IT SEEMS TO MOSTLY AFFECT PEOPLE WHO DO A LOT OF CARDIO, NOT LIFTERS: Death By Exercise.

WELL, GOOD: AI Makes Anthrax Bioterror Detection Easier.

HIGHER EDUCATION UPDATE: What Sets Thrivers and Divers Apart in College? The Insta-Daughter — who I think can fairly be characterized as a Thriver — told me that my advice to seek out professors during office hours was the secret to her success, though I think her conscientiousness and strong work ethic were the important parts.

A REMINDER FROM PATRICK POOLE: Mueller Probe of Trump Only Exists Because of Comey’s Illegal Leak to New York Times.

THIS WILL END WELL: Anti-Trump Republicans Plotting “Shadow Campaign” for 2020.

WELL, YES: Thanks, Obama! Trump Is Expanding Your Effort to Imprison Leakers!

Sessions is continuing a war that began before he took office. Nothing he said today is all that different from how the federal government under President Barack Obama treated unauthorized leaks other than the expansion of the effort.

Obama’s Department of Justice aggressively pursued leaks, invoked the Espionage Act to prosecute people, snooped on the press, and even threatened journalists with prison to try to make them give up sources. The department eventually changed its policies after the revelation that it had been surveilling journalists to try to track down leakers. But those policies can be changed back, and that may be what Sessions intends to do.

Obama famously campaigned on transparency but his administration provided anything but that. Federal agencies took years to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests. Such a paucity of information practically requires reporters to depend on leaks in order to get information.

There’s a difference between leaking and whistleblowing, though. Leaks aren’t always bad — sometimes they’re good — but when they’re done out of a bare desire to do political harm, as the recent Trump transcript leaks seem to have been, then there’s no excuse.

MICHAEL LEDEEN: How the Trump Administration’s Anti-Leak Crusade Is Likely to Play Out.

BEN DOMENECH: It’s Time For Millennials To Rise And Claim Their Inheritance: Even as they inhabit an era providing utopian degrees of choices, millennials have become too fearful to actually make those choices and seize the future liberty allows.

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GRIFFIN PRACTICE IN THE GULF: The coastal patrol ship USS Chinook (PC 9) test fires a Griffin missile off Bahrain. The Chinook‘s sister ship, USS Thunderbolt, is the USN warship that confronted Iranian Revolutionary Guard patrol boats in July.

RELATED: Background on the Griffin (from January 2017).

OBAMA’S WEAKNESS ENCOURAGED RUSSIAN MEDDLING:

This timidity was on display all throughout 2016, well before the President was confronted with a detailed report from the CIA containing evidence of Russian interference in our elections. In July of that year, just a little after Trump, Jr. held his meeting with the so-called Russian lobbyists in New York, an explosive video started making the rounds—footage of a Russian security guard wrestling an alleged U.S. spy to the ground right outside the U.S. embassy in Moscow, in the process fracturing the American’s shoulder. It was an act of unprecedented aggression on the part of the Russians, with at least one former U.S. intelligence official noting how such brazen behavior was unheard of even at the height of the Cold War. And it was but the most egregious manifestation of what appears to have been a concerted effort to intimidate U.S. diplomats in Russia.

Yes, the wages of Obama’s weakness. Good to see The American Interest is woke.

WHAT’S NEW? Mayor Rahm Emanuel believes he should be able to violate the law without consequences.

UNEXPECTEDLY: Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles Employees Arrested For Creating False IDs for Illegals.

ON THE CONTRARY, HE SHOULD KEEP TALKING, RIGHT THROUGH 2018 AND 2020: CNN Preacher Jim Acosta Should Shut His Loud, Irritating Face.

As Jim Treacher says, the left wants the right to shut up. The right wants the left to keep talking . . . .

EDDIE SCARRY: When Trump sticks to his agenda, he wins — and the media lose.

If Trump and Republicans want to keep the national media on the defensive, they can pursue the issues he campaigned on and, other than absolutely necessary bathroom breaks, do nothing else.

It’s when Trump talks about forgettable cable news people, his victimhood, and his own “very weak” attorney general that the media win.

Well, post-Kelly he seems to be sticking better.

WONDERFUL THING, SUBPEENEES: Trump administration mulls media subpoenas as part of leaks crackdown.

I wish we had Assistant Attorney General James Wells investigating this.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. The media needs Trump more than he needs them.

Michael Walsh:

On one side: the perpetually aggrieved White House press corps, whose members sit atop journalism’s pinnacle and yet are herded like cattle, made to stand behind rope lines and are generally treated with disdain by those they report on. Like fantasy-league baseball players, they’re convinced they can run the country better than the officials they so resentfully cover.

On the other: a beleaguered, media-conscious president who still harbors the notion that he can get dedicated ideological enemies to like him if he can just charm them enough and is prepared to go around them on Twitter if he can’t.

As the Trump administration revamps its communications operation yet again in the wake of the short-lived Anthony Scaramucci era, it’s time to face the fact that this is no longer an exercise in public relations, or even messaging strategy.

This is war.

That’s been true from the start — and do read the whole thing.

WHY DOES #FIGHTFORFIFTEEN HATE BLACK PEOPLE? Black Teens Are Fired When the Minimum Wage Rises: Two labor economists report that when the minimum wage increases, Black teens suffer disproportionate dismissals.

It is no surprise that Black teens, 16- to 19-years old, are disproportionately unemployed. At the Great Recession’s bottom, African-American teens had an unemployment rate of nearly 50 percent while the rate for all teens was 27.1 percent. In the weak post-Recession, many teens compete for jobs against down-sized adults with college degrees.

And economists William Even from Miami University and David Macpherson from Trinity University report that when a state, or the federal government, increases the minimum wage, Black teens are more likely to be laid off. The duo analyzed 600,000 data points, which the Employment Policies Institute says included “a robust sample of minority young adults unprecedented in previous studies on the minimum wage.”

The report focused on 16-to 24-year-old males without a high school diploma and found that for each 10 percent increase in the federal or state minimum wage employment for young Black males decreased 6.5 percent. By contrast, after the same wage boost, employment for white and Hispanic males fell respectively just 2.5 percent and 1.2 percent.

Like so many things pushed by unions, the minimum wage is a racist barrier to entry.

WELL, GOOD: Senate Advances Bill to Block Palestinian Aid if Terror Paydays Continue.

ROGER SIMON: Is America on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown or Civil War? “Can the Deep State co-exist with an awakened populace, even a partially awakened one? Increasingly, beneath all the leaks and counter-leaks, the missing emails and accusations, what we are looking at is a sclerotic system that has become increasingly built on self-preservation and not on the people’s will, in fact is largely disinterested in and disconnected from that will.”

NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF HIGHER EDUCATION: Northwestern professor and Oxford University employee who ‘stabbed and mutilated a hair stylist in a luxury Chicago apartment’ are captured more than 2,000 miles away in California. “The body was mutilated. His genitals were cut, mutilated. It was so savage it broke the knife found at the crime scene.”

HENRY KISSINGER: ‘Iranian Radical Empire’ Could Emerge in a Post-ISIS Middle East.

“Across large areas of Iraq and Syria, an ideologically radical religious army, Isis, has declared itself a relentless foe of modern civilisation, seeking violently to replace the international system’s multiplicity of states with a single Islamic empire governed by Sharia law,” the 94-year-old Kissinger wrote. “In these circumstances, the traditional adage that the enemy of your enemy can be regarded as your friend no longer applies. In the contemporary Middle East, the enemy of your enemy may also be your enemy. The Middle East affects the world by the volatility of its ideologies as much as by its specific actions.”

“The outside world’s war with Isis can serve as an illustration,” he continued. “Most non-Isis powers — including Shia Iran and the leading Sunni states — agree on the need to destroy it. But which entity is supposed to inherit its territory? A coalition of Sunnis? Or a sphere of influence dominated by Iran? The answer is elusive because Russia and the Nato countries support opposing factions. If the Isis territory is occupied by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards or Shia forces trained and directed by it, the result could be a territorial belt reaching from Tehran to Beirut, which could mark the emergence of an Iranian radical empire.”

The full article, which I recommend, is here.