeli security officials have warned that Tehran may use the area of western Iraq and eastern Syria as a “land bridge” connecting the Islamic Republic to Lebanon, through which it can move fighters and weaponry.

Cohen said Iran is also taking over territory for itself and its proxies in Lebanon and Yemen.

The Mossad chief noted that in the two years since the signing of the Iran nuclear deal, known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, Tehran has not abandoned its desire to develop nuclear weapons, and that the agreement “only reinforced that trend and strengthened Iranian aggression in the region.”

You don’t say.

PENNSYLVANIA, MICHIGAN, AND WISCONSIN COULD NOT BE REACHED FOR COMMENT: Trump acts like the president of the Red States of America.

RICHARD EPSTEIN: Gender@Google. “Indeed, recent data show that in all graduate programs women outnumber men by more than a 4-3 ratio, but that field differences matter. Thus men get about 75 percent of the advanced degrees in Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Sciences, while women get slightly more than half the degrees in biological and agricultural sciences. No simple theory of discrimination can begin to account for this data. It is largely student selection that tends to drive the outcomes. But these raw numbers in quantitative areas matter far more for the tech jobs in Google than for work in management and sales. The observed distributions thus help explain the gender imbalance in tech jobs.”

FIGHTING NOT-SO-VAINLY THE OLD ENNUI? Why Generation X Might Be Our Last, Best Hope.

The members of the in-between generation have moved through life squeezed fore and aft, with these tremendous populations pressing on either side, demanding we grow up and move away, or grow old and die—get out, delete your account, kill yourself. But it’s become clear to me that if this nation has any chance of survival, of carrying its traditions deep into the 21st century, it will in no small part depend on members of my generation, Generation X, the last Americans schooled in the old manner, the last Americans that know how to fold a newspaper, take a joke, and listen to a dirty story without losing their minds.
…
Though much derided, members of my generation turn out to be something like Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca—we’ve seen everything and grown tired of history and all the fighting and so have opened our own little joint at the edge of the desert, the last outpost in a world gone mad, the last light in the last saloon on the darkest night of the year. It’s not those who stormed the beaches and won the war, nor the hula-hooped millions who followed, nor what we have coming out of the colleges now—it’s Generation X that will be called the greatest.

I rather doubt that last bit, but Rich Cohen has written an interesting and entertaining piece.

UPDATE: More on this from Jon Gabriel. “Boomers and Millennials, writ large, subscribe to the unconstrained vision; Gen X to the constrained, or tragic, vision. Perhaps we should start calling my generation the Sowell generation.”

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S FULL-COURT PRESS: Coordinating U.S. power to squeeze the nukes out of North Korea. And it looks like it’s getting results.

TAXPROF: The IRS Scandal, Day 1559: Checking In On IRS-Tea Party Lawsuits.

RON RADOSH: Trump’s Statements on Charlottesville Reveal a Deeply Flawed President at His Worst.

STEPHEN POINTED THIS OUT: But it needs to be pointed out, repeatedly. Iran is threatening to re-start its nuclear weapons program. But do we know if the program was really stopped? The truth is, Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran was a very bad deal. It was puffery and posturing by the Obama Administration. It did not penalize Iranian behavior and did little to hinder Iran’s ballistic missile program.