YEAH.  WE SURE HAVEN’T HAD ENOUGH OF GENDER-SHIFTED CLASSICS AND “GENTLY FEMINIST” PROPAGANDA LITERATURE:  You’ll love this absolutely delightful sequel to ‘The Wind in the Willows’.  I suspect this like the others of its kind is chasing a micro-audience.

SOMETHING TO BE GLAD ABOUT:  Scalise is back.

ALL THOSE NINJA REDNECK ASSASSINS:  An Opinion on Suppressors and the Hearing Protection Act.

THIS IS MY SHOCKED FACE:  The Russians Trolled the NFL and Black Lives Matter.

WAY TO MAKE FRIENDS AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE:  Taking a Knee at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

ALMOST AS THOUGH IT WERE A TISSUE OF LIES:  Yet Another Major Russia Story Falls Apart. Is Skepticism Permissible Yet?

JULIAN ASSANGE SAYS HE WILL PROVIDE EVIDENCE RUSSIA NARRATIVE IS FALSE IN EXCHANGE FOR PARDON (VIDEO).

KURT SCHLICHTER: GOP, Can You Hear Us Normals Now?

WHO NEEDS ESPN? An Amazon Cord-Cutting Bundle.

GLENN GREENWALD: Yet Another Major Russia Story Falls Apart. Is Skepticism Permissible Yet?

Sorry, ya gotta wait until Hillary’s book tour is over, at least.

THAT’S NICE: Officer Escorting Him Crashes — Trump Refuses to Let Air Force One Take Off Until He Talks to Him.

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump was being escorted through Indiana on the way back to Air Force One when one of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police officers, Robert Turner, crashed his motorcycle on I-70, Blue Lives Matter reported.

The cause of the crash is unknown, but it appears people stopped to take pictures instead of helping the officer. Several pictures show the officer, with several cuts, lying next to his motorcycle on the ground.

The officer was rushed to the hospital and put into a neck brace and appeared to be in poor condition. But then, he received a call from Trump.

Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department posted to Facebook that Trump refused to take off until he spoke with the wounded officer to thank him for his service.

Flashback: Salena Zito:

The 70-year-old Republican nominee took his time walking from the green room toward the stage. He stopped to chat with the waiters, service workers, police officers, and other convention staffers facilitating the event. There were no selfies, no glad-handing for votes, no trailing television cameras. Out of view of the press, Trump warmly greets everyone he sees, asks how they are, and, when he can, asks for their names and what they do.

“I am blown away!” said one worker, an African American man who asked for anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak to the press. “The man I just saw there talking to people is nothing like what I’ve seen, day in and day out, in the news.”

I guess it’s still that way.

MICHAEL TOTTEN’S NEW NOVEL, Into The Wasteland, is now out.

And the previous volume, Resurrection: A Zombie Novel, is currently free on Kindle.

FINALLY, WE’RE GETTING TO THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Tom Cruise just addressed the rumors that he wears a fake butt while shooting films.

SO I SPOKE AT AN EVENT TONIGHT, TALKING ABOUT CIVILIAN DISASTER RELIEF AND SOCIAL COHESION, and a guy came up to me afterward saying that since Robert Putnam found that diversity is associated with decreased social trust, how did I feel about a bunch of white people going off to start their own country. (My response: Unenthused). But you see this sort of thing on the Internet enough that some people believe it, and while Putnam’s point is supported by research, I don’t think it actually supports the solution. “Diversity,” I suspect, is one of those things that actually is a social construct. If you make people hyperaware of their differences — as is done on college campuses today — you can make things much worse than they otherwise would be. (See also Tito’s Yugoslavia). If you encourage people to think about what they have in common, you can make things much better. And where it suits their interests, politicians will create ethnic cleavages. (Hutus and Tutsis are both “black” in American conception, but politicians were still able to inflame passions that led to genocide.) My prediction is that if you created some sort of racially segregated society, politicians would soon be at work finding other differences to inflame, differences that nobody’s even aware of now. The only real answer is a strong social norm that supports, for example, our common humanity and, in this country, our common Americanness. This seems to be what ordinary Americans believe, and act upon, but politicians will do whatever it takes to gain power. Keeping politicians in check is the key to getting along. Can we do more of that?

GOOD: Researchers uncover the source of diabetic nerve pain.

REAL HEADLINE, 2017: “Multiple Arrests After Fight Inside Berkeley ‘Empathy Tent.'”

CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, ROGER: Bench the NFL. Pro football’s success is founded on shrewd lobbying and a federal favor. After a court forbade the NFL teams from jointly negotiating a TV deal, the league persuaded Congress in 1961 to grant a special exemption from antitrust laws. This perk has often has been criticized, but the efforts to remove it have never gone far in Congress. The NFL enjoyed bipartisan support because it seemed a national institution above politics. But now that the owners and players have so resolutely united against Republicans (and public opinion), Steve Malanga of City Journal wants Congress to reconsider:

The national anthem protest controversy offers a new perspective on the privileges that Congress has awarded to the NFL, particularly because the league’s team owners have allowed those protests to take place and even, last weekend, participated in them, in response to President Trump’s criticism of the players’ activism. Patriots’ owner Robert Kraft, for instance, said last Sunday, “I support [players’] right to peacefully affect social change and raise awareness in a manner that they feel is most impactful.” But while players have the right to engage in political speech free from government interference, their freedom does not extend by right to a private employer in its own workplace. The majority of companies in America would not, and do not, allow demonstrations at work by individual employees on political issues unrelated to their employment—just the sort of demonstrations begun last year by former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, and carried on through this weekend by more than 200 players. That the owners have tolerated and lately even encouraged such protests over an issue—charges of police brutality—that divides many Americans is a business risk that they seem willing to take. But the league’s use of its platform—created by its federal antitrust exemption—to broadcast its message across the country is more than a simple business matter. It represents an improper use of resources made available to the NFL by special federal legislation. It’s past time to revoke the Sports Broadcasting Act.

The owners won’t be happy with this, but at least they’ll have something specific to protest in the pregame ceremony.

IT’S OFFICIAL: Gravity Waves Detected. “A massive international team made history in 2016 when they announced that, for the first time ever, they’d confirmed the existence of gravitational waves – ripples in the fabric of spacetime from the collision of two black holes. Now gravitational wave astronomy has taken a leap forward with the detection of of a collision between two black holes using not two detectors, but three – vastly improving the accuracy, by a factor of about 10, with which astronomers can pinpoint the source of the waves.”

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Plus, shop Home Brewing and Winemaking kits and supplies.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21st CENTURY, YOU KNOW: VR technology allows women to try on boob jobs in 3D.

FASTER, PLEASE: Synthetic DNA coverts stem cells to heart muscle, is potential tissue regeneration treatment.

UNEXPECTEDLY: NFL ticket sales plummet 17.9%.

THAT MOMENT WHEN THE THIN WHITE DUKE HIT BOTTOM:

Tony Visconti was pleasantly surprised when David Bowie called him on the phone in mid-1976. The singer had just moved back from the US to Europe, and the last time the two men had been in touch had been when Visconti helped produce the 1975 album Young Americans. As they parted, Bowie entered his Thin White Duke phase in Los Angeles, living off milk, peppers and cocaine, and storing his urine in the fridge to stop witches or wizards — including, possibly, Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page — getting hold of it in order to curse him.

Who are we to judge? Let he who has never stored his urine in his fridge lest Jimmy Page get a hold of it to a put a curse on him cast the first stone.

JOSH BLACKMAN & SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: The emoluments clauses litigation, Part 3 — so what if the president does not hold ‘Office … under the United States’?

EVERYONE SHOULD: How I learned to stop worrying and love chaos.