SIT UP STRAIGHT: British Airways to axe reclining seats on some flights.

TRYING TO SAVE THE PROFESSION’S CREDIBILITY, BUT MAYBE A BIT LATE: American Psychiatric Association calls for end to ‘arm chair’ psychiatry amid Trump speculation. “A proper psychiatric evaluation requires more than a review of television appearances, tweets, and public comments.” Do tell.

ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS NO ONE IS ASKING: Pink pussyhats: The reason feminists are ditching them.

The reason: The sentiment that the pink pussyhat excludes and is offensive to transgender women and gender nonbinary people who don’t have typical female genitalia and to women of color because their genitals are more likely to be brown than pink.

“I personally won’t wear one because if it hurts even a few people’s feelings, then I don’t feel like it’s unifying,” said Phoebe Hopps, founder and president of Women’s March Michigan and organizer of anniversary marches Jan. 21 in Lansing and Marquette.

There is no way any satirist can improve upon the sheer absurdity of real life, especially when writing about far left SJWs in a red queen’s race to out-woke themselves.

CHANGE: Trump Clears Path for States to Require Employment for Medicaid.

The Trump Administration moved Thursday to allow states to impose work requirements on their Medicaid programs for the first time, the latest alteration of the nation’s health-care system through administrative action after Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare failed last year.

The change will allow states to craft programs that would require Medicaid recipients to prove they are working, training for a job, or volunteering in their communities, according to guidance issued by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

States aren’t forced to participate, and it looks like the work requirements are far from strict.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: What Is Considered “Cheating” These Days? Sorry, but liking someone’s photo on social media as cheating? Really?

BUT OF COURSE: Twitter Security Engineer Says Company ‘More Than Happy’ to Give DOJ Trump’s DMs.

JIBRAN KHAN: ‘Raw Water’ Makes a Mockery of Human Suffering.

Tacitus and Ibn Khaldun wrote of decadent civilizations drinking themselves to death, but for our new leaders, that is passé. Instead, they have decided to rebel all the way and simply drink death in the name of health. Startups have rushed to feed this pathetic desire for novelty, each trying to outdo the other in ignorance. One of their leaders, Christopher Sanborn, has changed his name to Mukhande Singh, the better to grant his dirty water the legitimacy of exotic culture. His customers might be surprised to know that the ancient Indians practiced water treatment — using dreaded “chemicals,” no less. Likewise, Greek, Sanskrit, and Ancient Egyptian writings demonstrate that water purification was a public-health concern for classical civilizations, long before modern germ theory, and that methods of filtration and chemical treatment were commonplace in their time.

To put this absurdity in perspective, consider that in the world’s “Middle Income Countries,” per capita income ranges from just under $3 to $34 a day, and that “raw water” bottles in the US cost $36.99 each. Or, put another way, in order to ingest “raw water,” the cause of 20 percent of child deaths worldwide, rich Americans have taken to spending more than most people in the world earn in a week. In doing so, not only are they rejecting millennia of widely understood science, but they are putting their lives and the lives of those around them at risk, in order to indulge in a patronizing play-act of poverty that puts even so-called slum tourism to shame.

Not to be too cynical, but I’m guessing patronization is the thrill of it all.

NEXT, AIRPORTS: Life Time Fitness bans cable news networks as part of ‘healthy way of life.’

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Nebraska Considers Common-Sense Gun Deregulation As Other States Tighten Up.

UM: “The prisoner, 29-year-old Gonzalo Montoya Jiménez, was found unresponsive in his cell during a morning roll call, and had been transferred to a hospital mortuary in a body bag when pathologists heard something strange. Snoring. Coming from inside the bag.”

ANN ALTHOUSE ECHOES SCOTT ADAMS: The “stable genius” stomps all over the Trump-is-stupid-and-crazy narrative by running a meeting in front of the cameras. “Look at him, with members of Congress arrayed around him at that table. The news media had to keep the cameras running live. After spending the last week promoting the theory that he’s stupid and crazy, the media look stupid and crazy, as he’s clearly in command, speaking coherently, behaving competently, and getting full respect from the members of Congress. This really was a perfect response the barrage of criticism that bounced off Michael Wolff’s convenient-but-fake book.” It’s like the whole thing was a setup that conveniently got rid of Bannon and enriched a guy (Wolff) that Trump is friendly with.

TYLER O’NEIL: 5 Things to Know About Fusion GPS’s Sordid Past.

SARAH HOYT: If the Left And The Press Were Hostile Aliens.

Aliens? Probably not. Hostile for sure.

WELL, THAT’S NECESSARY TO REFLECT THE SOUL OF ITS NAMESAKE: So, the Obama Presidential Library Is Really Ugly. “A discarded Chinese take-out box. The backside of a Star Wars sand crawler. The Washington Monument with the interesting bits lopped off. That’s what sprung to mind when confronted with the initial design of the Obama Presidential Center, Jon Gabriel writes at Ricochet.

Elsewhere, the Chicago Tribune asks, “Without archives on site, how will Obama Center benefit area students, scholars?”

Jon answers that question as well; he notes that “the Obamas are going to use it as a community organizing bootcamp to teach new generations how to make hyperviolent Chicago an even less comfortable place to live and work.”

To paraphrase Gabriel’s defining tweet of Obama’s two terms, my favorite part about the Obama presidential library will be all the racial healing.

WEIRD, I THOUGHT THE NEW TAX BILL DID NOTHING FOR THE WORKING CLASS: “Walmart is boosting the minimum hourly wage for its U.S. employees to $11 and dishing out bonuses of up to $1,000, crediting President Trump’s tax cut for enabling the move.”

OUCH: Europe’s High Representative for Appeasement. “Iran, Cuba, North Korea and Russia have a friend in Brussels.”

Eli Lake:

If Federica Mogherini didn’t exist, the world’s autocrats would be trying to invent her.

As the European Union’s high representative for foreign affairs, she is a tireless advocate for engaging rogue states. Few diplomats though have pursued this kind of engagement with such moralizing puffery. In Mogherini’s world, diplomacy with dictators should not aim to transition these countries to open societies, but rather to prevent conflicts at all costs.

Just consider her trip last week to Cuba, a plantation masquerading as a nation-state. Did Mogherini use her visit to call attention to the struggle of human rights activists or to comfort the families of political prisoners? No, Mogherini was in Cuba to reassure a regime that Europe will not go along with America’s trade embargo.

And:

While Mogherini found her voice in Havana about Cuba’s “isolation,” she was mute on the popular uprising in Iran. She waited six days to say anything about the demonstrations there. When she finally did, it was a mix of ingratiation and neutrality. “In the spirit of openness and respect that is at the root of our relationship,” she said, “we expect all concerned to refrain from violence and to guarantee freedom of expression.”

It’s as if Mogherini believes that Iranian demonstrators are arresting and silencing members of the state Basij militia, and not the other way around.

European diplomats have long been the masters of doing business with nasty regimes while accusing Americans of crass commercialism.

VITAMIN D UPDATE: High doses of vitamin D rapidly reduce arterial stiffness. “Participants taking 4,000 international units – more than six times the daily 600 IUs the Institute of Medicine currently recommends for most adults and children – received the most benefit, says Dr. Anas Raed, research resident in the MCG Department of Medicine and the study’s first author.”

MAYBE TRUMP SHOULD HAVE CALLED HER “SNEEZY DIANNE FEINSTEIN:” Feinstein blames ‘bad cold’ for handling of Fusion GPS transcript.

IT’S LIKE LOW-ALCOHOL SCOTCH FOR PEOPLE WHO DON’T DRINK SCOTCH: Starbucks Has a New ‘Blonde’ Espresso for People Who Don’t Drink Espresso.

PAUL GREGORY: Why Socialism Fails.

WHY IS THE ULTIMATE BLUE STATE SUCH A CESSPIT OF RELIGIOUS DISCRIMINATION? Chinese authorities demolish well-known evangelical church:

Authorities in northern China’s coal country this week demolished a well-known Christian mega-church, underscoring long-standing tensions between religious groups and the officially atheistic Communist Party.

Witnesses and overseas activists say paramilitary People’s Armed Police forces used excavators and dynamite on Tuesday to destroy the Golden Lampstand Church in the city of Linfen in Shanxi province.

ChinaAid, a U.S.-based Christian advocacy group, said local authorities planted explosives in an underground worship hall to demolish the building, which was built with nearly $3 million in contributions from local worshippers in one of China’s poorest regions.

The church, with a congregation of more than 50,000, has long clashed with the government. Hundreds of police and hired thugs smashed the church and seized Bibles in an earlier crackdown in 2009 that ended with church leaders receiving long prison sentences.

Elsewhere in totalitarian China, “A Visa-Free Zone Welcomes Your Wallet. But Maybe Not Your Beard,” the New York Times reports:

Except for men with long beards and women wearing veils or jewelry with a crescent moon motif, just about anyone can enter Chinese territory — at least a few miles of it — across a frontier marked only by two thin stripes of paint daubed across the road.

The stripes — one red, one light blue — demarcate the border between China’s restive region of Xinjiang in the far west of the country and Kazakhstan, a Central Asian neighbor.

* * * * * * *

The unusually relaxed border at what the Chinese call Horgos and the Kazakhs Khorgos is all the more remarkable because it marks the entrance to a tense Chinese region that has been struggling for decades to contain a low-grade but persistent insurgency by militants from a minority Chinese Muslim ethnic group, the Uighurs.

Posters written in Russian, a language most Kazakhs can understand, make clear that the area is not entirely at peace. They offer a “friendly” warning that bushy beards and Islamic clothing are not welcome in China and include photos of prohibited dress and jewelry. An American diplomat with a hipster-style beard who tried to visit recently got stopped by the People’s Armed Police and was let in only after Mr. Ivanov convinced the Chinese that he was not a potential terrorist.

Now who’s being naïve, Xi?

(Presumably, all of the above is Thomas Friedman approved, of course.)