WEIRD. OBAMA PROMISED US THAT WE’D ALL SAVE $2500. Middle-Class Families Confront Soaring Health Insurance Costs.

NOT A GOOD SATURDAY FOR BOOMER-ERA POP MUSIC: David Cassidy In Critical Condition After Organ Failure.

Earlier: AC/DC guitarist and rock legend Malcolm Young dead at 64.

WELL, GOOD: Baby boomers avoiding macular degeneration better than previous generations.

FASTER, PLEASE: For The Good Of The Country, Roger Goodell Must Fail Against Jerry Jones.

Amazing how Goodell has made much-hated sports figures such as Jones and Tom Brady seem like good guys by comparison.

SCIENCE: First Ever Anti-Ageing Gene Discovered in a Secluded Amish Family.

AT AMAZON, Top Gift Ideas.

Plus, Shop Amazon – Most Wished For Items.

JEFF BEZOS’ VIDEO DEPARTMENT IS REALLY KNOCKING IT OUT OF THE PARK: ‘Transparent’ Plots Future Without Star Jeffrey Tambor Amid Harassment Allegations.

Earlier: “Amazon and Bezos knew of the allegations against [then-Amazon Studios chief Roy Price] for two years but took no public disciplinary action against him until last week, when producer Isa Hackett told her full story to The Hollywood Reporter’s Kim Masters. Amazon acted only after the combination of the THR article and the revelations about Harvey Weinstein made Price’s continued employment politically untenable.”

I THINK THERE’S MORE TO FREAK OUT ABOUT IN THE WORLD: People are freaking out about this couple’s 34-year age gap.

“ASTONISHING:” It’s Astonishing That It Took This Long for the Bill Clinton Moment of Reckoning to Arrive.

—Headline at Slate on Thursday. Slate is one of the last journalistic redoubts of the Graham family, who previously owned the Washington Post and Newsweek.

Flashback:

Newsweek’s top editors, after a day of frenetic meetings, sought yesterday to explain why they failed to publish the story that stunned the nation, an exclusive piece about allegations that President Clinton encouraged a 24-year-old former White House intern to lie about whether they had an affair.

* * * * * * * *

There are few secrets in the modern media world, however, and word of Isikoff’s suppressed scoop leaked out through an increasingly familiar route: Matt Drudge’s Internet gossip column. Reporters across Washington, some of whom were already pursuing the story, kept scrambling for confirmation.

— “Newsweek’s Melted Scoop,” Howard Kurtz on January 22, 1998, reporting about the then-Graham-owned magazine Newsweek in the then-Graham-owned Washington Post.

Drudge has been reviled by the DNC-MSM ever since for being the first to break their monopoly on news.

WEIRD HOW THEY SUDDENLY CARE: ‘Then What Happens?’: Congress Questions the President’s Authority to Wage Nuclear War. “It was a raw, existential exercise in something that has become routine in Washington since Donald Trump’s election: unearthing and scrutinizing long-buried assumptions about U.S. foreign policy.”

As I’ve said before, the Trump presidency is about the re-negotiation of a whole bunch of post-World War II institutional arrangements.

CAN’T ANYBODY HERE PLAY THIS GAME? Massive US military social media spying archive left wide open in AWS S3 buckets.

FREE MARKETS: Few things in human history have done so much to reduce absolute poverty.

CHANGE: Apple’s Diversity Chief Is Leaving After Only 6 Months.

She had irked some critics in May when she commented during a conference, “There can be 12 white, blue-eyed, blonde men in a room and they’re going to be diverse too because they’re going to bring a different life experience and life perspective to the conversation.” Her comments were seen by some as insensitive to people of color, women, and members of the LGBT community, who have long faced an uphill battle in the workplace.

Denise Young Smith later apologized for her comments, saying that they “were not representative of how I think about diversity or how Apple sees it.”

“For that, I’m sorry,” she said in a staff email. “More importantly, I want to assure you Apple’s view and our dedication to diversity has not changed.”

Her sin was being honest that there’s more to diversity than skin color or sexual orientation.

UPDATE (From Ed): I’m so old, I can remember when Apple’s marketing slogan was “Think Different.”

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Biohackers are using CRISPR on their DNA and we can’t stop it.

MAD DOG MATTIS: Military Aiming to ‘Buy Time for the Diplomats to Resolve’ North Korea.

RIP: AC/DC guitarist and rock legend Malcolm Young dead at 64.

NEW YORK TIMES REPORTER: Obama Administration Misled on al Qaeda.

“The overall narrative that I think was being pushed to the press, and if you look back at the editorials that were done when that trove came out, was an image of bin Laden isolated, he had lost control of this group,” Rukmini Callimachi said during an event at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, referring to the 17 hand-picked documents released by the Obama administration in May of 2012.

Her remarks triggered the following question from Kim Dozier, a former top correspondent for the Associated Press and CBS, and current executive editor of the Cipher Brief: “Do you think that was something that was kept from the public’s view because it revealed that there had to be reams of communication going back and forth, which means U.S. intelligence, Western intelligence, was missing this?”

“Think back to when bin Laden was killed. It was 2011, it was right before a major campaign season. I don’t want to underplay the role that the killing of Osama bin Laden had,” said Callimachi. “But I think that that was theorized into something much bigger.”

And the press was willing to play along, so that Obama could declare “victory” in Iraq — and make way for the rise of ISIS.

OHIO PLAYER: Ohio supreme court justice: Leave Al Franken alone because, just fyi, I’ve probably boinked 50 chicks myself.

And possibly Robert Taft, if you read his Facebook post too quickly.

It’s certainly one way to push back against today’s PC culture. And speaking of anti-PC, Ace of Spades has a great, if (not surprisingly) R-rated take on The Ohio State* Justice Bill O’Neill: “American politics are getting Trumpy in the most unexpected places, and I’m not sure that’s all bad. I didn’t really need to know about this self-conceived Lothario’s cocksmanship, but then, I also didn’t really need the pretend-virginal sanctimony about everything having to do with sex.”

* Classical reference.

HEH: Democrats: It’s No Fair When Republicans Sink as Low as Us!

BRUCE BAWER: Why Didn’t Liberals Embrace ‘Whiskey Tango Foxtrot’?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: White inventor of ‘white fragility’ tells University of Texas: Whites must stop becoming teachers.

THE WORKERS’ PARADISE: North Korean defector found to have ‘enormous parasites.’

“I’ve never seen anything like this in my 20 years as a physician,” South Korean doctor Lee Cook-jong told journalists, explaining that the longest worm removed from the patient’s intestines was 27cm (11in) long.

“North Korea is a very poor country and like any other poor country it has serious health problems,” Prof Andrei Lankov of Kookmin University in Seoul told the BBC.

“North Korea does not have the resources to have a modern medical system,” he says.

“Its doctors are relatively poorly trained and have to work with primitive equipment.”

In 2015 South Korean researchers studied the health records of North Korean defectors who had visited a hospital in Cheonan between 2006 and 2014.

They found that they showed higher rates of chronic hepatitis B, chronic hepatitis C, tuberculosis and parasite infections, compared to South Koreans.

“I don’t know what is happening in North Korea, but I found many parasites when examining other defectors,” Professor Seong Min of Dankook University Medical School was quoted by the Korea Biomedical Review as saying.

It takes a willful ignorance for a South Korean to not have at least some idea of what is happening in North Korea.