THEY’RE GETTING WORRIED: Iran cuts off internet access in several cities as mass protests continue.

Plus, this shameful move by Telegram: Telegram shuts down messaging channel used by Iranian protesters.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. New Year’s Eve in Times Square sounds like a urine-soaked hell.

UM, FASTER PLEASE? The 2019 Ford Mustang Shelby GT500 Is Rumored to Go 200 MPH. Actually, that’s probably fast enough. We live in a golden age of muscle.

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GENDER GAP: ‘Vast Majority’ of Online Anti-Vaxxers Are Women. That’s consistent with my experience.

SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Study: Asthma worse for overweight preschool children.

MITCH DANIELS: The Anti-GMO movement isn’t just unscientific, it’s immoral. “This is the kind of foolishness that rich societies can afford to indulge. But when they attempt to inflict their superstitions on the poor and hungry peoples of the planet, the cost shifts from affordable to dangerous and the debate from scientific to moral.”

MORE ON VITAMIN D AND DIABETES. This paper recommends supplementation to a considerably higher level than I go.

UPDATE: From the comments: “Careful with the units in this paper. They are using nmol/l. Most test results in the USA are in ng/ml. A target of 100 nmol/l is equivalent to 40 ng/ml.”

EVEN WITH A VERBATIM TRANSCRIPT, the New York Times gets the story exactly backward.

ROGER KIMBALL: Taking Trump Seriously. “The point is not that Barone agrees with Trump. About many things, I suspect, he does not. The point is rather that one of our most thoughtful commentators understands that Trump’s perspective is not necessarily jejune, crazy, or counterproductive. . . . Barone’s calm, dispassionate description of alternatives suggests two things. One, that the dreaded ‘normalization’ of Donald Trump is proceeding apace, just as it did with Ronald Reagan, who also had been dismissed as an evil, warmongering moron before he was declared a statesman of rare genius. Two, that the vaunted policy establishment in Washington and the media, to say nothing of its support groups in academia and the world of celebrity, are just about to suffer a disestablishment that will rival in vividness, if not in carnage, what Henry VIII visited upon the monasteries of Tudor England.”

As I’ve said before, a major characteristic of the Trump presidency is the renegotiation of all sorts of post-World War II institutional arrangements. That is, unsurprisingly, viewed as illegitimate by those who are doing quite well under said arrangements, regardless of whether the country as a whole benefits.

DORSA DERAKHSHANI: Why I Left Iran to Play Chess in America.

Chess — a game that I have loved since I first sat down at a board — is pure. It doesn’t care about gender, ethnicity, nationality, status or politics. But too often the countries, organizations and people who enforce the rules in the world of chess are anything but.

This is a subject I know something about.

I was the second-highest-ranked player for girls under 18 in the world in 2016. I am the second-highest-ranked female chess player in Iranian history. And yet my passion for the game has taken me thousands of miles away from my home in Tehran to seek citizenship here in the United States.

From 2011 until 2015 I played for the Iranian national team. I had to follow the official Iranian dress code, which requires women to cover their hair in public. I understood that being a member of the team meant that I was an official representative of the country, so I never broke the rules. But I chafed under them.
…
Unlike on the Iranian team, I am now surrounded by people who respect me as a player and don’t care or notice what I look like. Unlike on the Iranian team, where the officials could ignore a player’s earned right to play a tournament and replace that player with someone they preferred, here the rules are consistent and fair.

In this sense, America at its best reflects the best values of chess. Chess doesn’t care how old you are or what you wear. It doesn’t care about what gender you are, or how much money you have. It is blind to all of that. It cares only about merit.

Read the whole thing.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Strap a Shark Fin to Your Head, Sarah Hoyt overhears:

Yesterday my husband and I celebrated our wedding anniversary and — as one does — went out to dinner at a small, quaint Italian restaurant in the neighborhood, a place we’ve been meaning to try since we moved here a year and a half ago.

The place was lovely, the service superb, the food well balanced and we were having a great time when, from the table next to us — occupied by men in matching polos and women in business attire — came the following piece of advice “you need to do something to stand out. Strap a shark fin to your head, or something.”

Read the whole thing. Your mileage may very, but hey, it worked in the NFL for Kenny Gant…

WEIRD TO SEE THIS AT CNN: Trump Is Right About The FBI: Leadership to blame for tarnished reputation. “While I rarely agree with much of what the President does or says regarding legal issues, this time he’s got it right. The FBI’s reputation has been severely damaged not by the President’s criticism but by a systematic failure of the bureau’s leadership. The field agents of the FBI should still retain the trust of the American people. Their honor and dignity has not been compromised; but the bureau’s leadership ranks require a prompt and thorough house cleaning by the new director, Christopher Wray. The bureau’s leadership has forfeited the reputation of a cherished American institution.”

ENTITLEMENT DOESN’T CARE: Does Sheila Jackson Lee Know The Person She’s Accused Of Racism For Airline Fiasco Is A Human Rights Activist?

ROGER SIMON ON LIBERAL HUMILIATION: TRUMP VS. OBAMA ON IRAN.

PHIL BAKER: Worst High-Tech Disasters of 2017.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Policing Disability: Our institutions of higher learning have fostered a new paternalism.

In the early stages of academic disability studies there seemed nothing remotely disturbing about efforts to think about embodiment and normalcy. Why not look closely at the works of gifted writers whose experience of disability allowed them to see the common world in original and sometimes shocking ways? Why not probe language itself so as to reveal the relationship between bodies and metaphor and to expose practices built into ordinary speech? Why not, indeed, move on to ask political questions about the rhetoric of diversity and wonder why disability issues are not always cited in conversations built around inclusion? All of that seemed, as I say, not only plausible but valuable, and some of the scholarly research sponsored in the field was rigorous and challenging.

But it is one thing to identify practices and assumptions and another to suppose that they can or should be eliminated. It’s one thing to open up a lively conversation and another to promote a conversion narrative in terms of which a cadre of language activists teach everyone else to watch what they say and thereby put an end to practices that are neither injurious nor offensive.

The proper response to “language activists” is something along the lines of: “Do the letters F.O. mean anything to you?”

One of the most important things to remember — and to say, loudly and frequently — is that these “activists” aren’t good people who are perhaps a bit overzealous in their efforts to make a better world. They’re horrible, awful people on a conscienceless power trip, whatever cause they purport to be serving at the moment.

HOW DO I COUNT THE WAYS? How the ‘feminist’ left let women down in 2017.

PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC: California Prosecuting Man for Insulting Posts on Islamic Center’s Facebook Page.

A HERO IN THE BRONX: After Saving Many From Fire, Soldier Died Trying to Rescue One More.

SEAN DAVIS: The Top 10 Undercovered Stories of 2017.. Including: “6. We still know nothing about what motivated the Vegas shooter. Months after the deadliest mass shooting in American history, we don’t know why the gunman fired on a crowd of innocent concertgoers. If law enforcement authorities have any leads or theories, they’re not sharing them with citizens eager for answers. Perhaps the feds don’t have a clue, either. Either way, it’s shocking that, months later, the country is still in the dark about what happened.”

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LIBERAL HUMILIATION: Roger Simon compares Trump’s Iran-Protest response to Obama’s. “What we also know is that the Donald J. Trump administration has taken the exact opposite approach from the Obama administration to events in Iran. They are unqualifiedly — and immediately — supporting the demonstrators and democracy. Bravo!”