CHANGE: Starting in October, the government plans on enforcing REAL ID, a long-gestating security law.

YOUR DAILY TREACHER: Things I’ll Miss About Steve Bannon.

THE REVOLUTION WILL BE JAZZERCISED: Video of Antifa Self-“Defense” Training, With Commentary.

(Language NSFW – pretty much not safe for anyone…)

CONGRESS AND WHAT ARMY? Venezuela’s Congress declares ‘petro’ cryptocurrency illegal.

Venezuela’s opposition-run parliament on Tuesday outlawed a “petro” cryptocurrency promoted by socialist President Nicolas Maduro, calling it an effort to illegally mortgage the cash-strapped country’s oil reserves.

Maduro on Friday said his government would issue nearly $6 billion of petros as a way to raise hard currency and to evade financial sanctions imposed by Washington.

Cryptocurrency experts say Venezuela’s mismanagement of its own economy, combined with the ruling Socialist Party’s historic lack of respect for private property rights, will likely leave investors uninterested in acquiring petros.

“This is not a cryptocurrency, this is a forward sale of Venezuelan oil,” said legislator Jorge Millan. “It is tailor-made for corruption.”

Which of course is the whole point. But Maduro effectively neutered the opposition-held congress last year by creating the rubber-stamp “Constituent Assembly” via a widely-boycotted election.

HEALTH: CDC: Too many babies die needlessly due to risky parental decisions.

PARTLY, YES: Is an ‘Empathy Gap’ to Blame for James Damore’s Problems at Google?

Compelling evidence supporting Damore and Gudeman’s lawsuit comes from a recent interview published in Quillette. Claire Lehmann interviews “Gideon Scopes” (a pseudonym), a software engineer who occasionally writes for the publication. Scopes has Asperger syndrome. He also has extensive experience navigating gender issues in tech:

I asked Gideon if he thought that the American media painted a distorted picture of the gender gap in tech. He told me yes. He chalked it up to three factors: a growing tendency towards collectivism in American culture, combined with a blank slate view of human nature and an empathy gap towards men.

… When women talk about being made to feel uncomfortable at work, or being sexually harassed, we feel empathy and want to punish the wrong-doers. But we don’t have the same reaction for “geeks,” or “techbros”. Because our understanding of neurodiversity is painfully lacking, our culture tends to view men as a homogenous category, seeing all men as inheritors of privilege and all men as possessing the masculine traits that foster toughness and resilience. We have a habit of ignoring those who don’t, and when they do talk about their vulnerability, we are inclined to ignore, or ridicule them for it.

Scopes believes Damore falls somewhere on the Autism spectrum, hence his ignorance in releasing such a highly charged memo, commenting, “If he didn’t get the message that the women in science movement wasn’t interested in dialogue and is glad to destroy anyone who questioned it then he must be [on the spectrum].”

Also to blame is the Bay Area’s notorious contempt for actual diversity.

ANOTHER REASON FOR THE WALL – THE FEDS MISS TOO MANY BAD GUYS ON THE BORDER: Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials missed really bad guys in all 40 screening cases reviewed by the Department of Homeland Security Inspector General. Many of them were national security risks of the highest order.

HMM: Florida cut from future offshore drilling.

“President Trump has directed me to rebuild our offshore oil and gas program in a manner that supports our national energy policy and also takes into consideration the local and state voice,” Zinke said in a statement. “I support the governor’s position that Florida is unique and its coast is heavily reliant on tourism as an economic driver. As a result of today’s discussion and Governor Scott’s leadership, I am removing Florida from consideration for any new oil and gas platforms.”

Gov. Scott rejoiced in the decision. “By removing Florida from consideration, we can now focus on how we can further protect our environment, including our proposal for record funding for the Everglades, our springs, our beaches and our state parks. I will never stop fighting for Florida’s environment and our pristine coastline.”

Sounds like offshore drilling wasn’t playing well in a state which might be competitive in 2020.

GEORGE KORDA: Nathan Bedford Forrest: Instead of statue demolition, why not turn the tables on racists? This is a really thoughtful and informative piece.

SCIENCE: Scientists Just Changed Our Understanding of How Anaesthesia Messes With The Brain.

YEP. WE SHOULD CUT THE NUMBER OF “STUDENT LIFE” ADMINISTRATORS DOWN TO, WELL, ZERO. Today’s kids love socialism — but it’s not because of their radical professors: Professors have little influence on student political beliefs compared to peers, “student life” administrators and campus activists. And the “campus activists” are, mostly, tools of the administrators.

MEH. WHEN BUSH DID THAT THEY JUST SPREAD “FAKE TURKEY” LIES. Mr. President, do your duty. Go see our troops.

THE INTERNET OF BATHROOM THINGS: Kohler launches Kohler Konnect smart home range of iPhone-configurable bathroom and kitchen fixtures.

The new line of connected devices using Kohler Konnect mostly centers around the bathroom experience, with each including some element that users can fine tune to their preference. The Kohler Konnect companion app can be used to alter presets, such as temperatures and lighting, and in some cases, to remotely turn on elements.

A key aspect is the inclusion of voice control, allowing for the user to operate a kitchen faucet or intelligent toilet, change the lighting in a bathroom mirror, run a shower, or automatically fill a bath to a specified depth and temperature, all through vocal commands.

Unless it can prevent someone else from flushing a toilet while I’m in the shower, I fail to see the utility.

BEN SHAPIRO: It’s A Good Day For Andrew Breitbart’s Legacy.

AND FOR THE REST OF THE CONSTITUTION: Kamala Harris Now on Senate Judiciary Committee; Bad News for Second Amendment.

CHANGE? White House plans to destroy Trump election fraud commission’s voter data.

THE MORE THINGS CHANGE… Russian historian who exposed Stalin’s crimes faces enforced psychiatric testing.

Yuri Dmitriev, 61, is on trial in northwest Russia on charges brought by state prosecutors of involving his adopted daughter, then 11, in child pornography, of illegally possessing “the main elements of” a firearm, and of depravity involving a minor.

Some of Russia’s leading cultural figures say Dmitriev was framed because his focus on Stalin’s crimes – he found a mass grave with up to 9,000 bodies dating from the Soviet dictator’s Great Terror in the 1930s – jars with the latter-day Kremlin narrative that Russia must not be ashamed of its past.

The narrative has taken on added importance ahead of a March presidential election which polls show incumbent Vladimir Putin, who uses his country’s World War Two victory when Stalin was in charge to bolster national pride, is on track to win.

Putin asserted last year that what he called an “excessive demonization of Stalin” was being used to undermine Russia.

Under Brezhnev, when the Soviet Union had moved to a kinder, gentler totalitarianism, psychiatric “treatment” was often used to punish dissidents instead of labor camps or summary execution. After all, you’d have to be crazy to oppose the State.

And these days, you’d have to be crazy to oppose Putin.

PUSHBACK: Catherine Deneuve and 100 other French women sign public letter disavowing #MeToo ‘witch hunt.’

The letter, signed by renowned French actress Catherine Deneuve as well as writers, historians, journalists and entertainers, was published in Le Monde to “we defend freedom to importune, indispensable to sexual freedom.”

“Rape is a crime, but trying to seduce someone, even persistently or back-handedly, is not — nor is men being gentlemanly a macho attack,” the letter said.

“Men have been punished summarily, forced out of their jobs when all they did was touch someone’s knee or try to steal a kiss.”

Or less.

I FELT A GRAVE DISTURBANCE IN THE FORCE, AS IF MILLIONS OF SITCOMS SUDDENLY CRIED OUT IN TERROR AND WERE SUDDENLY SILENCED: The post-Pervnado era has made a lot of classic TV cringeworthy. Including:

M*A*S*H

It wasn’t just “M*A*S*H” — but the 1970s comedy was one of the worst offenders and one of the most influential shows of its era, Thompson says. It ran for 11 years, was a huge hit and the characters’ lecherous behavior “was really central to a lot of the comedy.”

Where many skeevy TV characters are portrayed as losers, the main protagonist on “M*A*S*H,” Alan Alda’s Capt. Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce, was suave, funny and smart.

But he, and the other men, also terrorized Loretta Swit’s Houlihan — who they called “Hot Lips” — and other nurses with sleazy, handsy come-ons.

“If fictional characters could be exposed, I’m sure Hawkeye Pierce would be one of them, all those nurses would finally come forward and talk about all the things he did,” Thompson says.

As the show and times went on, Alda — a liberal and self-professed “feminist” — gained more influence, and both “M*A*S*H” and his character moved away from such sexist gags.

In his year-end round-up of “The 165 Greatest American Movies,” John Nolte of Big Hollywood warned  Robert Altman’s original film version of M*A*S*H could never be made in today’s SJW environment:

Frank Burns (Robert Duvall) and Margaret “Hotlips” O’Houlihan (Sally Kellerman) are the insufferable Social Justice Warriors of their time — pious, smug, hypocritical, bossy snitches, forever sucking up to the  Establishment. They are nothing less than stand-ins for today’s left as personified by the elite media. Cutting them down to size are Hawkeye (Donald Sutherland) and Trapper John (Elliott Gould), two characters whose fun-loving attitude in pursuit of personal freedom would be villainized onscreen today as sexist and racist (they are not), as cisgender white males in need of a stern lecture from Hot Lips, who would now be portrayed as the movie’s heroine — sorry, hero. Think I’m kidding? Read this.

* * * * * * * *

M*A*S*H gives us the heroes we most need today: men who love women, sex, booze, a good time; women and men who respect life and professionalism, despise war and conformity, and whose favorite sport is the most crucial of all — removing the steel rods stuck up the backsides of society’s joyless scolds and virtue signalers.

A decade after he adapted M*A*S*H for the small screen, veteran TV writer/producer Larry Gelbart was interviewed by fellow lefty Todd Gitlin for his book on the TV industry, Inside Prime Time:

Perry Lafferty, who had been at CBS with Wood and Silverman, said that if someone else had come to him with an idea for a show about American doctors in the Korean War, he would have said, “Never. Bad concept. Terrible. What are you talking about?” The show sold without a pilot.

Obviously M*A*S*H was launched on a wave of antiwar sentiment. “We wanted to say that war was futile,” Gelbart said, “to represent it as a failure on everybody’s part that people had to kill each other to make a point. We wanted to say that when you take people from home they do things they would never do. They drink. They whore. They steal. They become venal. They become asinine, in terms of power. They get the clap. They become alcoholics. They become rude. They become sweet. They become tender. They become loving. We tended to make war the enemy without really saying who was fighting.” Gelbart’s favorite line was when Klinger, under fire, said, “Damn Truman, damn Stalin, damn everybody.” M*A*S*H and its cast were so lovable, the American right never saw much payoff in blasting it for dangerous pacifist tendencies. “It was chic to be antiwar,” Gelbart says. “You couldn’t offend anybody.”

Well, that was the left in the 1970s, when they were having fun. And now that the sexual revolution has moved into its French Revolution phase, it’s impossible to not offend them. Which is why, as our first link illustrates, M*A*S*H isn’t the only 1970s sitcom that humorless SJW scolds want to toss down the memory hole. What will Nick at Nite and TV Land have left to show?

(See also: Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles, which both Nolte and Brooks himself have noted could never be made today. As Nolte warned in 2014, “Buy a Copy Before the Left Burns Them All.”)

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Even Elite Business Schools Discount MBA Degrees By 50% Or More.

HEATHER MAC DONALD: Tenuous accusations of sexual harassment against a portrait artist suggest that #MeToo has become a war on men.

Chuck Close is a darling of the contemporary art world; his massive, photography-based portraits have exhibited at virtually all major contemporary art venues. In 2005, he met a painter, Delia Brown, at a chic Hamptons dinner party. He said that he liked her work and asked her to pose for a photo in his studio. Brown immediately conveyed the invitation to one of her patrons, who was also a guest at the Hamptons party, as a sign of her election to the modern art-market firmament. When she phoned Close the next day to arrange the visit, he said that he wanted her to pose topless. This was hardly a novel proposal: Close’s photographs of male and female nudes are a known part of his output. Brown was insulted, however. She told Close over the phone that she needed to think about it. She then decided against the invitation. “I came to the conclusion that I was not being photographed as an artist but as a woman,” she told the New York Times. “You shouldn’t expect just because you go into an artist’s studio that you will be compromised. You should be allowed to have that experience, just like male artists who have that experience.”

Brown was not insulted enough, however, to forego trying to arrange a visit to his studio anyway. When she called a few weeks later to schedule such a visit, Close acted like he did not know her, she said.

Close had sexually harassed Brown, according to the New York Times and the Huffington Post.

Read the whole thing.

My first (and last) corporate sexual harassment seminar was 25 years ago, and even back then a man’s “guilt” was based on the non-objective standard of whether the “victim” felt as though she’d been harassed. The War on Men predates #MeToo by a long time.

ROGER SIMON: Donald Trump — the Grownup in the Room on Immigration.

BLUE ON BLUE: Senate Hopeful Challenging Five-Term Incumbent Feinstein’s Liberal Credentials.

ACCOUNTABILITY: Trump budget chief shuts down consumer ‘protection’ bureau ‘slush fund.’ “CFPB, the brainchild of Democratic Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, collects fines from financial institutions and spends it on victims and educating the public on its mission. Millions of dollars have been set aside for the education funding. But the agency has been secretive about who gets the money.”