TRADECRAFT: Clumsy French spy sends text message to the radical Islamist he was keeping tabs on.

Anyone who has accidently sent a text message to the wrong person might have some sympathy with a member of the French intelligent services who landed himself in trouble with his bosses this week.

The man, who works for the central territorial intelligence services (SCRT) had been keeping tabs on a suspected Islamist extremist.

He wanted to send a text containing important intelligence on his target to a colleague.

But the spy got all his phone numbers mixed up and accidentally sent it to the very suspect he had been closely monitoring.

The “target” was reportedly quick to respond to the message, reminding the spy of how incompetent he had been. And to make matters worse he was able to warn those he had been contact with that they too were probably being listened to.

You might find that just adding headshots to your contacts prevents sending messages to the wrong people, but you’re probably not in the spy biz.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Harvey Weinstein can’t wash away Hollywood’s sins: Exiling one mogul won’t bury this question: If people realize the system is exploitative and inhuman, will they still watch movies?

HMM: Officials Sniffing Into How So Many People Win State Lotteries So Many Times.

Gary Miller, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania Lottery, said it was unfair to draw any conclusions about the games’ most frequent winners just because they were winning.

“You cannot make any assumptions about frequent winners without knowing how often they play,” said Miller. “And the Lottery has no legal or business reason to track spending or frequency of play by individuals.”

However, Susan Woods, spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Auditor General’s Office, told PennLive the Auditor General’s office would be “reaching out to the Attorney General’s Office to discuss what might be the next best steps to ensure the integrity of Pennsylvania’s lottery.”

As unusual or “implausible” as Vukovich’s lottery winning streak might seem, it pales compared to the nation’s top lottery winner — 79-year-old Clarence Jones of Lynn, Mass. One day alone, in December 2016, he turned in 20 winning scratch-off tickets worth a total of $21,000.

Over the past six years, Jones has cashed in more than 7,300 winning lottery tickets with a total of $10.8 million.

Curious.

ROUNDUP: More Reaction To The Wax & Alexander Op-Ed On The Breakdown Of The ‘Bourgeois Culture.’

JOHN FUND ON AUSTRIA: The Populist Right, Scorned By The Left As ‘Islamophobic,’ Wins Another Election.

JUST FREAKING GREAT: WPA2 security flaw puts almost every Wi-Fi device at risk of hijack, eavesdropping. “Many products and device makers will likely not receive patches — immediately, or ever. Katie Moussouris‏, founder of Luta Security, said in a tweet that Internet of Things devices will be some of the ‘hardest hit.’ Until patches are available, Wi-Fi should be considered a no-go zone for anything mission critical, a feat almost impossible in today’s age of ubiquitous and blanket wireless network access.”

We are not ready for the Internet Of Things. Not even close.

HUSH MONEY: Rose McGowan tears into Lisa Bloom claiming the celebrity attorney is a ‘snake’ who tried to pay her $6 million to say ‘Harvey’s changed.’

In an emotional statement posted to what appears to be her private Facebook account, the former Charmed star accused celebrity attorney Lisa Bloom of approaching her literary agent to try and influence McGowan to publicly support Weinstein.

Bloom had represented Weinstein before resigning on October 7 after the scandal broke.

McGowan, who was one of the first women to publicly allege that Weinstein had sexually assaulted her, revealed she did not sign a non-disclosure agreement after reaching a settlement with the media mogul for $100,000 after she claims he raped her at a hotel room in 1997 during the Sundance Film Festival.

‘You know what is truth, Lisa? I feel like people should know that you’ve been calling my literary agent and saying there’d be money for me if I got on the “Harvey’s Changed” bandwagon?’ the actor wrote.

‘You told her that I should care about HIS reputation. How HE has a family now and how HE has changed. Well, guess what? I’ve always had a family and that didn’t stop him from assaulting me.’

RELATED? Former member of Pussycat Dolls Kaya Jones says the band was a front for a ‘prostitution ring’ and the singers were ‘passed around’ and ‘abused’ by industry executives.

Band’s founder Robin Antin denies the charges, but that’s a hard sell in Weinstein’s wake.

MEGAN MCARDLE: The FDA Needs This Nudge to Speed Along New Drugs: The commissioner is gradually correcting a dangerously overcautious culture.

Drug researcher Derek Lowe has pointed out that in today’s cautious climate, aspirin — good not only for headaches, but for heart attacks — would have “died in the lab,” because it can cause severe gastrointestinal bleeding. Even penicillin, the modern miracle that ushered in an age of safer surgery, safer sex and longer lifespans, would give today’s researchers pause, because of the risk of allergic reactions.

That drug was developed in a different time. It was tested in a slapdash manner — and luckily, penicillin is so amazing that its benefits were obvious even without a rigorously designed trial. If the team that discovered it had tried to follow modern FDA-mandated clinical trial procedures for the drug, its introduction and dissemination would have been seriously delayed. Fewer men would have come home from World War II.

The potential delay of the next penicillin should worry regulators at least as much as the potential horrors of another Thalidomide. But human psychology being what it is, we view sins of omission more benevolently than sins of commission, even if the results are the same. So regulators are likely to worry more about approving a bad drug than about delaying a good one.

No one person, even an agency head, can single-handedly change that sort of tendency, especially when it’s rooted in institutional culture. But they can slowly make headway with decisions about who to advance within the agency.

Faster, please.

THE SEXUAL PREDATORS EVERYONE STILL WORSHIPS:” “What do we do about predators we actually think are cool?…What is the point at which it becomes necessary for us to channel our inner Savonarolas and just start burning? Is one confirmed incident enough? How many Station to Stations or Physical Graffitis are worth the assault of a single woman or child? Are we affirming or materially contributing to their crimes when we watch films or listen to music made by abusers?”

Earlier: Hugh Hefner, Gangsta Rap & the Emerging Moral Majority: “Slowly, however, the elite of our culture seem to be drifting toward a new, far-more jaundiced and suspicious view of popular culture from the 1960s to the 1990s.”

PARTY OF YOUTH, YOU’RE DOING IT RIGHT: Austria’s next chancellor a 31-year-old conservative, early results show.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Princeton op-ed: Conservatives have no right to free speech.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Harvey Weinstein can’t wash away Hollywood’s sins: Exiling one mogul won’t bury this question: If people realize the system is exploitative and inhuman, will they still watch movies?

WHATABURGER: Fast Food Worker Fired for Refusing to Serve Police Officers.

JOSH BLACKMAN & SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: The ‘Resistance’ vs. George Washington: If a president can’t take emoluments, the founders were crooks.

The Trump administration has been under siege from the left’s self-professed “legal resistance.” Perhaps the highest-profile example involves President Trump himself. Several lawsuits allege that his business interests run afoul of the Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause.

The Justice Department has done a good job defending the president’s actions on most issues—but not on this one. The department still has refused to make its strongest argument: that the Foreign Emoluments Clause does not apply to the president. The Trump administration needs to throw out a 2009 opinion from the department’s Office of Legal Counsel that concluded, without any analysis, that the Foreign Emoluments Clause “surely” applied to President Obama. Instead the department should defend the president’s unitary role in the separation of powers—a position the Constitution supports. . . .

History backs up this reading. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton set the precedent in 1793: When the Senate requested a financial statement listing the “emoluments” of “every person holding any civil office or employment under the United States,” Hamilton’s comprehensive report excluded all elected offices—the president, vice president and members of Congress—but included appointed positions in all three governmental branches.

George Washington accepted, as a diplomatic gift from France, a framed full-length portrait of King Louis XVI. Thomas Jefferson accepted a bust of Czar Alexander I from Russia. Neither president sought Congress’s consent to keep the gifts.

But for some reason the Trump administration continues to stand by the 2009 opinion, drawn up when Mr. Obama was being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, which came with a $1.4 million award. The Office of Legal Counsel concluded Mr. Obama could accept the money, but the opinion simply assumed the Foreign Emoluments Clause applied to the presidency. It was taken as a given with no citations either to judicial rulings or to the practices established by Washington and other founders.

The Obama Justice Department was a disaster, and much of it is still employed under Trump.

MORE ON JIMMY KIMMEL ON LOSING REPUBLICAN VIEWERS: “I probably wouldn’t want to have a conversation with them anyway.”

We’ll get to Kimmel in a moment, but to understand how we got to this point, let’s flashback to the hypothesis that Robert Tracinski explored a week ago at the Federalist, in a column titled,“Why Late Night Hosts Like Jimmy Kimmel Are Suddenly So Political.” After discussing how DVRs, streaming and YouTube are fracturing their audiences, he concluded:

So the late-night shows are in a much fiercer competition for eyeballs than ever before, and I suspect the politicization is a response to that—a desperate way of getting in the news, of getting noticed, of securing the loyalty of a particular demographic. This is also my theory about the big entertainment awards shows like the Oscars and the Emmys. If the big, broad, general audience you used to have is gone, and deep down you think it’s never coming back, then why not make a harder bid for the loyalty of the smaller audience you’ve got left? In a time when the entertainment industry is (or thinks it is) a one-party state with no dissenters, you had better echo that politics back to your base.

What were once cultural institutions with a broad, bipartisan audience are becoming niche players with a narrow fan base. They no longer view partisan politics as a dangerous move that will shrink their audience. Instead, they’re using partisan politics as a lure to secure the loyalty of their audience, or what is left of it. Not that it’s going to work over the long term, because people who want to have their biases confirmed will just watch the five-minute YouTube clip Chris Cillizza links to the next day.

Tracinski’s theory dovetails perfectly with the above quoted tweet yesterday from the Washington Examiner: “Jimmy Kimmel on losing Republican viewers: ‘I probably wouldn’t want to have a conversation with them anyway.’” The article it links to goes on to note:

Critics like conservative commentator Ben Shapiro have slammed Kimmel for parading as a “moral arbiter.”

“I’m not. I mean, I agree with him. I’m nobody’s moral arbiter,” Kimmel told CBS. “You don’t have to watch the show. You don’t have to listen to what I say.”

A defiant Kimmel added that he doesn’t say “I don’t mind” because he preferred “everyone with a television to watch the show.”

“But if they’re so turned off by my opinion on healthcare and gun violence then, I don’t know, I probably wouldn’t want to have a conversation with them anyway,” he continued. “Not good riddance, but riddance.”

To paraphrase a legendary fictitious newscaster, you stay classy, Jimmy.

Kimmel is afraid to “have a conversation on healthcare and gun violence” because since 2001, the current Democratic Party purity test (just scroll through the Insta-archives on the topic) requires that Inner Party members make no contact with the lumpenproletariat, lest the bad think rub off. Kimmel runs the risk of learning about a topic and having his mind changed, and he and Disney and the DNC certainly can’t have that. And by echoing the party line, Kimmel keeps his base of remaining leftwing viewers, and his bosses pumped up as well.

As Salena Zito, who actually gets up from her desk and goes out to talk to everyday Americans — even icky flyover country Republicans despised by Hollywood! — and somehow survives the process tweets in response, “Narrow-minded commentary by [Kimmel.] Most Americans are willing to converse with someone who sees world differently than themselves.” But apparently, Democrats are done “having a conversation,” and are simply biding their time until they’re back in power to impose their will on us.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: America, Your Campuses Are Madhouses. Why Are We Paying For This? Expect more and more people to be asking this question.

When the people who run institutions care more about their standing within their narrow peer group than about the future of those institutions, things tend to go bad.

NAOMI SCHAEFER RILEY: TV shows like ‘Young Sheldon’ disguise a scary truth about boys today.

These TV characters represent an extreme, but it’s one that’s resonating with the American public: Boys are increasingly feeling left out and left behind. In a world that is increasingly dependent on communication skills and collaborative work — skills that girls seem to master more easily — boys are becoming adrift.

For their TV counterparts, things eventually turn out well in business and in love. Extreme smarts, it seems, can make up for a lot of social problems. For average boys in America, it is increasingly hard to navigate today’s educational and professional worlds. Schools, as many have noted, seem like hostile environments to them. From zero-tolerance policies that discipline boys who turn their thumbs and forefingers into guns to reading lists that are devoid of adventure to playgrounds that are built to minimize risk to the dramatic reduction in recess time, there seems to be fewer outlets for boys’ energies or imaginations. Which may be why they are diagnosed with ADHD at twice the rate of girls.

Christina Hoff Sommers, author of “The War Against Boys,” predicted that “the gender gap favoring girls is threatening to become a chasm.” That appears to be coming true. In a recent piece in the Atlantic, Amanda Ripley writes, “Wherever girls have access to school, they seem to eventually do better than boys. In 2015, teenage girls outperformed boys on a sophisticated reading test in 69 countries — every place in which the test was administered. In America, girls are more likely to take Advanced Placement tests, to graduate from high school and to go to college, and women continue their education over a year longer than men.”

Boys graduate from high school at lower rates. They make up only 43 percent of college graduates. And they are outnumbered by women in graduate school — 135 women for every 100 men. The results are obvious in our workforce, where there are at least 7 million prime-age men who have simply dropped out.

Colleges and universities in particular seem to place more value on social skills — participation in extracurricular activities, leadership in school groups — as well as on “executive function,” the ability to manage and organize many tasks, rather than just being very good in one area of study. When David Brooks coined the term “Organization Kid” while watching kids in elite colleges, he was describing a skill set that is much more common in girls.

Related: ‘Young Sheldon’ and the War on Genius.

IT’S GOOD TO BE THE KING: For Weinstein, a Brush With the Police, Then No Charges.

For decades the film producer Harvey Weinstein succeeded in hiding from public view complaint after complaint of sexual misconduct against him. But on the evening of March 28, 2015, at a rendezvous at the TriBeCa Grand, his longtime pattern of cover-ups was coming to a dramatic end.

Meeting with him at the hotel was Ambra Battilana, a 22-year-old model from Italy, who had reported to the police the night before that Mr. Weinstein had groped her during a business meeting. She was wearing a wire. As Ms. Battilana asked Mr. Weinstein why he had touched her breasts at his office, undercover police officers monitored the exchange, eager to capture his every word.

“Oh, please, I’m sorry, just come on in,” Mr. Weinstein said as he tried to usher her into his hotel room, his tone alternating between threatening and cajoling, according to the recording. “I’m used to that. Come on. Please.”

“You’re used to that?” she replied.

“Yes,” he said, adding, “I won’t do it again.”

Read the whole, belated thing.

HOWARD FINEMAN: The Method To The Moron’s Madness. “The powers that be are underestimating Trump — again.”

Washington reacts with alarm to his inflammatory tweets, and lately has made a parlor game out of chronicling his outbursts of anger, dismay and ignorance, as news organizations offer a cascade of vivid in-the-room portrayals of an out-of-control boy king.

Democrats hope against hope that he will be impeached over Russia. His approval rating is lower at this point in his term than any previous modern president’s. His former consigliere Steve Bannon has reportedly said Trump has only a 30 percent chance of lasting a full term.

But by the end of this week, it was clearer than ever that if Trump is a moron, he is a moron on a mission ― and with more method to his madness than his enemies understand or want to consider. The tweets are a useful distraction ― a kind of air cover for his carpet bombing of federal policy and programs.

Fineman can call it “carpet bombing” if he wants, but conservatives (and a few libertarians) might call it “winning.”

And who’s the more moronic, the moron or the moron who follows his every tweet?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: When Are You Glued to a Live Stream of a Free Speech Debate?

When your colleague Charlie Cooke is locked in a passionate and heated battle with two university censors, that’s when. In this week’s Liberty Files podcast, I talk to Charlie about one of the more fascinating university debates I’ve ever seen — his battle at Kenyon College. His two opponents vigorously (and emotionally) defended university efforts to silence so-called “hate speech.” Charlie’s responses were outstanding.

The Livestream link is here. Congratulations to Kenyon college for having this debate, though it’s too bad they apparently had to reach outside to find someone willing to take the free-speech side. . . .

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: McConnell, Weinstein, Tapper, Kaepernick and Much, Much More.

HOLLYWOOD ENDING:

● NYPD investigating alleged 2004 sex attack by Weinstein.

● Harvey Weinstein: [Scotland Yard] investigating five sexual assault claims.

● Will Harvey Weinstein go to jail? How the Hollywood mogul could face 25 years in prison over sexual assault charges.

As “Tyler Durden” writes at the Zero Hedge econo-blog, “Disgraced Hollywood mega producer Harvey Weinstein better enjoy his stay at the tony $2,000-a-night rehab in Arizona, because when once his ‘treatment’ has ended, he might be facing a stint in a much less comfortable institution.”

JIMMY KIMMEL: Losing Republican Viewers Is ‘Not Ideal’ but ‘I probably wouldn’t want to have a conversation with them anyway.’

When Spinal Tap’s appeal became more selective, at least it wasn’t on purpose.