CELEBRITIES MAKE IT OFFICIAL: Pick Trump or Us.

Christian Toto:

There’s an interesting psychological game going on here, and it’s one Hollywood, Inc. might not relish. The more teeth gnashing we see out of both the press and Hollywood, the more reluctant Trump supporters side with him.

Why?

Entertainers should entertain. The mainstream media should report the facts, not take sides. Seeing both fail to fulfill their duty makes some citizens sympathetic to both President Trump and his histrionics.

We’re already seeing some of the results of this “choose him or us” playbook. Box office numbers are cratering since Trump took office. The president’s Twitter war against NFL players refusing to respect the National Anthem is turning into a slaughter.

Entertainment is where we go — or at least try to go — to escape the daily grind. Gleichschaltung worked in Nazi Germany because outlets were limited and control was total. Hollywood acts as though that’s the case in 21st Century in America when in fact, entertainment (and information) outlets are virtually unlimited — and most attempts at control result in the Streisand Effect or one of its corollaries.

Hollywood and the mainstream media continue to blur the lines between entertainment and news, and between news and indoctrination — a process which seems to be accelerating even as audiences continue shrinking. Now the process may speed up even more as the Ick Factor becomes undeniable. Harvey Weinstein has shown that not only is Hollywood as bad as we imagined, it might be worse than we could imagine.

Back in its heyday, Fox News proved that you could make big ratings and big money by appealing to audiences outside of the NYC-DC-LA Progressive Axis. When will some smart Hollywood studio rediscover the same thing about blockbuster entertainment?

THE TOLERANT LEFT: Dana Loesch Explains Why She’s Being Forced to Move Out of Her House.

WEIRD. WHAT COULD ACCOUNT FOR THAT? CBS earnings to disappoint due to weak NFL ratings, Credit Suisse says.

MARK RIPPETOE: Physical Strength Is Like Money In the Bank.

Physical strength is like money in the bank, in that it enables you to do the things you want to do with your body. Work, play sports, hunt and fish, and be physically independent well into your later years – physical strength is the basis of all these things.

I know that sitting around the table at The Academy, solving calculus problems, grappling with tough philosophical questions, writing art criticism, calculating reparations payments, and making decisions for other people might seem to be a more satisfying use of time and intellect. If you’re physically lazy, it certainly is.

But you can still do all these things while getting your deadlift up to a respectable weight. I manage.

Intellectual pursuits are indeed important, but having a strong enough body to host an intellect effectively, and to enjoy the fruits of intellectual accomplishment into old age is part of the equation. Strength is the antithesis of ill health, and ill health is not how an intellect flourishes.

In fact, the muscle mass that comes with the development of physical strength has been proven to prevent the diseases and afflictions that come with careless aging, the irresponsible lack of attention to maintaining the strength that is everyone’s birthright. Everyone can get and stay strong, but this requires work, and excuses are easier than squats and deadlifts.

Related: Nassim Taleb on how to spot an intellectual-yet-idiot: “He doesn’t even deadlift.”

Also: Lifting weights could make you more intelligent, study suggests.

SODOM-ON-THE-PACIFIC SEES ITS FEARS BECOME REAL: Harvey Weinstein’s Fall Opens the Floodgates in Hollywood.

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CAN’T ANYBODY PLAY THIS GAME? French intelligence texts jihadist by mistake, inadvertently warning of surveillance operation.

A French intelligence agent sent a text message by mistake to the mobile phone of a jihadist, inadvertently warning him that he was under surveillance and undermining an investigation, it emerged on Friday.

The target of the probe, described as an “Islamist preacher” based in the Paris area, immediately understood that his phone was being tapped and his movements monitored.

He called the agent to complain and warned his contacts that they were under surveillance. As a result, separate investigations by two different intelligence services came to nothing, M6 television reported.

Sigh.

WAIT, WHAT? Sevier deputy suffered panic attack while armed, couple charged with causing it. I’ve read this story twice and I’m still not sure what’s going on.

CHICKS DIG BAD BOYS: O.J. Simpson slides right back into the Vegas nightlife scene as he mingles with three women. “Looks like O.J.’s still got game — and incredibly, some women are still willing to play along.”

AT AMAZON, save big on Wheels and Tires for Winter.

Plus, deals on Herbs, Spices, and Seasonings.

NOT EVEN LINCOLN IS SPARED THE WRATH OF THE STATUE TOPPLERS: “Who would have guessed the author of the Gettysburg Address was a white supremacist?”

Now who’s being naïve, Reason? Everyone not named Barack Obama can be transformed instantly into a white supremacist in the eyes of the SJW left.

Speaking of which, Michael Walsh posits that pioneering American songwriter Stephen Foster is Next Up to be Torn Down. “Almost half a century ago, when I was a young music critic in Rochester, N.Y., I predicted in print that someday radicals would want to dig up the corpses of the politically incorrect dead (we didn’t use that term then, but the sentiment was already around) and hang them. Tearing down their statues and erasing them from history is the next best thing.”

Not one of Foster’s, but certainly apropos in the era of statue toppling:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgOX1qrN1O4

YOUNG ADULT NOVEL ABOUT “MOB MENTALITIES” PUNISHED AFTER ONLINE MOB MENTALITY BACKLASH:

When Laura Moriarty decided she wanted to write a dystopian novel about a future America in which Muslims are forcefully corralled into detention centers, she was aware that she should tread carefully. Her protagonist is a white teenager, but one of her main characters, Sadaf, is a Muslim American immigrant from Iran, so Moriarty began by diving into Iranian books and films. Moriarty explained via email that she asked two Iranian immigrant friends to read an early draft and see if Sadaf seemed authentic to them, and whether the language and accent fit with their memories and experiences. A friend of Pakistani and American descent who is a practicing Muslim gave additional feedback. Moriarty asked a senior colleague at the University of Kansas, Giselle Anatol, who writes about Young Adult fiction and has been critical of racist narratives in literature, to read the book with a particular eye toward avoiding another narrative about a “white savior.” And after American Heart was purchased by Harper, the publisher provided several formal “sensitivity reads,” in which a member of a minority group is charged with spotting potentially problematic depictions in a manuscript.

So many, many problematics – why, it’s as if the SJW mob can just pull problematics out of the air at will!

As I noted here last week, the recent review of Mark Lilla’s The Once and Future Liberal at the L.A. Review of Books claimed that, “Despite his fondness for ridiculing the religious intensity of the ‘social justice warrior,’ Lilla fails to recognize that a rejection of one’s political expressivism could be experienced as a religious deconversion. For some, the remedy may well be worse than the disease.”

The former is certainly true. The latter is most certainly false, as the above documented freakout demonstrates in spades. Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: “The ultimate endpoint of keeping out mitts off experience that doesn’t belong to us is that there is no fiction,” novelist Lionel Shriver warned last year in a speech at the Brisbane Writers Festival. She put on a sombrero during the speech to demonstrate that novelists were being warned by SJWs that “you’re not supposed to try on other people’s hats. Yet that’s what we’re paid to do, isn’t it? Step into other people’s shoes, and try on their hats.”

Naturally, she was crucified by the left for telling the truth.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The 11 college majors with the highest unemployment rates.

SO THREE OF THE TOP 10 ARTICLES ON SSRN ARE FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE COLLEGE OF LAW. Hat trick!

I THINK IT’S ALL ABOUT ZERO POINT ENERGY: The Forgotten Mystery of Inertia.

AMERICA: What I Saw In The Floodwaters of Houston.

KURT SCHLICHTER: The Fussy Attack of the Domesticated Conservatives.

You know what you won’t find in the major papers or on the mainstream networks, besides timely exposés of Democrat megadonors who are also megaperverts? Conservative columnists who don’t foam at the mouth over Donald Trump and who actually support conservative policies. Instead, you’ll find a bunch of journalistic Jeb!s, because the liberals hiring them know that squishes gonna squish.

Look, far be it from me to tell my enemy when it’s making a mistake, but because the media only hires nominal conservatives who already agree with liberals, liberals have no idea what real conservatives think or why. This is the reason they end up baffled when they lose and lose and lose again – sure, Felonia von Pantsuit was also stupid and drunk, but you get the point. As Sun Tzu observed, and I believe this is a verbatim translation from the original Chinese text, a wise general must seek to know and understand the true nature and schemes of his enemy lest he end up as forlorn and humiliated as a foxy fern in the Miramax head office.

Who knew that Kurt’s Chinese was so fluent?

Related: “We tried nice guys. We had John McCain. Mitt Romney.” And the press called them Hitler.

FASTER, PLEASE: Viruses discovered a century ago may be our best defense against a threat that could kill 10 million people a year by 2050. “The treatments are made of bacteria-killing viruses called bacteriophages, or phages for short. Discovered in the early 1900s, bacteriophages have the potential to treat people with bacterial infections. They’re commonly used in parts of eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union as another way to treat infections that could otherwise be treated by antibiotics. Because they are programmed to fight bacteria, phages don’t pose much of a threat to human safety on a larger scale.”

I’ve been hearing about phage therapy as a coming thing for most of my life. I wish it would happen.

PATRICK POOLE: Pakistani Police Beat Christian Student To Death In Latest Sectarian Lynching.

FASTER, PLEASE: Brain Stimulation Partly Awakens Patient after 15 Years in Vegetative State.

FAKE HATE: Suspect Arrested for Campus Graffiti Swastika Is Black Ex-Employee.

UH-OH: Megyn Kelly’s ratings hit ‘possible all-time low.’

Her “Megyn Kelly Today” viewership slipped from 0.77 ratings points on Monday to 0.54 ratings points on Tuesday of last week.

“It’s a possible all-time low for ‘Today.’ It may even be lower than her [Fox] cable show. [NBC News president] Noah [Oppenheim] and [NBC News and MSNBC chairman] Andy [Lack] are in big trouble,” a source told us.

Another source added, “That’s a big drop. They have to turn this around.”

Kelly also appeared for the first time on MSNBC earlier this week.

“It’s unthinkable. You don’t see Matt [Lauer] or Savannah [Guthrie] on MSNBC … It’s not a good sign.”

FLASHBACK: Roger Ailes’ Evil-Genius Plan to Sink the Competition Bears Fruit.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: The new reason why women cheat on their husbands.

A LOOK AT Ghana’s Emerging Surfing Community.