LIFESTYLES OF THE RICH AND VAPID: Sarah Hoyt asks, Who Are These “People’s State of the Union” People?

THE LEFT EATS ITS OWN, PART MMMMCCCLXVII: Climate alarmist Bill Nye called out by “500 Women Scientists” for legitimizing climate skepticism by attending the State of the Union address. “500 Women Scientists,” by the way, appears to be four women.

THE CHIPS ARE DOWN: Bone Marrow and Heart Attack. “They have learned that a bizarre accumulation of mutated stem cells in bone marrow increases a person’s risk of dying within a decade, usually from a heart attack or stroke, by 40 or 50 percent. They named the condition with medical jargon: clonal hematopoiesis of indeterminate potential. CHIP has emerged as a risk for heart attack and stroke that is as powerful as high LDL or high blood pressure but it acts independently of them. And CHIP is not uncommon.”

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THIS WAS MERELY A MATTER OF TIME. ESPN Host: Notre Dame’s Fighting Irish Mascot Is Offensive, Needs to Change.

ESPN morphed into MSNBC so quickly, it was impossible not to notice.

NEW YOU CAN USE: What Millennials Should Know About the Soviet Union.

GOOD: Saliva-based HIV test may be as reliable as blood test.

BRENDAN O’NEILL: Feminists have a new target: working-class women.

This is the nature of feminism today: it has become a well-off women’s racket. It has become a means for educated women to secure their position in the media, business and politics. Witness the new feminism’s myopic obsession with numbers of women on company boards, or the exact ratio of male-to-female guests on the Today programme, or how female MPs are addressed on Twitter. The vast majority of women, and men, do not work in these fields, of course. Feminism, clearly, isn’t for them. In fact, feminism is very often against them, especially if they are those ‘bad women’ who take jobs or have points of view that mainstream feminists disapprove of. Those women will be raged against by the sisterhood.

But they aren’t all that “new” a target; as Fred Siegel wrote a few years ago in The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class, “The best short credo of liberalism came from the pen of the once canonical left-wing literary historian Vernon Parrington in the late 1920s. ‘Rid society of the dictatorship of the middle class,’ Parrington insisted, referring to both democracy and capitalism, ‘and the artist and the scientist will erect in America a civilization that may become, what civilization was in earlier days, a thing to be respected.’”

Based on the number of #metoo tags emanating from women working in Hollywood and the news media, that project doesn’t appear to be going all that well for the left.

WELL, THEY’RE NOT EXACTLY AWASH WITH OIL REVENUES ANYMORE: Russia military spending almost halved from 2015 peak and Russia near financial collapse.

Thanks, Frackers! Weird that the people most worried about Russians under their beds are the least supportive of fracking, the most powerful tool in existence against Russian power projection.

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THIS STRATEGY WORKED OUT SO WELL FOR THE NFL AND THE GRAMMY AWARDS: Airbnb goes to war with Trump in prime time with State of the Union ad blasting ‘s***hole’ countries’ remarks and saying ‘Let’s open doors, not build walls’.

THIS IS BAD: Berserk leprosy bacteria are wildly mutating to become extremely drug resistant.

THE INTERNAL COMBUSTION ENGINE IS TOUGHER TO BEAT THAN MANY PEOPLE EXPECTED: Mazda Says Its Next-Generation Gasoline Engine Will Run Cleaner Than an Electric Car.

J.D. TUCCILLE: FBI’s Unsavory History Casts Shadow Over Debate About Political Meddling.

Trump may have had reason to be concerned about FBI politicking. Leaked text messages shared by two romantically involved FBI employees who were involved in the probe into Russian meddling revealed their belief that Trump is “loathsome” and an “idiot.” At the same time, they had a soft spot for his major opponent, Hillary Clinton, noting that they should take it easy in investigating her conduct because “She might be our next president. The last thing you need us going in there loaded for bear'”

This has Republicans waging what Vox’s Jane Coaston calls a “war on the FBI,” claiming that partisan bias extends beyond those two FBI texting buddies to taint the whole bureau. Democrats beg to differ. “I can assure you that the men and women at the bureau are dedicated public servants committed to defending the American people and upholding the law,” protests Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.).

But those “dedicated public servants” who are “upholding the rule of law” are the institutional descendants of the folks the bipartisan Church Committee said “all too often disregarded the Constitutional rights of Americans.” In their domestic operations, the report revealed, “FBI intelligence reports on protest activity and domestic dissent accumulated massive information on lawful activity and law-abiding citizens.”

And yes, the FBI used the information it gathered to become an active player in politics.

Maybe we should just abolish the Bureau.

EVEN BETTER THAN THE REAL THING: Joni Mitchell’s “brilliant art was always a product of artifice as much as it was of honesty.”

WILLING THE STASI INTO EXISTENCE: Oklahoma State Activists Want a Bias Response Team with the Power to Punish Racially Insensitive Speech.

I TALK TO MIKE STOPA AND TODD FEINBURG on the Harvard Lunch Club Podcast. Breakout quote: “Apollo was like a command economy. And a command economy is like being on steroids – your muscles get big but your testicles shrink, so it’s ultimately not sustainable.”

BURIED LEDE: NANCY PELOSI FINALLY UTTERS A TRUE STATEMENT! Pelosi Gets Testy With Chris Cuomo: ‘You Really Don’t Know What You’re Talking About’ [VIDEO].

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: VIDEO: Students hate Trump’s SOTU…before it even happens!

Related: Yale student says classmates insist on ‘leftist viewpoints.’ “A Yale University student recently criticized her peers for shunning ‘alternative voices’ after she was ‘roasted’ for defending British-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie in class.
Anushree Agrawal, who comes from a similar culture as Rushdie, says her classmates blasted Rushdie as a ‘woman-hater,’ then attacked her for explaining that he was simply depicting the world that he was writing about.”

RADICAL CHIC, THE GERITOL YEARS:

● Establishment Media Bury Obama-Farrakhan Photo.

● “Managing editor of The Beat DC, Tiffany Cross, said Democrats should treat their state of the union response like a ‘trailer for the black panther party,’ Sunday on MSNBC’s ‘AM Joy.’”

● The deep meaning of Keith Ellison.

In 2005, on the 35th anniversary of Leonard and Felicia Bernstein’s infamous fundraising party for the Black Panthers in their uber-swank Park Ave. duplex that inspired Tom Wolfe’s epochal “Radical Chic” article for New York magazine, I asked: “Has radical chic run its course?… the next four years will be interesting to watch, indeed. The wheels came off [for the Democrats as they moved further and further left during McGovern’s run] in ’72. This might be their last chance to put them back on.”

Given Alan Dershowitz’s shocked reaction this past week that he would not have campaigned for Obama had he known about his affiliation with Farrakhan, burying the Obama-Farrakhan photo may have bought the Democrats some breathing room in 2008. But radical chic continues to be one of the key motivators for that “progressive” party, despite being a half-century old worldview.

NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL MAKING AMERICA GREAT AGAIN: Elon Musk Sells $3.5 Million Worth Of Flamethrowers In One Day.

THE HILL: Expect Trump’s State of the Union to celebrate America — and provide a roadmap to the future. Seems like a safe bet.

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