ROGER SIMON: BuzzFeed, Acosta and the Non-Existence of Journalism.

(Bumped.)

LINDA SARSOUR GETS A BIG CHEER AT WOMEN’S MARCH CALLING FOR THE BOYCOTT OF ISRAEL.

Did everybody say cheers with a big shot of Johnnie Walker’s spin-off Scotch, Jane Walker?

OVER AT ED DRISCOLL.COM: The Grand Tour Returns to Amazon Prime Video Today.

(Bumped.)

DESPITE MY WILLINGNESS TO SHOW OFF MY MANLY PHYSIQUE, I THINK I’LL STICK WITH DEET: To avoid blood-sucking insects, paint your body.

LIZ SHELD: Trump Is Delivering On Pharma Pricing.

WE’LL MAKE YOU AGREE: Lysenkoism and Climate Change Heresy.

Insisting that scientific truth must agree with what’s current political truth never works out well for either.

YOUR WEEKEND TREACHER: You Won’t Believe How BuzzFeed Reacted to Being Wrong About THIS!

EARLIER TODAY, A STUDENT ASKED ME WHAT I THOUGHT TRUMP WOULD DO: Offer something reasonable that the Democrats won’t go for, I replied. And that seems to be what he’s doing:

President Donald Trump proposed a deal to end the government shutdown that continued his demand for $5.7 billion in funding for his border wall, but contained what he suggested was a concession to Democrats: three years of protections for immigrants who were brought to the country illegally as children and those who fled certain countries and are covered under the “temporary protected status” program.

“This plan solves the immediate crisis, and it is a horrible crisis,” Trump said in an address to the nation, delivered from the Diplomatic Room at the White House. “And it provides humanitarian relief, delivers real border security and immediately reopens our federal government.”

Trump said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has agreed to put his proposal into a bill and bring it up on the floor by the end of next week.

Democratic leaders in Congress declared the plan dead on arrival, issuing a spate of statements based on early news reports of what Trump intended to propose.

The Democrats have gotten themselves into a position where they can’t accept the wall because of its symbolic-win value for Trump, almost no matter what else he offers. A journalist friend messages:

Trump is a genius. He took away DACA so he could give it back. If they don’t give him the wall, they screw the DACAs.

And the ongoing shutdown is their fault. He just grabbed their compassion card.

Prediction: His support among DACAs and Latinos will go up.

Well, the Democrats have made clear that they value people who haven’t crossed the border (illegally) yet more highly than people who are already in this country. Or, alternatively, that they hate Trump more than the love the “Dreamers.”

UPDATE: Thoughts from Trent Telenko.

ANOTHER UPDATE:

ALSO FOR YOUNGER ONES: For older adults, a protein-rich diet is important for health.

Older adults need to eat more protein-rich foods when they’re trying to lose weight, dealing with a chronic or acute illness, or facing a hospitalization, according to a growing consensus among scientists.

During these stressful periods, aging bodies process protein less efficiently and need more of it to maintain muscle mass and strength, bone health, and other essential physiological functions.

Even healthy seniors need more protein than when they were younger to help preserve muscle mass, experts suggest. Yet up to one-third of older adults don’t eat an adequate amount due to reduced appetite, dental issues, impaired taste, swallowing problems and limited financial resources. Combined with a tendency to become more sedentary, this puts them at risk of deteriorating muscles, compromised mobility, slower recovery from bouts of illness and the loss of independence.

Recent research suggests that older adults who consume more protein are less likely to lose “functioning”: the ability to dress themselves, get out of bed, walk up a flight of stairs and more. In a 2018 study that followed more than 2,900 seniors over 23 years, researchers found that those who ate the most protein were 30 percent less likely to become functionally impaired than those who ate the least amount.

While not conclusive (older adults who eat more protein may be healthier to begin with), “our work suggests that older adults who consume more protein have better outcomes,” said Paul Jacques, co-author of the study and director of the Nutritional Epidemiology Program at Tufts University’s Jean Mayer USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging.

In another study, which was published in 2017 and followed nearly 2,000 older adults over six years, people who consumed the least amount of protein were almost twice as likely to have difficulty walking or climbing steps as those who ate the most, after adjusting for health behaviors, chronic conditions and other factors.

Lifting weights helps, too. It helps a lot. For older (over 40, up to past 90) people a good place to start is The Barbell Prescription, published by Mark Rippetoe and endorsed by Nassim Taleb.

In a semi-related manner, I’ve noticed something. In my late 30s I started to spontaneously grunt when I got up out of a chair. I just assumed that was a natural age-related thing, since my father and grandfather did the same thing. But Helen pointed out a few weeks ago that I’ve stopped, and she was right, I just hadn’t noticed. I think it’s the farmer’s carries I’ve been doing for the last few months, because I was doing heavier squats and deadlifts a couple of years ago and that didn’t do it. I’ve also been doing vacuums to strengthen the transversus abdominis muscles, but I suspect it’s the farmer’s carries — they just make me feel lighter on my feet and more agile in general. Lately I’ve also popped up from sitting on the floor in a way I haven’t done for years, and I’m pretty sure that’s the farmer’s carries.

KYLE SMITH ON THE GREAT FORGETTING: Cultural Icons: Popular Today, Unknown Tomorrow.

These days, in a cultural sense, the only two pre-1960 singers who still linger in the memory are Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley. Bing Crosby, as Terry Teachout recently pointed out in Commentary, has more or less disappeared. A case could be made that, in addition to being one of his era’s most popular singers, Crosby is the single most popular movie star in Hollywood history. Certainly he is in the top ten. Today he survives in the memory of specialists and historians and suchlike boffins. To the broader populace, the words “Bing Crosby” no longer have meaning.

Looking back on his four decades as a movie critic, John Podhoretz points out that even if you go back only to the 1980s, hardly anything survives. People still talk about Back to the Future and Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Princess Bride (but not E.T., the biggest hit of the decade). Rain Man not only swept the Academy Awards in 1988 but was the biggest hit of that year, selling the equivalent of $380 million in tickets in today’s dollars. Bring up that movie in a classroom today and I suspect the reaction will be the same as if you brought up Mickey Rooney or Shirley Temple. Step forward, 1990s movies, and report to the vaporization facility. You’ve got a few years left, but only a few.

As the Who suit up for what I suppose will be their final tour (“Who’s Left”?), Chuck Klosterman points out in his book But What if We’re Wrong? that whole forms die out. He compares rock to 19th-century marching music: nothing left of the latter except John Philip Sousa. That’s it. And Sousa himself is barely remembered. In 100 years rock might be gone too, Klosterman guesses. Maybe we’ll remember one rock act. Who will it be? Maybe none of the obvious answers. It certainly wasn’t obvious at the time of Fitzgerald’s death that The Great Gatsby would be the best-remembered novel he or anyone else wrote in the first half of the 20th century. As for the novels of the second half of the 20th century, the clock is ticking on them. The Catcher in the Rye is moribund. Generation X was the last to revere that book. Teaching it to young people today would get you ridiculed. To Kill a Mockingbird? It had a good run but it’s now being labeled a “white savior” story by the grandchildren of those who revered it. Soon schools and teachers will be shunning it.

Speaking of The Catcher in the Rye, as Cathy Young noted last week at Quillette, “The Posthumous #MeToo-ing of J. D. Salinger,” is helping to dramatically speed up his once universally known novel’s memory holing, despite this being the 100th birthday of its author.

FASTER, PLEASE: Experimental diabetes drug better than current meds, trial results suggest.

SO I SAW SOME PEOPLE ON FACEBOOK TALKING ABOUT A “USB CONDOM,” and it took me a second to realize they meant one of these. I wouldn’t trust it against the Chinese or the NSA, but yeah.

REPORT: TRUMP WILL OFFER DEMS DEAL ON DACA RECIPIENTS FOR BORDER WALL FUNDING.

But is it already DOA?

Update: (From Charlie): I tweeted this about 2 hours before the actual announcement:

WILSON IS REALLY BRANCHING OUT: New for 2019: Wilson Combat Protector Series.

AT AMAZON, save on bestselling Pet Supplies.

Plus, deals on Automotive Tools and Equipment.

FAIL: Only 10,000 Are Expected At This Year’s Women’s March Following Anti-Semitism Scandal. “In 2017, the first Women’s March attracted between 500,000 and 1 million people from around the country, according to official estimates.” Well, the Women’s March’s appeal has become “more selective,” and there aren’t that many anti-semitic bigots available, it turns out.

BUFF IN OZ: A USAF B-52 takes off from Royal Australian Air Force Base (RAAF) Darwin, Australia. The bomber’s on its way back to Guam.

RELATED: The caption refers to a specific U.S.-Australia exercise, but at the strategic level think Quad. The Quadrilateral Security Dialogue: Japan, Australia, America and India. You can find more details in Chapter 3 of my latest book, Cocktails from Hell: The Dragon Revives.

OOPS: Common gut bacteria blocks effects of Parkinson’s drugs, study says.

THE LATEST CORPORATE SOCIAL FIASCO: JOHNNIE WALKER STEPPING ON A RAKE FOR THE WOMEN’S MARCH.

Hot on the heels of the toxic masculinity razor commercial debacle another corporate political decision has reared up. After Gillette insulted an entire gender, and a significant of its customer base, one liquor brand has stepped up to say, “Hold my Scotch!”

Johnnie Walker has come out in support of The Women’s March, and it is not going well. The scotch brand has been an enthusiastic backer of the movement, seemingly oblivious to the various groups that have disavowed the March due to anti-semitic leadership. To date the NOW, NAACP, Greenpeace, Emily’s List, and the Southern Poverty Law Center are just a few who marched off. Things have become so toxic even the Democratic National Committee has cut ties.

But the scotch mavens are touting its affiliation with the hate-filled group, even partnering with them on a marketing basis. On the eve of the March Johnnie Walker tweeted out this collection of posters it commissioned for the event.

The wisdom behind a company clearly choosing sides (note the “Resist” poster selection) is obscured partially by lending support to an organization many are fleeing due to its internal anti-semitic positions. Johnnie Walker may have signaled itself into a corner, as the brand has been an active booster for the movement for at least a year now.

I feel sorriest for the ghost of Christopher Hitchens, who used to called Johnnie Walker Black “the breakfast of champions.” Today, Johnnie Walker is aligning itself with a rabidly anti-Semitic and anti-Israel group. As Brad Slager writes at Red State, “One day corporations may learn how social activism is bottom line averse.”

But as with Gillette, not this week.

HITMAN CONVICTED BY FITBIT. “A British runner, cyclist, and mob hitman has been convicted for the murders of two rival gangsters, in part, because of his GPS watch.. . . Though police already suspected Fellows in Kinsella’s death, it was his Garmin Forerunner that linked him to Massey’s unsolved 2015 murder. While detectives were investigating Fellows, they came across a photo of the suspect wearing his Garmin Forerunner during 2015’s Great Manchester 10K (he ran 47:17, pictured above) two months before the murder of Massey that July. Detectives then located the device at Fellows’s home and checked its GPS data for files that could link him to Massey. They found that the runner plotted these murders with the attention and precision of any serious athlete, and accordingly, he recorded his recon missions.”

ALL THIS AND WORLD WAR II: Oregon Likely to Become the First in the Nation to Adopt Statewide Rent Control. And that will probably make housing less affordable, not more.

As economist Walter Block wrote about 15 years ago at the libertarian-themed Econlib:

New York State legislators defend the War Emergency Tenant Protection Act—also known as rent control—as a way of protecting tenants from war-related housing shortages. The war referred to in the law is not the 2003 war in Iraq, however, or the Vietnam War; it is World War II. That is when rent control started in New York City. Of course, war has very little to do with apartment shortages. On the contrary, the shortage is created by rent control, the supposed solution. Gotham is far from the only city to have embraced rent control. Many others across the United States have succumbed to the blandishments of this legislative “fix.”

For an ideology dubbed “Progressivism,” the left sure loves the economic policies of the first half of the 20th century.

AT AMAZON, shop the Valentine’s Day Gift Shop.

HOW’S THAT SPACE PROGRAM COMING ALONG? The Earth has been experiencing more frequent asteroid strikes.