BLASTS FROM THE PAST, PART DEUX: The Beatles released their first LP, Please Please Me 55 years ago today: The Beatles’ Marathon Please Please Me Session, Hour by Hour.

The sessions wrapped just after 10:45 p.m., and the following night the Beatles were back out on the road. The venture had cost the record label just £400 (about $11,000 in 2018). “There wasn’t a lot of money at Parlophone,” Martin admitted. “I was working to an annual budget of £55,000.” It took the band just under 10 hours of studio time to record the bulk of their first album, released on March 22nd, 1963, as Please Please Me. As Harrison wryly observed decades later: “The second one took even longer.”

Heh, indeed.™

TABLES TURNED: Alarmists Now ‘Deny’ Climate Science While Big Oil Defends It.

BLASTS FROM THE PAST, PART ONE: 10 Songs From the ’90s That We Still Love To Hear.

ROCKY MOUNTAIN WAY: The Hemperor From New Belgium Is Colorado’s Latest Hemp Beer.

Hemp Beers are nothing new in Colorado. Several have been brewed over the past fifteen years — if not further back — but when New Belgium Brewing releases its new hemp beer, the Hemperor HPA, next month, it will represent a serious effort by the state’s largest craft brewer (and the nation’s fourth-largest) to bring the often controversial and quasi-legal plant into the mainstream market.

The 7 percent ABV beer, which will be sold in six-packs, is brewed with hemp seeds, adding a component that the brewery believes will re-create the flavor of cannabis terpenes, the aromatic oils in plants. Hemp itself is the non-psychoactive cousin of marijuana, often used in textiles, soaps and food.

I can’t recall anyone who smoked pot for the flavor, but this beer has to be better than an over-hopped IPA.

BET YOU DIDN’T KNOW EARNINGS WERE UP IN 22 OF 24 MEASURED INDUSTRIES IN 2017: The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) in the Department of Commerce included that interesting tidbit of information in its announcement Thursday that statewide personal income was up in 2017 by 3.1 percent, compared to 2.3 in 2016.

Mining and agriculture took hits but everything else, especially construction, was up. As of 4 pm today, I found nothing about the BEA data on the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and New York Times homepages. Maybe I just missed it. Or they did. Coincidental, right?

LOST AND FOUND: Steve McQueen’s Bullitt-Movie Mustang Suddenly Reappeared: This Is How It Happened.

AT AMAZON, save in Mystery, Thriller, and Suspense.

Plus, deals on Pet Supplies.

LOUISIANA SENATOR JOHN KENNEDY ON THE OMNIBUS BILL: “This is a Great Dane-size whizz down the leg of every taxpayer in this country.”

Best video I’ve seen all day.

FLASHBACK: Biden’s Son Fails Drug Test, Is Discharged From Navy.

LONGEVITY: Japanese woman becomes 4th oldest person in history.

Research and verification by the Gerontology Research Group (GRG) shows that Tajima is the world’s oldest living person. She reached 117 years and 231 days on Friday, making her the fourth oldest person in recorded human history, surpassing Marie-Louise Meilleur of Canada.

It marks the first time since December 1999 that someone has been alive who has reached or surpassed Tajima’s age. Other people have claimed to be older, but those claims have never been verified with official documentation and other supporting evidence.

Tajima, who still lives on Kikaijima island, has 9 children and, as of 2017, has more than 160 descendants, including great-great-great-grandchildren, according to the Gerontology Research Group. She has claimed that her secret to longevity is eating delicious things and sleeping well, but she also enjoys hand-dancing to music when the shamisen is played.

Sleep well and eat well — sounds good to me, no matter how long you might last.

IS THERE ANYTHING IT CAN’T DO? Promiscuity may have accelerated animal domestication.

LEAVING FACEBOOK — IT’S GONE VIRAL! Next Worry for Facebook: Disenchanted Users. “Rising number of users claim to be abandoning social media giant, prompting a warning from some analysts that its growth could slow.”

Throughout previous controversies in recent years, Facebook’s user population has climbed steadily, providing the critical base that draws an ever growing gusher of advertising revenue.

Now Facebook is contending with a groundswell of users—some of whom are tweeting under the hashtag #DeleteFacebook—who claim to be abandoning the social media giant, prompting some analysts to warn that its growth juggernaut could sputter.

“The biggest issue we see for Facebook is if the DeleteFacebook leads to user attrition and eventually ad dollars allocated elsewhere,” Barclays analysts said in a research note Tuesday. The public backlash also could impinge on Facebook’s ability to recruit talented engineers, they said.

Late Wednesday, financial services firm Stifel slashed its target price for Facebook shares to $168 from $195, saying, “Facebook’s current plight reminds us of eBay in 2004—an unstructured content business built on trust that lost that trust prior to implementing policies to add structure and process.”

I’m not leaving Facebook, or at least not yet, because it remains a great way to deliver traffic to the content I produce for non-Facebook platforms. That’s for the simple reason that there are lots and lots of eyeballs on Facebook.

The mistake others have made was moving their platform from independent sites and blogs, over to Facebook. Once there, they’re hostage to either Facebook’s capricious whims, or to that platform suffering a huge loss of trust and/or users.

CELEBRATE HUMAN ACHIEVEMENT THIS SATURDAY: Every year the environmental scolds ask us to sit in the dark contemplating our sins against Mother Earth for what they call “Earth Hour.” Instead, you could join us in celebrating Human Achievement Hour. As well as keeping the lights on, you could be:

• Watching your favorite TV show or movie thanks to satellite technology
• Participating in the craft brewing revolution with a cold drink
• Facetiming or Skyping with far-off friends and family
• Traveling home from a night out with a rideshare driver
• Relaxing at home with plenty of food, heat, and hot water for your family

Celebrate just how far we’ve come from the preindustrial age and, if you’d like, use the hashtag #HAH2018 and tweet examples and photos at @ceidotorg.

WELL, GOOD: Viagra Turns Out to Have a Totally Unexpected Side Effect That Could Save Thousands of Lives. “Researchers studying the effects of Viagra (aka sildenafil) on mice have discovered a small, daily dose of the medication in the animals’ drinking water significantly reduces their risk of developing colorectal cancer.”

ROGER L. SIMON: The Deep State Is in Deep Trouble.

REVOLT OF THE RULING CLASS:

I get the feeling that Washington believes the current unrest is just another Tea Party they can ignore, ridicule, co-opt, or shut down.

That may prove to be a grave mistake.

BREAKING: Schumer Gives ‘Big Pat on the Back’ for Trump on China Tariffs After Bush, Obama ‘Inaction.’

ELIZABETH WARREN’S RESEARCH HARDEST HIT: Study: Medical bankruptcies may not be as common as thought.

Medical bills can push patients over the financial cliff, but a new study says this may not happen as often as previous research suggests.

Hospitalizations cause only about 4 percent of personal bankruptcies among non-elderly U.S. adults, according to an analysis published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

This contrasts with previous research by former Harvard professor and current U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren and others that pointed to medical reasons as the trigger for more than 60 percent of U.S. bankruptcies.

Background on Elizabeth Warren’s shady research here. Remember that her conclusions were among the major arguments for ObamaCare.

Related: ” I don’t know which is worse: the notion that Elizabeth Warren understood what she was doing, or the notion that she didn’t.”

I should note that Gail Heriot exposed Warren’s research as bogus back in 2006, but the Post continued to hold her up. Had the more-or-less fraudulent nature of her work gotten national attention then, would Warren be a Senator today? Would ObamaCare have passed?

YUGE: Trump attorney John Dowd resigns amid shake-up in president’s legal team.

Tyler O’Neil adds:

Lawyer John Dowd will resign after Trump refused to take his advice and insisted he should testify to Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

Sorry, President Trump, but Dowd is right. Mueller could catch the president and push for perjury, should the president say anything amiss under oath.

Dowd also told my old Hillsdale College classmate Betsy Woodruff that Trump should fire Mueller.

Developing…

IT’S ONLY A WEAPON WHEN REPUBLICANS USE IT: How Facebook Went From ‘Ideal Way’ to Reach Voters to Being ‘Weaponized.’

YOU’LL NEVER GUESS NUMBER 23! Bradley Areheart: The Top 100 Law Reviews: A Reference Guide Based on Historical USNWR Data.

UH OH: Mumps vaccine protection may be waning, driving rise in U.S. cases.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION: Savannah Law School Sells Building, To Close After Spring 2018 Semester. This is a good place, with good faculty, in a good location, and if it can’t make it it bodes poorly for some other schools.