I’M SO OLD, I CAN REMEMBER WHEN IT WAS “THE 1980s CALLED.” The 1950s Called. It Wants Its Atomic War Plans Back. But this is misleading. We don’t live in the Dr. Strangelove era any more.

YES. NEXT QUESTION? Has Washington Gone Crazy?

MILO UPDATE: Milo Yiannopoulos Announced as Keynote Speaker for CPAC…Not So Fast.

IMPOSSIBLE! DIDN’T OBAMA SPEND A TRILLION DOLLARS FIXING STUFF LIKE THIS? Almost 10 percent of all bridges in America are in need of repair or replacement.

Oh, right.

THE REVIEWS ARE AMUSING: Trump Success Eau de Toilette Spray for Men.

“GODWIN IS DEAD:” Mickey Kaus on the 1934ists, Ron Rosenbaum Edition.

Related: New Republic Post: Trump’s ‘Bizarre Behavior’ Is Because He Probably Has Syphilis.

Hey, you know who else was rumored to have had syphilis…

YOU’RE ONLY ALLOWED TO SAY THAT SORT OF THING ABOUT FLYOVER-COUNTRY DEPLORABLES! Minnesota philosophy professor writes that immigrants have low IQs and refugees are part of “religious-political cult.” Reaction is intense.

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YOU KNOW, IF I WEREN’T ALREADY BUSY WITH INSTAPUNDIT, a blog like this one by a University of Oregon professor about his home school would be fun. But I don’t have time or energy for that right now.

AND WHAT IF NAPOLEON HAD HAD A B-52 AT THE BATTLE OF WATERLOO? Could a Single Marine Unit Destroy the Roman Empire?

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NEWS YOU CAN USE: This Unsettling Experiment Shows How Liquefaction Occurs During an Earthquake.

SEXLESS MARRIAGES: A threat to the planet.

FEMINIST SNOWFLAKE: Daddy-Daughter Dates Are ‘Everything That Is Wrong in the World’

ANALYSIS: TRUE. There Is No Solution in Afghanistan.

SCOTT ADAMS ON IMAGINARY NEWS:

There are two clues that the Huffington Post is hallucinating and I’m not. The first clue is that they have a trigger and I don’t. Reality violated their egos, whereas I was predicting a Trump win all along. My world has been consistent with my ego. No trigger. All I have is a warm feeling of rightness.

The second clue is that the Huffington Post is seeing something that half the country doesn’t see. As a general rule, the person who sees the elephant in the room is the one hallucinating, not the one who can’t see the elephant. The Huffington Post is literally seeing something that is invisible to me and other observers. We see a President Trump talking the way he normally talks. They see a 77-minute meltdown.

Read the whole thing.™

(Via SDA.)

THEY TOLD ME IF DONALD TRUMP TOOK POWER, FASCIST VIOLENCE WOULD THREATEN CIVIL GOVERNANCE. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! Betsy DeVos being guarded by U.S. Marshals Service. “The last Cabinet member protected by marshals was a director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy.”

So, basically, taking on the Education Cartel is as dangerous as taking on the Drug Cartels? Well, the former has more money and jobs at stake. . . .

HIGHER EDUCATION IMPLOSION UPDATE: Rutgers Apologizes After Booting Students from Job Fair for Blue Suit, Brown Shoes.

ANOTHER #MERKELFAIL: Germany’s Energy Mistakes Are Hurting its Neighbors, Too.

It’s one thing for a country’s radical energy decisions to burden its own citizens, but it’s another altogether when those negative effects start to spill over into neighboring nations. That’s what’s happening in Germany right now, where headlong subsidization of renewable energy has not only produced some of the highest electricity bills in Europe, but has also threatened the stability of power grids in Poland and the Czech Republic. . . .

To recap, Germany has become the world leader in renewable energy through its energiewende, a plan that involved phasing out nuclear power (a curious decision for a purportedly environmentally conscious country, as nuclear is a zero-emissions energy source) while boosting wind and solar power by guaranteeing producers long-term, above-market rates. The costs of those cushy deals for renewable suppliers have been passed along to consumers, of course, in the form of green surcharges to monthly power bills. As a result, Germans are paying out the nose for their electricity, and their bills keep rising.

But wind and solar power are intermittent—they can only supply the grid when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. On especially sunny or windy days, that can mean a sharp spike in supplies that doesn’t just strain Germany’s grid, but also those of its neighbors.

So now Poland and the Czech Republic are having to contend with blackouts, unstable grids, and at times an inability to sell their own power. Believe it or not, this is not what a successful energy policy looks like.

I believe it.

MATTHEW CONTINETTI: Who Rules the United States?

Nor is Flynn the only example of nameless bureaucrats working to undermine and ultimately overturn the results of last year’s election. According to the New York Times, civil servants at the EPA are lobbying Congress to reject Donald Trump’s nominee to run the agency. Is it because Scott Pruitt lacks qualifications? No. Is it because he is ethically compromised? Sorry. The reason for the opposition is that Pruitt is a critic of the way the EPA was run during the presidency of Barack Obama. He has a policy difference with the men and women who are soon to be his employees. Up until, oh, this month, the normal course of action was for civil servants to follow the direction of the political appointees who serve as proxies for the elected president.

How quaint. These days an architect of the overreaching and antidemocratic Waters of the U.S. regulation worries that her work will be overturned so she undertakes extraordinary means to defeat her potential boss. But a change in policy is a risk of democratic politics. Nowhere does it say in the Constitution that the decisions of government employees are to be unquestioned and preserved forever. Yet that is precisely the implication of this unprecedented protest. “I can’t think of any other time when people in the bureaucracy have done this,” a professor of government tells the paper. That sentence does not leave me feeling reassured.

Opposition to this president takes many forms. Senate Democrats have slowed confirmations to the most sluggish pace since George Washington. Much of the New York and Beltway media does really function as a sort of opposition party, to the degree that reporters celebrated the sacking of Flynn as a partisan victory for journalism. Discontent manifests itself in direct actions such as the Women’s March.

But here’s the difference. Legislative roadblocks, adversarial journalists, and public marches are typical of a constitutional democracy. They are spelled out in our founding documents: the Senate and its rules, and the rights to speech, a free press, and assembly. Where in those documents is it written that regulators have the right not to be questioned, opposed, overturned, or indeed fired, that intelligence analysts can just call up David Ignatius and spill the beans whenever they feel like it?

Read the whole thing, but the answer to the headline question is in the question itself. The people of the United States are to be governed, not ruled — and lightly governed, at that.

But the Permanent Bureaucratic Class feels doesn’t see it that way.

BILL MAHER INTERVIEWS MILO; ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY HAS A SAD OVER HIS LENA DUNHAM REMARKS:

“Nothing annoys people like the truth,” Yiannopoulos concurred. “Policing humor for racism and sexism is utterly wrongheaded. Not because normally it’s not there, but because that’s how we build bridges and not how we break them.”

Yet Yiannopoulos made blatant sexist comments during the interview, criticizing Amy Schumer and Sarah Silverman as people who “used to be funny before they contracted feminism.”

“You’re literally the only good [liberal],” Yiannopoulos said, before slamming Girls creator and star Lena Dunham as the poster woman for the Democratic Party’s issues. “The Democrats are the party of Lena Dunham. These people are mental, hideous people, and the more that America sees of Lena Dunham, the fewer votes that the Democratic Party is going to get.”

“Let’s not pick on fellow HBO stars,” Maher replied, drawing laughs. “There are so many other people.”

“I hurt people for a reason,” Yiannopoulos said. “I like to think of myself as a virtuous troll.”

Flashback: Kevin Williamson on Dunham’s “Pathetic Privilege.”

FAKE NEWS: The AP blew it big time on that National Guard roundup story.

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As Trump Visits Boeing, Senators Take Aim at Contractor’s Iran Air Deal.

As President Trump made the rounds with Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg at the aerospace giant’s plant in Charleston on Friday, Republican senators were introducing legislation to require the president to report to Congress on Iran’s potential use of new Boeing aircraft to further terror.

After sanctions were eased following implementation of the Iran nuclear deal, Boeing struck an 80-plane deal with state-owned carrier IranAir worth at least $8 billion. President Obama’s State Department lauded the agreement in June as “the type of permissible business activity envisioned in the JCPOA.”

The news drew immediate reaction from Reps. Pete Roskam (R-Ill.) and Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), who wrote Muilenburg to explain “Iran’s commercial aviation sector is deeply involved in supporting hostile actors.”

Well, good.

Meanwhile, the art of another deal: Trump hints at ‘big order’ of F/A-18 Super Hornets instead of some F-35s.

The F/A-18 is built by Boeing, the same company which struck that 80-plane deal with Iran.