Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

The next Nobel Medicine prizes will go to researchers at The University of Virginia. Huffington Post tells us about the stunning discovery of vessels that connect the brain to the lymphatic system.

Neuroscientists have uncovered a previously unknown direct connection between the brain and the immune system — a finding that could have significant implications for the treatment of brain disorders like Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis and autism.

The discovery came as a surprise to Dr. Kevin Lee, chairman of the University of Virginia’s neuroscience department.

“The first time these guys showed me the basic result, I just said one sentence: ‘They’ll have to change the textbooks,’” Lee said in a press release Monday.

The study’s lead author, Dr. Jonathan Kipnis of the University of Virginia’s Center for Brain Immunology and Glia, echoed the sentiment.

“When we discovered the lymphatic vessels we were very very surprised, because based on the textbooks — these vessels do not exist,” Kipnis said in an email to The Huffington Post. … 

… A next step of the research is to determine how the vessels might be involved in diseases involving the brain and the immune system, such as multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer’s.

“We believe that for every neurological disease that has an immune component to it, these vessels may play a major role,” Kipnis said.

Though the findings are preliminary, the researchers hope they’ll open up a number of new possibilities for treating these and other neurological disorders through therapies that target the lymphatic vessels of the brain.

For example, Kipnis explained that the findings could shed light on why large protein chunks accumulate in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. “We think they may be accumulating in the brain because they’re not being efficiently removed by these vessels,” he said. …

More from Machines Like Us.

That such vessels could have escaped detection when the lymphatic system has been so thoroughly mapped throughout the body is surprising on its own, but the true significance of the discovery lies in the effects it could have on the study and treatment of neurological diseases ranging from autism to Alzheimer’s disease to multiple sclerosis.

“Instead of asking, ‘How do we study the immune response of the brain?,’ ‘Why do multiple sclerosis patients have the immune attacks?,’ now we can approach this mechanistically – because the brain is like every other tissue connected to the peripheral immune system through meningeal lymphatic vessels,” said Jonathan Kipnis, a professor in U.Va.’s Department of Neuroscience and director of U.Va.’s Center for Brain Immunology and Glia. “It changes entirely the way we perceive the neuro-immune interaction. We always perceived it before as something esoteric that can’t be studied. But now we can ask mechanistic questions.”

He added, “We believe that for every neurological disease that has an immune component to it, these vessels may play a major role. [It’s] hard to imagine that these vessels would not be involved in a [neurological] disease with an immune component.”

The desire of humans to trade has many ancient markers. Science20.com reports on gold trade between Ireland and the Cornish coast as many as 2,500 years BCE. That would mean a sea voyage of over 150 miles across unfriendly waters.

Archaeologists have found evidence of an ancient gold trade route between the south-west of the UK and Ireland, which would mean people were trading gold between the two countries as far back as the early Bronze Age, 2500 B.C.

The finding was made after measuring the chemical composition of early gold artifacts in Ireland and discovering that the objects were actually made from imported gold, rather than Irish. The gold is most likely to have come from Cornwall, which means the symbiotic link between Ireland and England is even farther back then believed. …

Smithsonian has interesting trips for your bucket list. They list five sites where large meteors have hit the earth and rearranged the landscape.

Early in the morning of October 6, 2008, astronomers at the University of Arizona detected an asteroid on a collision course with Earth. When other sightings cropped up across the world, the astronomers’ suspicions were confirmed—the asteroid was going to hit our planet. It was the first time in history an asteroid had been observed before impact. Within hours, the asteroid entered the Earth’s atmosphere (and thus became a meteor) and broke up into tiny pieces. These fragments—known as meteorites—landed in a remote location in northern Sudan.

Luckily for Earth, this meteor wasn’t the big one that NASA scientists are warning could one day crash into our planet (and that Bruce Willis once blew up in a movie). But throughout history, meteorites have left their beautiful—if destructive—scars upon the globe. Here are some of the best places to see meteorite impact sites this summer: …

 

The cartoonists have some fun with Caitlyn Jenner.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Harvard used to restrict Jews, now it’s Asians. Kate Bachelder with a WSJ OpEd – Harvard’s Chinese Exclusion Act.

… First, a few facts. Asian-Americans are the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population, and the share of college-age Asian-Americans climbed to 5.1% in 2011 from 3% in 1990. Yet according to independent research cited in the complaint, members of this 5% make up roughly 30% of National Merit semifinalists, a distinction earned by high-school students based on PSAT scores. Asian-American students seem to win a similar share of the Education Department’s Presidential Scholar awards, “one of the nation’s highest honors for high-school students,” as the website puts it. By any standard, Asian-Americans have made remarkable gains since 1950. They constituted 0.2% of the U.S. population then, due in part to the legacy of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.

Harvard admissions do not reflect these changes or gains. The percentage of Asian-American students has held remarkably steady since the 1990s. This spring, 21% of the students admitted to Harvard were Asian-American; in 1993 it was about 20%. Harvard selects students based on criteria it calls “holistic,” taking into consideration subjective qualities such as, according to the university’s website, “interests,” “character” and “growth.”

Yet look how Harvard stacks up against schools that explicitly don’t consider ethnicity in admissions. At the California Institute of Technology, the share of Asian-American students hit 42.5% in 2013—double Harvard’s and a big jump from Caltech’s 26% in 1993. At the University of California-Berkeley it is more than 30%; the state’s voters banned the state schools from using racial preferences in a 1996 referendum. The trend is also observable at elite high schools with race-neutral admissions: New York City’s HunterCollegeHigh School was 49% Asian-American in 2013. …

Continuing with higher ed, Michael Barone says colleges and universities have grown bloated and dysfunctional.

American colleges and universities, long thought to be the glory of the nation, are in more than a little trouble. I’ve written before of their shameful practices — the racial quotas and preferences at selective schools (Harvard is being sued by Asian-American organizations), the kangaroo courts that try students accused of rape and sexual assault without legal representation or presumption of innocence, and speech codes that make campuses the least rather than the most free venues in American society.

In following these policies, the burgeoning phalanxes of university and college administrators must systematically lie, insisting against all the evidence that they are racially nondiscriminatory, devoted to due process and upholders of free speech. The resulting intellectual corruption would have been understood by George Orwell. …

… A glut of Ph.D.s and an ever-increasing army of administrators have produced downward pressure on faculty pay. Universities increasingly hire Ph.D.s as underpaid adjuncts, with low wages and no job security.

The last half-century has seen a huge increase in the percentage of Americans who go to college and a huge increase in government aid to them. The assumption was that if college is good for some, it’s good for everyone. But not everyone is suited for college: witness the increasing ranks of debt-laden nongraduates.

And the huge tranches of government money have been largely mopped up by the ever-increasing cadres of administrators. Do students get their money’s worth from the masses of counselors, facilitators, liaisons and coordinators their student loans pay for? Or would they be better off paying for such services only as needed, as most other adults do? …

Editors of NY Daily News opine on campus thought crimes. 

Madness has been unleashed on college campuses — not by drunken frat boys but by the White House.

A wildly mishandled Obama administration campaign to combat student sexual assaults has morphed under a federal gender-equality law into a nightmarish weapon against free speech and academic freedom.

The statute, called Title IX, obligates colleges to act on sexually related complaints to protect students from a hostile environment. But enforcement now encompasses any member of a college community deemed by an accuser to have prompted discomfort in connection with his or her sex.

As NorthwesternUniversity film professor Laura Kipnis discovered, that includes writing or saying the wrong thing. Defying a gag order, she has gone public with a hair-raising account of being accused under Title IX after writing an article about Northwestern’s recent ban on sexual relations between faculty and students. …

Huffington Post has more campus hijinks. 

Six weeks ago, Northwestern University President Morton Schapiro wrote a fine op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in which he offered a ringing endorsement of academic freedom. As he observed, a university must have “a compelling reason to punish anyone — student, faculty member, staff member — for expressing his or her views, regardless of how repugnant you might find those views.” Indeed, he added, “freedom of speech doesn’t amount to much unless it is tested,” and if freedom of speech isn’t aggressively protected “on college campuses, where self-expression is so deeply valued, why expect it to matter elsewhere?”

It is therefore both surprising and disappointing that NorthwesternUniversity recently found itself embroiled in two embarrassing violations of the core principles of academic freedom. Sadly, a university that should be a national leader in promoting and protecting these values allowed itself to lose sight of its very reason for being. …

Kimberley Strassel wonders why the IRS can’t take a look at the Clinton shakedown foundation. 

The scandal of the century at the IRS was that agency’s secret targeting of conservative nonprofits. Perhaps a close second is the scandal of what the IRS hasn’t been investigating: the Clinton Foundation.

The media’s focus is on Hillary Clinton’s time as secretary of state, and whether she took official actions to benefit her family’s global charity. But the mistake is starting from the premise that the Clinton Foundation is a “charity.” What’s clear by now is that this family enterprise was set up as a global shakedown operation, designed to finance and nurture the Clintons’ continued political ambitions. It’s a Hillary super PAC that throws in the occasional good deed.

That much is made obvious by looking at the foundation’s employment rolls. Most charities are staffed by folks who have spent a lifetime in nonprofits, writing grants or doing overseas field work. The Clinton Foundation is staffed by political operatives. It has been basically a parking lot for Clinton campaign workers—a comfy place to draw a big check as they geared up for Hillary’s presidential run.

The revolving door is spinning quickly these days. There’s Dennis Cheng, a finance director for Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 bid, who went to the Clinton Foundation as its chief development officer. There he built a giant donor file, which he earlier this year took with him to head up fundraising for the Clinton 2016 campaign. There’s Katie Dowd, who raised $100 million as Mrs. Clinton’s new media director in 2008, then went to a Clinton PAC, then to the State Department, then to the foundation as a “tech adviser.” She’s now at Clinton 2016 as digital director.

Some operatives don’t even bother feigning separation. Longtime aide Cheryl Mills served as general counsel to Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 campaign, then worked at State. She then joined the board of directors of the foundation and remains on it still, even as she works on Clinton 2016. Nick Merrill, an aide to Mrs. Clinton at State, has continued on as her press liaison. Last year his name popped up on a news release as a contact person for the Clinton Foundation. Mr. Merrill will be a campaign spokesman for Clinton 2016. …

Great post from Free Beacon on the comedians who suck up to the president and the clintons.

… Stephen Colbert had on Hillary Clinton for a supposedly humorous name-dropping segment about her memoir Hard Choices last June that was so obsequious even the Washington Post called it “embarrassing.” In the end, he told viewers to visit the show’s website to purchase copies. Colbert, in his super-edgy fake conservative persona, also allowed Obama to take over hosting his show last December at GeorgeWashingtonUniversity.

Colbert’s a top-level satirist, and he’s still letting the two top Democrats in the country use his show for their own interests? Gag.

NBC comedian Seth Meyers, in “A Closer Look” segment on Late Night in April, took it upon himself to identify the perceived biases of Clinton Cash author Peter Schweizer, while failing to reveal that he’d hosted the Clinton Global Citizen Awards last year. Ironically, Meyer felt Schweizer’s conservative leanings and former work as a George W. Bush speechwriter helped debunk the findings of his book on pay-for-play allegations against Hillary Clinton at the State Department, findings that were followed up on by decidedly non-conservative outlets like the New York Times and ABC.

It added up to a decidedly weak attempt to be like John Oliver. …

Kevin Williamson on the proposed liberal gulag.

… Sheldon Whitehouse is a sitting United States senator, writing in the Washington Post, arguing for racketeering charges against those who hold heterodox opinions on global warming. 

How about we ask the candidates what they think about this? Does Mrs. Clinton support the proposal to lock people up as mafiosi for seeking to publicize their views on political issues? Does Senator Sanders? Senator Warren? 

Follow-up question: Which other unpopular political views should we be locking people in cages over?

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Joel Kotkin writes on the things that have made our economy unsafe for small business. 

For those of us who covered the great entrepreneurial explosion of the 1980s, it seemed that we were heading toward a new era of economic diversity and decentralization. In 1985, for example, technology guru John Seybold spoke of an emerging “entrepreneurial age” – driven by competition among young, people-centered companies. Similar pronouncements were issued by futurists ranging from John Naisbitt to more serious analysts like Alvin Toffler and Taichi Sakaiya.

Yet, a funny thing has happened to our entrepreneurial age. Instead of a growing presence of smaller, entrepreneurial firms, we are witnessing a resurgence of Big Business. Indeed, over the past two decades, the Fortune 500’s share of nominal gross domestic product has grown from 58 percent in 1994 to 73 percent in 2013. More revealing still, the fastest growth has taken place among the top 100 firms, which now represent 63 percent of all revenue, up from 57 percent in 1994.

At the same time, smaller firms clearly are struggling. The country’s rate of new business creation, which peaked about decade ago, notes the Kaufmann Foundation, plunged more than 30 percent during the economic collapse that started in 2008 and has been slow to bounce back following the recession. Indeed, in 2012-13, entrepreneurial activity actually declined. This is particularly troubling at a time when we are experiencing a rapid expansion of the ages 25-34 workforce, traditionally a harbinger of obstreperousness. But now, younger people, as a whole, seem either too stressed by tough circumstances or too lacking in assets – normally, a house – to get the critical loans they need to start a business.

The financial equation

The economic reasons for this vary, suggests FiveThirtyEight’s Andrew Flowers, including such things as globalization, merger mania and the success of firms such as Apple. But there may also be political factors at work, most particularly the confluence of large business interests and those of the ever-expanding regulatory regime. …

And William McGurn has more on the way to escape poverty in Baltimore – leave. He has some reference to the Joel Kotkin essay that started this week in May 31st Pickings.

Of all the “solutions” for post-riot Baltimore, the best—at least for African-Americans trapped in poverty—appears to be the one that attracts the least notice: Find a new town to call home.

The message comes via two new studies of upward mobility. The first is from Harvard’s The Equality of Opportunity Project. It finds that a poor child whose family leaves a bad neighborhood for a good one will have better long-term economic prospects.

The other, by Joel Kotkin’s Center for Opportunity Urbanism, measures (by median household income, self-employment, housing affordability and population growth) the best and worst cities for America’s racial minorities. Its finding puts self-styled progressives to shame: Of the top 15 cities for African-Americans today, 13 are in the former Confederacy.

Let’s not mince words. The Harvard study identifies Baltimore as the city where the odds are most stacked against a child’s escaping poverty. Mr. Kotkin says his center’s study underscores “the relative worthlessness of good intentions.”

It also underscores the worthlessness of most of the conversations about Baltimore’s future. These include President Obama’s urging more federal “investment” in the city. Or Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake’s looking to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for $20 million to pay for the riot damage. Or former Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley’s run for president on the same government-first orthodoxies that help explain all those boarded up buildings that Americans saw during last month’s televised riots. …

A couple of our favorites have turned their attention to Bernie Sanders. Richard Epstein tries an economics lesson. Good luck washing away Bernie’s tiresome and appalling ignorance.

Senator Bernie Sanders’ quixotic presidential campaign received some unexpected attention for an off-the-cuff comment he made in Iowa this past week. The sentence that has raised some eyebrows is short and to the point: “You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country.” For Sanders, the market economy that provides consumers with such choices is fundamentally at odds with society’s duty to take care of the vulnerable.

Fortunately, it is impossible to take Sanders’s pronouncement out of context. It was delivered in casual conversation as a stand-alone one-sentence indictment of what is wrong with America. Unpacking it helps expose Sanders’ profound misunderstanding of how a well-functioning market system operates. …

… it is instructive to ask, what should be done if in fact we conclude that 23 varieties of underarm deodorants and 18 types of sneakers aren’t necessary in a world with starving children? What next? It will surely not do to operate with no types of deodorants or sneakers. But if open markets generate too many alternatives for these and thousands of other market goods, just who is responsible for deciding what firms can offer what products at what prices, and why?

That problem solves itself in a market economy through the mechanism of decentralized consumer choice. …

… The socialist Sanders cannot take any comfort in these decentralized processes, but wishes to put in place cumbersome administrative processes to make those choices. It is there that the agony begins. …

… The history on this point is clear. I doubt very much that Bernie Sanders has any familiarity with the socialist calculation debate of the 1930s, which proved that no central planner has the information to make intelligent judgments on the question of which products should be sold and at what price. There are of course many things that government has to do to maintain competitive markets, but none of them rely on the heavy-handed forms of intervention that rolled effortlessly off Bernie Sanders’ lips. …

Matthew Continetti compares Sanders’ “fossil socialism” to the Clinton campaign.

… Bernie Sanders, for reasons of age and experience, is an old-school socialist, more concerned with quantitative justice than with the hierarchy of grievances. He didn’t mention Baltimore in his announcement speech because he thinks it’s just a symptom of economic breakdown. Or as an article on the World Socialist Website recently put it: “The fundamental division in Baltimore—as in American society as a whole—is class, not race.”

It’s fitting that Sanders’s opponent Hillary Clinton has decided on the opposite strategy. Petrified of once again losing the nomination unexpectedly, she’s pandering to the constituencies that reelected President Obama. So she’s called for an end to “mass incarceration,” she’s pledged to “go further” than Obama’s unconstitutional executive amnesty, she’s playing the gender card, and her aides deny she ever changed her position on same-sex marriage.

Meanwhile she’s coy on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which the unions oppose, and on the Keystone Pipeline, which the unions support. Her 200 policy advisers haven’t come up with an economic plan as detailed or coherent as Sanders’s because she’s far less antagonistic to the market than he is, and she doesn’t see our social and political dysfunction as a reflection of material imbalances, like he does.

And how could she—she’s a millionaire many times over, a featured speaker at Goldman Sachs, a jet-setter who decided to run for president while vacationing at Oscar de la Renta’s villa in Punta Cana. She may have authorized a leak to the New York Times in which she fantasized about “toppling” the One Percent, but no one really believes her. …

No corner of the economy is free of government’s dead hand. The hand that Bernie Sanders likes. George Will tells us how they mess with raisin growers.

In oral arguments Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear the government defend its kleptocratic behavior while administering an indefensible law. The Agricultural Marketing Agreement Act of 1937 is among the measures by which New Dealers tried and failed to regulate and mandate America back to prosperity. Seventy-eight years later, it is the government’s reason for stealing Marvin and Laura Horne’s raisins.

New Dealers had bushels of theories, including this: In an economic depression, prices fall, so a recovery will occur when government compels prices to stabilize above where a free market would put them. So Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “brains trust” produced “price stabilization” programs by which the government would fine-tune the supply of and demand for various commodities. In 1949, this regulatory itch was institutionalized in the Raisin Administrative Committee (RAC). Today it wants the Hornes to ante up about $700,000. They could instead have turned over more than 1 million pounds of raisins — at least four years of their production. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Heather Mac Donald writes on the new nationwide crime wave. With office holders like the president and the mayors of New York and Baltimore, we’re quickly seeing the fruits of left/liberal ideas.

The nation’s two-decades-long crime decline may be over. Gun violence in particular is spiraling upward in cities across America. In Baltimore, the most pressing question every morning is how many people were shot the previous night. Gun violence is up more than 60% compared with this time last year, according to Baltimore police, with 32 shootings over Memorial Day weekend. May has been the most violent month the city has seen in 15 years.

In Milwaukee, homicides were up 180% by May 17 over the same period the previous year. Through April, shootings in St. Louis were up 39%, robberies 43%, and homicides 25%. “Crime is the worst I’ve ever seen it,” said St. Louis Alderman Joe Vacarro at a May 7 City Hall hearing.

Murders in Atlanta were up 32% as of mid-May. Shootings in Chicago had increased 24% and homicides 17%. Shootings and other violent felonies in Los Angeles had spiked by 25%; in New York, murder was up nearly 13%, and gun violence 7%.

Those citywide statistics from law-enforcement officials mask even more startling neighborhood-level increases. Shooting incidents are up 500% in an East Harlem precinct compared with last year; in a South Central Los Angeles police division, shooting victims are up 100%.

By contrast, the first six months of 2014 continued a 20-year pattern of growing public safety. Violent crime in the first half of last year dropped 4.6% nationally and property crime was down 7.5%. Though comparable national figures for the first half of 2015 won’t be available for another year, the January through June 2014 crime decline is unlikely to be repeated.

The most plausible explanation of the current surge in lawlessness is the intense agitation against American police departments over the past nine months. …

… Contrary to the claims of the “black lives matter” movement, no government policy in the past quarter century has done more for urban reclamation than proactive policing. Data-driven enforcement, in conjunction with stricter penalties for criminals and “broken windows” policing, has saved thousands of black lives, brought lawful commerce and jobs to once drug-infested neighborhoods and allowed millions to go about their daily lives without fear.

To be sure, police officers need to treat everyone they encounter with courtesy and respect. Any fatal police shooting of an innocent person is a horrifying tragedy that police training must work incessantly to prevent. But unless the demonization of law enforcement ends, the liberating gains in urban safety over the past 20 years will be lost.

While a lot of the increased crime comes from policies of foolish mayors, the US Justice Dept. also bears much of the responsibility according to Thomas Sowell.

… The Department of Justice has threatened various local police departments with lawsuits unless they adopt the federal government’s ideas about how police work should be done.

The high cost of lawsuits virtually guarantees that the local police department is going to have to settle the case by bowing to the Justice Department’s demands — not on the merits, but because the federal government has a lot more money than a local police department, and can litigate the case until the local police department runs out of the money needed to do their work.

By and large, what the federal government imposes on local police departments may be summarized as kinder, gentler policing. This is not a new idea, nor an idea that has not been tested in practice.

It was tested in New York under Mayor David Dinkins more than 20 years ago. The opposite approach was also tested when Dinkins was succeeded as mayor by Rudolph Giuliani, who imposed tough policing policies — which brought the murder rate down to a fraction of what it had been under Dinkins.

Unfortunately, when some people experience years of safety, they assume that means that there are no dangers. That is why New York’s current mayor is moving back in the direction of Mayor Dinkins. It is also the politically expedient thing to do.

And innocent men, women and children — most of them black — will pay with their lives in New York, as they have in Baltimore and elsewhere.

And the lawlessness also extends to many prosecutors says Kevin Williamson.

The GOP should turn its attention to prosecutorial misconduct.

As the old Vulcan proverb has it, “Only Nixon can go to China.” And only Nixon’s political heirs can fix the persistent — and terrifying — problems that continue to plague this country’s law-enforcement agencies and prosecutors’ offices.

Exhibit A: Orange County, California.

The sunny Southern California county with a population surpassing that of nearly half the states has a Republican district attorney, Tony Rackauckas, and a big problem on its hands: Its entire prosecutorial apparatus — all 250 lawyers in the district attorney’s office — have been disqualified from participation in a high-profile capital-murder case following revelations that the office colluded with the Orange County sheriff’s department to systematically suppress potentially exculpatory evidence in at least three dozen cases, committing what legal scholars have characterized as perjury and obstruction of justice in the process.

One of the questions involves a secret database of jail records related to confessions obtained via informants. Sheriff’s officers denied the database even existed, and their deception was abetted by prosecutors, leading an exasperated judge to issue an order noting that they “have either intentionally lied or willfully withheld material evidence from this court during the course of their various testimonies. For this court’s current purposes, one is as bad as the other.” The judge unsubtly recommends prosecution. …

WSJ OpEd on our country’s betrayal of Iraqi friends. 

As the fight to retake Ramadi from Islamic State, also known as ISIS, heats up, I can’t help thinking of my visit to the capital of Iraq’s Anbar province nearly eight years ago, and of America’s broken promises since then.

In September 2007, I was in Ramadi for a gathering of Iraqi and American military commanders, politicians and local tribal leaders who had joined forces with the U.S. to defeat al Qaeda in Iraq. Then-Sen. Joseph Biden was there. “These are difficult days,” he told our Iraqi allies. “But as you are proving, you can forge a future for Iraq that is much brighter than its past. If you continue, we will continue to send you our sons and our daughters, to shed their blood with you and for you.”

It was a noble promise, and Iraqis believed it. The surge in U.S. forces and the “Anbar Awakening” had succeeded beyond all hopes. U.S. troops patrolled casually where just a few months before Marines couldn’t fight their way in. There as a journalist, I walked through one village east of Ramadi where an old vegetable vendor waved to me and said, a grandson smiling on his knee, “Thank you coalition.” …

Mark Steyn posts on this week’s cover of the smug self-satisfied tiresome leftist New Yorker.

The New Yorker cover at right has attracted a lot of comment. It shows Hillary Rodham Clinton outside the locker room trying to get in. But the locker room is full of white Republican males – Walker, Paul, Bush, Cruz, Rubio… Okay, the last couple are Hispanic, but let’s not get hung up on details. And Bush identifies as Hispanic on voter registration forms, but let’s not get hung up on the paperwork…

But, in fact, the GOP has already let a female into the locker room – Carly Fiorina – plus a black guy – Ben Carson – and an Indian – Bobby Jindal. So nothing celebrates diversity like the locker room for the Republican primary debate: whites, blacks, browns, Hispanics, men, women, old, young… Over in the Dem locker room, there’s hardly anybody in there, and the few that are all white, and old: Hillary, Bernie, Elizabeth Warren.

By the way, is there a whiter cultural artifact than The New Yorker? Mark Ulriksen is the cartoonist, and a useful reminder of why I’ll take the Charlie Hebdo crowd any day. He should do a picture of Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina and Bobby Jindal banging to get in the door of his outmoded Republican stereotype.

Also by the way, I hate having to talk like this – to buy into the left’s hideous civilization-sapping trope that identity politics is the only thing that matters: We’ve got two Hispanics; where’s yours? Where’s your Indian? Where’s your transgender candidate? It’s pathetic, but what can you do with an artist who thinks “provocation” means “pandering to the delusion of upscale white liberal solipsists”? …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Orin Kerr, law prof at GeorgeWashingtonUniversity has a comment on the country’s political class.

If I understand the history correctly, in the late 1990s, the President was impeached for lying about a sexual affair by a House of Representatives led by a man who was also then hiding a sexual affair, who was supposed to be replaced by another Congressman who stepped down when forced to reveal that he too was having a sexual affair, which led to the election of a new Speaker of the House who now has been indicted for lying about payments covering up his sexual contact with a boy.

Yikes.

John Fund says not long after Denny Hastert’s thing become public, people started to wonder where he got the cash. 

Denny Hastert — the former House speaker now indicted for violating regulations on bank withdrawals that were originally meant to snare drug dealers — was a man of integrity according to his former House colleagues.

By the sketchy standards of Illinois politics, that might well have been true. But his fall from grace should prompt other questions about how a former high-school teacher who held elective office from 1981 to 2007 could leave Congress with a fortune estimated at $4 million to $17 million. When he entered Congress in 1987, he was worth at most $275,000. Hastert was the beneficiary of very lucky land deals while in Congress; and since leaving office, he has earned more than $2 million a year as a lobbyist. That helps explain how he could agree to pay $3.5 million to a former student to cover up an ancient sex-abuse scandal.

Denny Hastert used to visit the Wall Street Journal, where I worked while he was the speaker. He was a bland, utterly conventional supporter of the status quo; his idea of reform was to squelch anyone who disturbed Congress’s usual way of doing business. I saw him become passionate only once, when he defended earmarks — the special projects such as Alaska’s “Bridge to Nowhere” that members dropped at the last minute into conference reports, deliberately leaving no time to debate or amend them. Earmarks reached the staggering level of 15,000 in 2005, and their stench helped cost the GOP control of Congress the next year. …

The NY Times continues to pound the Clintons. This was front page above the fold on Saturday.

To commemorate the 10th anniversary of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, Petra Nemcova, a Czech model who survived the disaster by clinging to a palm tree, decided to pull out all the stops for the annual fund-raiser of her school-building charity, the Happy Hearts Fund.

She booked Cipriani 42nd Street, which greeted guests with Bellini cocktails on silver trays. She flew in Sheryl Crow with her band and crew for a 20-minute set. She special-ordered heart-shaped floral centerpieces, heart-shaped chocolate parfaits, heart-shaped tiramisù and, because orange is the charity’s color, an orange carpet rather than a red one. She imported a Swiss auctioneer and handed out orange rulers to serve as auction paddles, playfully threatening to use hers to spank the highest bidder for an Ibiza vacation.

The gala cost $363,413. But the real splurge? Bill Clinton.

The former president of the United States agreed to accept a lifetime achievement award at the June 2014 event after Ms. Nemcova offered a $500,000 contribution to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation. The donation, made late last year after the foundation sent the charity an invoice, amounted to almost a quarter of the evening’s net proceeds — enough to build 10 preschools in Indonesia.

Happy Hearts’ former executive director believes the transaction was a quid pro quo, which rerouted donations intended for a small charity with the concrete mission of rebuilding schools after natural disasters to a large foundation with a broader agenda and a budget 100 times bigger.

“The Clinton Foundation had rejected the Happy Hearts Fund invitation more than once, until there was a thinly veiled solicitation and then the offer of an honorarium,” said the former executive director, Sue Veres Royal, who held that position at the time of the gala and was dismissed a few weeks later amid conflicts over the gala and other issues. …

… Outside Cipriani, protesters, mostly Haitian-Americans frustrated with the earthquake reconstruction effort, stood behind barricades holding signs.

“Clinton, where is the money?” they chanted. “In whose pockets?”

Jonathan Tobin posts on the above NY Times story.

… But the main point to be gleaned from this incident isn’t just that Clinton has established a lucrative personal appearance business that beggars anything ever attempted by any other retired public official, let alone a former commander-in-chief. The problem is that Happy Hearts is a real charity that does hands-on good works in the Third World. The Clinton Foundation is, at best, a charitable middleman, that funds events where people talk about charity and how best to strategize its implementation. As we’ve learned since Schweizer’s book appearance, the foundation does relatively little actual charity work on its own. Only ten percent of the vast sums it raises from the wealthy and the powerful around the world is spent on charitable efforts. The rest goes to funding conferences where the Clintons and their donors pose as philanthropists and to pay the salaries and travel expenses of those who work for the foundation. That means the money goes to feather the nests of Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton and, to a lesser extent, does the same for many of their faithful family retainers such as Clinton attack machine hit man Sidney Blumenthal.

So while the large army of Clinton fans and apologists can say that there is nothing illegal going on here, what they aren’t saying is that the Clintons don’t merely leech off the rich. They also live off of the money they extract from smaller charities that do real good works. That’s not merely “distasteful,” it’s disgraceful and unethical. …

Jack Kelly has more on Clinton corruption.

… In more than two decades in national politics, Hillary Clinton has succeeded only at peddling influence and orchestrating smear campaigns against women her husband molested. Ms. Clinton is greedy and corrupt. She has a reckless disregard for the truth and national security. She has a record barren of achievement.

Ms. Clinton is popular with her party despite all this. What that says about Democrats isn’t flattering.

Not only does Clinton hardly ever leave her bubble, Jennifer Rubin says when she steps out she takes her bubble with her. 

More interesting than Bill Clinton’s shell company and the Clinton Foundation’s receipt of thousands of dollars from the just-indicted and widely reviled FIFA (but arguably a FIFA beneficiary, Qatar, whom also sent the foundation money, is much worse ethics-wise), is the newest Clinton pretense. Not the Southern accent — the other pretense. The New York Times dutifully tells us (because the Clinton campaign told them!) that she has “immersed herself in dense briefing papers” (yet has no views we can easily discern) and brings snippets of information from her roundtables back to her policy team. This is nearly as bad as taking and passing on Libya analysis from Sid Blumenthal.

Remember these are handpicked participants. So she is getting information from people who the campaign has made certain will not create discord, disagreement or doubt. Aside from the monochromatic composition of the group, she picks up whatever stray phrase one of these participants happen to use. She now wants to call education an “opportunity system” because one of her hand-picked attendees used that pretentious buzz phrase.

It is remarkable that even when she ventures outside her bubble, it is not actually outside the bubble. She brings her bubble with her in the form of a preselected, fully vetted, non-combative audience.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Pickerhead’s Iron Rule of Government is that it always screws up. Knowing that, would it surprise that the water crisis in the West is partially caused by federal policies? Scientific American has the story which starts in Coolidge AZ located almost halfway between Phoenix and Tuscon. We cut this long piece short but supplied links without firewalls if you want to read more.  

State Route 87, the thin band of pavement that approaches the mostly shuttered town of Coolidge, Ariz., cuts through some of the least hospitable land in the country. The valley of red and brown sand is interrupted occasionally by rock and saguaro cactus. It’s not unusual for summer temperatures to top 116 degrees. And there is almost no water; this part of Arizona receives less than nine inches of rainfall each year.

Then Route 87 tacks left and the dead landscape springs to life. Barren roadside is replaced by thousands of acres of cotton fields, their bright, leafy green stalks and white, puffy bolls in neat rows that unravel for miles. It’s a vision of bounty where it would be least expected. Step into the hip-high cotton shrubs, with the soft, water-soaked dirt giving way beneath your boot soles, the bees buzzing in your ears, the pungent odor of the plants in your nostrils, and you might as well be in Georgia.

Getting plants to grow in the SonoranDesert is made possible by importing billions of gallons of water each year. Cotton is one of the thirstiest crops in existence, and each acre cultivated here demands six times as much water as lettuce, 60 percent more than wheat. That precious liquid is pulled from a nearby federal reservoir, siphoned from beleaguered underground aquifers and pumped in from the Colorado River hundreds of miles away. …

… The water shortages that have brought California, Arizona and other Western states to the edge of an environmental cliff have been attributed to a historic climate event—a dry spell that experts worry could be the worst in 1,000 years. But an examination by ProPublica shows that the scarcity of water is as much a man-made crisis as a natural one, the result of decades of missteps and misapprehensions by governments and businesses as they have faced surging demand driven by a booming population.

The federal subsidies that prop up cotton farming in Arizona are just one of myriad ways that policymakers have refused, or been slow to reshape laws to reflect the West’s changing circumstances. …

Since a new earthquake movie (San Andreas) is out, it’s a good time for Smithsonian Magazine to write about what the next big CA quake will be like.

A giant earthquake will strike California this summer. Skyscrapers will topple, the Hoover Dam will crumble and a massive tsunami will wash across the Golden GateBridge. Or at least, that’s the scenario that will play out on the big screen in San Andreas. 

The moviemakers consulted Thomas Jordan, director of the Southern California Earthquake Center, before they started filming, but “they probably didn’t take much of my advice,” he says. While the actual threats from the Big One are pretty terrifying, they are nowhere near the devastation witnessed by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and his onscreen companions. Even the largest of San Andreas’ quakes can’t produce a massive tsunami like the one that swells over San Francisco in the movie. “The really big tsunamis, like the one that hit Japan, are caused by earthquakes that generate a major displacement of the ocean floor,” Jordan says. The San Andreas fault sits far inland, and the land slips past on either side. For that reason, a quake also can’t cause the fault to split apart into a giant chasm as it does in the film. And despite the warnings of distraught movie scientists, even the largest of California’s quakes won’t be felt by anything but seismometers on the East Coast.

That doesn’t mean California is off the hook, though. While the movie may be more fantasy than reality, the Big One is coming, and it will produce plenty of destruction. “We think Southern California is locked and loaded, that the stresses have really built up, and when things start unleashing, they could unleash for years,” says U.S. Geological Survey seismologist Ned Field. …

Salt again! Peter Whoriskey in WaPo posts on new research.

For years, health authorities around the world have warned people that they are eating too much salt.

This salty binge is causing heart attacks and strokes, according to these warnings, and in the U.S. alone, authorities say too much salt is precipitating  tens of thousands of deaths annually.

Yet the response to these warnings has been a remarkable show of dietary disobedience. An estimated 95 percent of the world’s population keep eating salt in amounts officials deem excessive.

So who’s right – the people, or the health authorities? The question sounds naive, but in fact, some scientists ask the very same thing, and it lurks behind the debate that has sprung up this year over the government’s longstanding salt advice, which is embedded in the U.S. Dietary Guidelines.

At a major scientific conference last week in New York City, some presenters suggested that, in fact, the persistent global appetite for salt might be a sign that humans are geared for more salt than health authorities would allow.

These scientists point to new science indicating humans may be hard-wired to crave salt, and that there may be a natural appetite for it above the amounts that the government recommends. They point to the vast gap between what the authorities say is a healthy amount of salt and the amounts that people around the world are actually consuming. …

Turns out the best review of the new Wright Bros. book was in National Review. Best because it highlight’s McCullough’s delight in recounting government’s failures and the myopic national media.

… The story of the Wright Brothers was also a story about the efficacy of “government investment.” It turns out that the head of the Smithsonian Institution, Samuel Langley, who himself was himself an inventor and a renowned scientist, put a team of the best and the brightest minds together to launch a manned-flight project, and put some serious government money behind the project.

Only it didn’t pan out. The project, which cost some $70,000 — a large sum at the time — was a complete disaster, McCullough explained. “The Langley project unfortunately deterred the government from taking a serious interest in the Wrights because they really wasted so much money on something that didn’t work at all,” McCullough explained.

“‘We didn’t suppose the aeroplane could ever be practical outside the realm of sport,’ Orville Wright said. ‘It was the sport of the thing that appealed to Will and me.’”

Not that the Wright brothers would have taken the help. They thought that outside investment — from either the public sector or the private sector — would mean that they had relinquished control of their day-to-day work and decision-making. So they used their own money, and used it judiciously, rather than answer to any outsiders.

If you think the scientific elites fared poorly in this story, you’ll love the way the media elites came off. It turns out that, believing that a couple of bike-shop owners could not possibly do what they’d claimed to have done, never bothered to check out their story. But Amos Root, a writer with an interest in scientific pursuits, a guy who made a small fortune making beekeepers’ equipment, went down to Dayton to see things for himself. McCullough explained what happened next.

“He wrote a superb article describing the flight that he saw. It wasn’t only very descriptive. It was very accurate, and of considerable length. The first full accurate, fair reporting of this phenomenon that changed history was written by a beekeeper, published in his little newspaper.”

That’s right. It took a beekeeper to break the biggest science story of the year. But there’s more:

“Root then sent his story to Scientific American, saying, You’re free to publish this at no charge, and they just dismissed it as the writings of some whacko out in Ohio. The arrogance, the superiority of those who were in the know, again and again, in the government, in journalism, was almost comical.”

Our government elites weren’t much interested in the story, either. McCullough described the situation: …

Since he moved to the NY Times and went native, David Brooks has rarely been in Pickings. His last is worth our attention. The title is “The Small, Happy Life.” 

A few weeks ago, I asked readers to send in essays describing their purpose in life and how they found it. A few thousand submitted contributions, and many essays are online. I’ll write more about the lessons they shared in the weeks ahead, but one common theme surprised me.

I expected most contributors would follow the commencement-speech clichés of our high-achieving culture: dream big; set ambitious goals; try to change the world. In fact, a surprising number of people found their purpose by going the other way, by pursuing the small, happy life.

Elizabeth Young once heard the story of a man who was asked by a journalist to show his most precious possession. The man, Young wrote, “was proud and excited to show the journalist the gift he had been bequeathed. A banged up tin pot he kept carefully wrapped in cloth as though it was fragile. The journalist was confused, what made this dingy old pot so valuable? ‘The message,’ the friend replied. The message was ‘we do not all have to shine.’ This story resonated deeply. In that moment I was able to relieve myself of the need to do something important, from which I would reap praise and be rewarded with fulfillment. My vision cleared.”

Young continues, “I have always wanted to be effortlessly kind. I wanted to raise children who were kind.” She notes that among those who survived the Nazi death camps, a predominant quality she noticed was generosity.

“Perhaps,” she concludes, “the mission is not a mission at all. … Everywhere there are tiny, seemingly inconsequential circumstances that, if explored, provide meaning” and chances to be generous and kind. Spiritual and emotional growth happens in microscopic increments. …

One person who didn’t sign on to a small life was a fisherman in Florida who landed a 550 pound grouper from a kayak. Daily News with the story. 

Next time he should bring a bigger boat.

A Florida man made a once in a lifetime catch when he reeled in a 552-pound grouper fish May 20 while sitting on a kayak in Sanibel, Fla.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Joel Kotkin has a thought provoking look at what areas in the country offer better opportunities for minorities, and why.

In the aftermath of the Baltimore riots, there is increased concern with issues of race and opportunity. Yet most of the discussion focuses on such things as police brutality, perceptions of racism and other issues that are dear to the hearts of today’s progressive chattering classes. Together they are creating what talk show host Tavis Smiley, writing in Time, has labeled “an American catastrophe.”

Yet what has not been looked at nearly as much are the underlying conditions that either restrict or enhance upward mobility among racial minorities, including African-Americans, Latinos and Asians. In order to determine this, my colleague at Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism  Wendell Cox and I developed a ranking system that included four critical factors: migration patterns, home ownership, self-employment and income.

We found, for all three major minority groups, that the best places were neither the most liberal in their attitudes nor had the most generous welfare programs. Instead they were located primarily in regions that have experienced broad-based economic growth, have low housing costs, and limited regulation. In other words, no matter how much people like Bill de Blasio talk about the commitment to racial and class justice, the realities on the ground turn out to be quite different than he might imagine.

Southern Comfort

Perhaps the greatest irony in our findings is the location of many of the best cities for minorities: the South. This is particularly true for African-Americans who once flocked to the North for both legal rights and opportunity. Today almost all the best cities for blacks are in the South, a region that has enjoyed steady growth and enjoys generally low costs. …

… What this study shows us is, if nothing else, the relative worthlessness of good intentions. As we have seen over the past 50 years, the expansion of transfer payments, while critical to alleviating the worst impacts of poverty, have not generally been best at promoting upward mobility for African-Americans and, increasingly, Latinos. If higher welfare costs and political pronunciamentos were currency, New York, Los Angeles, Boston and San Francisco would not be, for the most part, stuck in the second half of our rankings.

Ultimately what really matters are the economics of opportunity. …

… There are other policy implications. Blue state progressives are often the most vocal about expanding opportunities for minority homeownership but generally support land use and regulatory policies, notably in California, that tend to raise prices far above the ability of newcomers — immigrants, minorities, young people — to pay. Similarly blue state support for such things as strict climate change regulation tends to discourage the growth of industries such as manufacturing, logistics and home construction that have long been gateways for minority success. …

The great irony of the past 60 or 70 years of American politics is that the ”progressives” who purport to be interested in the advancement of minorities are the ones who propose the policies that make the lives of blacks and browns more difficult. Next year’s presidential election will feature the campaign of H. Clinton. Minorities will support her and if she is elected their lives will get worse. And finally, she is showing her true colors and running as a radical leftist; which fact amuses Matthew Continetti who columns on what Hillary and Bruce Jenner have in common.

Bruce Jenner is not the only person trading identities. Hillary Clinton’s recent march to the left is one of the more remarkable political transformations in recent years, not least because she’s exploiting the public’s nostalgia for her husband’s presidency while repudiating the policies for which he is famous. Maybe this is how she plans to finally get revenge on Bill.

“If the centrist policies of the Bill Clinton years were known for stepped-up policing and prison building, deficit reduction, deregulation, welfare overhaul, and trade deals,” writes Amy Chozick of the New York Times, “Mrs. Clinton is steering her early candidacy in the opposite direction, emphasizing economic populism, poverty alleviation, and, in the criminal justice system, rehabilitation.” Despite a widespread gauzy attitude toward the 1990s as a time of peace and prosperity, a golden age, a holiday from history, Clinton is rejecting the president she married for the one she worked for—an implicit acknowledgment that the Bill Clinton of 1992 and 1996 could no longer win the nomination of his party.

Buzzfeed.com gleefully unearthed articles Clinton wrote in support of the 1994 crime bill, which her husband signed and which contributed to the decline of violent crime. But the turns of phrase associated with that bill—“broken-windows policing,” “more cops on the street,” “three strikes and you’re out,” “tough on crime”—have long been held in contempt by hard-left activists, whose influence in the Democratic Party has grown immeasurably since the Clintons last lived in the White House, and who now dominate intraparty and media debate. In the 1990s, Rudy Giuliani marginalized Al Sharpton, deprived him of influence; now Sharpton is—amazingly—one of the most important voices in the Democratic Party. Clinton needs to be on Sharpton’s good side, which she seems to have accomplished in April by vowing to “end the era of mass incarceration.” …

Ruben Navarrette writes on Hillary v. Hillary as he compares her before and after immigration policies.

On immigration, Hillary Clinton is a work in progress – and has been since she entered politics more than a dozen years ago. Depending on which audience she is trying to please, she assumes one of two conflicting personas: Restrictionist Hillary or Reform Hillary.

In 2003, Restrictionist Hillary told conservative radio host John Grambling that she was “adamantly against illegal immigrants” and that “we’ve got to do more at our borders.”

In 2006, while serving in the Senate, Restrictionist Hillary told the New York Daily News that she supported more fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border because “a country that cannot control its borders is failing at one of its fundamental obligations.” That same year, she voted for the Secure Fence Act, which directed the Department of Homeland Security to construct 700 miles of double border fencing.

In 2008, during a presidential debate with Barack Obama, Restrictionist Hillary tried to woo organized labor by blaming lost jobs on “employers who exploit undocumented workers and drive down wages.” …

Peter Wehner was in the NY Times wondering if the Dems have pulled too far to the left.

AMONG liberals, it’s almost universally assumed that of the two major parties, it’s the Republicans who have become more extreme over the years. That’s a self-flattering but false narrative.

This is not to say the Republican Party hasn’t become a more conservative party. It has. But in the last two decades the Democratic Party has moved substantially further to the left than the Republican Party has shifted to the right. On most major issues the Republican Party hasn’t moved very much from where it was during the Gingrich era in the mid-1990s.

To see just how far the Democratic Party has moved to the left, compare Barack Obama with Bill Clinton. In 1992, Mr. Clinton ran as a centrist New Democrat. In several respects he governed as one as well. He endorsed a sentencing policy of “three strikes and you’re out,” and he proposed adding 100,000 police officers to the streets.

In contrast, President Obama’s former attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., criticized what he called “widespread incarceration” and championed the first decrease in the federal prison population in more than three decades. Mr. Obama, meanwhile, has chosen to focus on police abuses. …

The Clintons are masters of getting well while “doing good.” The Sharptons are another successful crime family. Jillian Kay Melchoir writes on his daughter’s “non profit.”

Al Sharpton’s daughter Dominique has recently grabbed headlines for her $5 million lawsuit against the City of New York over a sprained ankle — but the shakedown may not stop there.

New records reviewed by National Review show Sharpton’s daughter and her boyfriend, Marcus Bright, together run a shadowy nonprofit that shares corporate donors, board members, and office space with Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, and they won’t answer any questions about it.

In tax filings, Education for a Better America (EBA) states that its mission is “to build a bridge between policy makers and the classroom by supporting innovations in the delivery of education and disseminating information and findings that impact our schools.” The nonprofit’s publications show the group hosting or participating in education-focused assemblies, speeches, summits, and events in New York City, Miami, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., among other cities.

“It’s all a scam,” says one source close to the Sharpton family. “It’s a cover for money, basically, to subsidize [Dominique] Sharpton and Bright to do what they do. . . . They put it all on their Instagram and their Facebook. Most of the time, it’s like they’re on vacation. . . . One could argue, being totally objective, that some of what [Al] Sharpton has done in terms of advocacy has helped black people and civil rights. Tell me one thing that Education for a Better America has done to help education.” …

Inquistr.com says New York readers might want to prepare for Manhattan Henge which will take place Saturday and Sunday. Good news is the event repeats in Mid-July as the sun starts moving to the south.

Manhattanhenge, the unique celestial event in which the sun lines up perfectly with the grid of Manhattan, will make its 2015 debut this weekend, one of only four times this year that such an alignment will be visible.

The Manhattanhenge phenomenon, which was first noticed and named by Neil deGrasse Tyson, is an unusual occurrence which highlights the fact that the Sun does not set in the same spot on the horizon each day. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Victor Davis Hanson on the collapse abroad and at home.

Things are starting to collapse, abroad and at home. We all sense it, even as we bicker over who caused it and why.

ISIS took Ramadi last week. That city once was a Bastogne to the brave Americans who surged to save it in 2007 and 2008. ISIS, once known at the White House as the “Jayvees,” were certainly “on the run” — right into the middle of that strategically important city.

On a smaller scale, ISIS is doing to the surge cities of Iraq what Hitler did to his neighbors between 1939 and 1941, and what Putin is perhaps doing now on the periphery of Russia. In Ramadi, ISIS will soon do its accustomed thing of beheading and burning alive its captives, seeking some new macabre twist to sustain its Internet video audience. We in the West trample the First Amendment and jail a video maker for posting a supposedly insensitive film about Islam; in contrast, jihadists post snuff movies of burnings and beheadings to global audiences. We argue not about doing anything or saving anybody, but about whether it is inappropriate to call the macabre killers “jihadists.”

When these seventh-century psychopaths tire of warring on people, they turn to attacking stones, seeking to ensure that there is not a vestige left of the Middle East’s once-glorious antiquities. I assume the ancient Sassanid and Roman imperial site at Palmyra will soon be looted and smashed.

What is unique about American foreign policy today is not just that it is rudderless, but how quickly and completely the 70-year postwar order seems to have disintegrated — and how little interest the American people take in the collapse, thanks to the administration’s apparent redeeming message, which translates, “It’s their misfortune and none of our own.” …

 

… Meanwhile, no one seems to much care that between 2009 and 2017, we will have borrowed 8 trillion more dollars. Yet for all that stimulus, the U.S. economy still has staggering labor non-participation rates, flat GDP growth, and stagnant household income. As long as zero interest rates continue, the rich make lots of money in the stock market, and the debt can grow by $500 billion a year and still be serviced. Financial sobriety is now defined as higher taxes bringing in record revenues to service half-trillion-dollar annual additions to an $18 trillion debt.

The liberal approach to the underclass continues as it has been for the last 50 years: The elites support huge, unquestioned redistributionist entitlements for the inner city as penance for avoiding it. Minorities are left to run their own political affairs without much worry that their supposed benefactors live apartheid lives, protected by the proof of their caring. The public is left with the lie “Hands up, don’t shoot” as a construct that we will call true, because the made-up last-seconds gasps of Michael Brown perhaps should have happened that way. As an elite bookend, we have a Columbia coed toting around a mattress as proof of society’s insensitivity to sexual violence, which in her case both her university and the New York City police agree never occurred. In theory, perhaps it could have and thus all but did.

As far as scandals go, no one much cares any more about the implosion of the Veterans Administration. In the public’s defense, though, how does one keep straight the multitudinous scandals — Lois Lerner and the rogue IRS, the spying on and tapping of Associated Press journalists, the National Security Agency disclosures, Fast and Furious, the serial lying about needless deaths in Benghazi, the shenanigans at the General Services Administration, the collapse of sobriety at the Secret Service, the rebooting of air-traffic controllers’ eligibility to be adjudicated along racial and ethnic lines, and the deletions from Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server, which doubled as her government server. …

… Whatever liberalism is, it is not working. Our country’s policies overseas are falling apart, while at home our society stagnates and turns tribal — with a growing and embittered underclass, a shrinking and angry middle class, and a plutocratic and apartheid elite who, as absolution for their privilege, are desperate to praise in the abstract what they so studiously avoid in the concrete.

Jennifer Rubin posts on the Current Occupant’s dangerous misconceptions about the world. 

President Obama remains impervious to world events that do not comport with his singular goal — a deal with Iran, which by virtue of his desperation will bear little resemblance to the “good deal” he promised was possible. In three instances last week, we got a peek into his motives and thinking. It was disturbing, to say the least.

The first revelation concerns the war against the Islamic State. On the heels of the defeats in Ramadi and Palmyra, the president gives no indication he is considering a dramatic course correction in the war against the Islamic State. More horrifying than the losses we have suffered is his determined passivity. …

… The second revealing episode came in a speech at a Washington synagogue. Obama emotionally recalled Israel in the 1960s (when it was far weaker and less prosperous than it is now) before saying something truly extraordinary: “It is precisely because I care so deeply about the state of Israel — it’s precisely because, yes, I have high expectations for Israel the same way I have high expectations for the United States of America — that I feel a responsibility to speak out honestly about what I think will lead to long-term security and to the preservation of a true democracy in the Jewish homeland.” Acknowledging the Palestinians’ refusal to accept Israel he insisted that “it is worthwhile for us to keep up the prospect, the possibility of bridging divides and being just, and looking squarely at what’s possible but also necessary in order for Israel to be the type of nation that it was intended to be in its earliest founding.”

In other words, it is only because he loves you so much, Israel, that he holds you to a different standard than the rest of the world and that he demands Israel meet his own conception of Israeli democracy (“type of nation that it was intended to be in its earliest founding”). The insistence that Israel be treated differently than other nations and that others can define what is good for it is a sly but all too common form of anti-Israel rhetoric. …

David Bernstein picks up these thoughts about Israel and says that the president is “nostalgic for white Israel.” This is a good lesson about the racial divide in Israel between Western Jews and Eastern Jews.

Oh, the irony. Here’s an excerpt from the president’s interview with Jeffrey Goldberg:

“Obama: And I care deeply about preserving that Jewish democracy, because when I think about how I came to know Israel, it was based on images of, you know—

Goldberg: We talked about this once. Kibbutzim, and—

Obama: Kibbutzim, and Moshe Dayan, and Golda Meir, and the sense that not only are we creating a safe Jewish homeland, but also we are remaking the world. We’re repairing it. We are going to do it the right way. We are going to make sure that the lessons we’ve learned from our hardships and our persecutions are applied to how we govern and how we treat others.”

To understand how this sounds to someone sensitive to the history of various historically disfavored groups in Israel, imagine a foreign leader had said “I came to know America based on images of Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman, the American Federation of Labor, the Daughters of the American Revolution…” Each of these individuals and groups had their virtues, but lots of us would think, “Geez, you’re nostalgic for an America dominated by White Protestants, and you aren’t even sensitive enough about the course of American history to recognize it, or assumedly you wouldn’t say it.”

The Israel of kibbutzim (kudos to Obama for using the proper Hebrew plural), Dayan, and Meir, was perhaps a more idealistic, and certainly more socialistic Israel. But it was also an Israel dominated by a secularized, Ashkenazic (European) elite.

Mizrahim (Jews from Arab countries), though more than half the population, were marginalized at every level of society. Discrimination was to a large extent institutionalized; the governing Labor Party was run by socialistic Ashkenazim, and given that state capitalism dominated the Israeli economy one’s political and social connections (protectsia in Hebrew) went a long way toward determining one’s economic prospects.

The kibbutzim in particular were a font of anti-Mizrahi chauvinism; as late as 1985, when I stayed for three weeks on a far-left Hashomer Hatzair kibbutz, the teenage kibbutzniks casually and derogatorily referred to the Moroccan city kids staying on the kibbutz for the Summer as “shechorim” (blacks) (for what it’s worth, the Moroccan kids were much nicer than the kibbutzniks). …

Roger Simon says Jeb Bush owes it to the country to withdraw.

… If Mrs. Clinton were to win the presidency, she would do so under a cloud of distrust unprecedented in any of our lifetimes.  She would have no honeymoon period and would not deserve one.  And this would be happening at a moment in history when the entire world is on a knife edge because of the rise of radical Islam and ISIS throughout the Middle East, Africa, South East Asia, Latin America and, increasingly, Europe, not to mention having to monitor the controversial nuclear deal with Iran, if and when such a thing is signed.

More than ever, we would need a man or woman in the White House we could trust — yet so many of us wouldn’t.  America would be split asunder at the beginning of a Hillary presidency as never before since the Civil War. No other Democratic candidate would create such a rift. If that sounds like an exaggeration, I assure you it is not.

Jeb Bush is eminently positioned to prevent this from happening. He can sacrifice his own presidential ambitions for the good of the country.  In the process he would be free to detail his reasons, free to be specific about the lies and evasions surrounding Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, the erased emails and missing server, the Benghazi prevarications, the ill-conceived and disastrous war in Libya, the dizzying corruption of the Clinton Foundation and then the inability to face the truth when confronted by her own myriad dishonesties, the quasi-fascistic silence of her political campaign during which she avoids substantive questions whenever possible.

While Jeb reminds us that the founding of our country was a rebellion against “royal families,” not a blind embracing of them, he can be the one to save us from a rupture that has the potential to destroy our social fabric for years to come. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Today we have one of the wonderful days without selections recounting the latest outrage from governments.

One of medicine’s biggest worries is bacteria strains that are resistant to antibiotics. Israeli researchers are finding ways to combat this resistance. Can you imagine a story about researchers anywhere in the Islamic world? The story was in ARS Technica.

… So, some researchers at Tel Aviv’s Sackler School of Medicine came up with a clever idea: why not create a virus that gives bacteria something that’s useful to them, but gets rid of antibiotic resistance at the same time? Under normal growth circumstances, the bacteria would readily pick up the virus, because it’s useful. But, when faced with an antibiotic assault, they’d be helpless to resist it.

To create this magical construct, the researchers turned to a virus that infects bacteria called λ (familiar to anyone who’s taken a class in gene regulation). λ has a mode of infection in which it inserts itself into the host genome and resides there, dormant until some point in the future. λ was modified so that it would remain dormant indefinitely.

To give this version of λ something that’s useful to bacteria, the authors equipped it with the CRISPR-Cas9 system along with genes for targeting RNAs that would direct it to other viruses. Now, if those viruses tried to infect a cell with the modified λ already in it, they’d be cut to pieces. In essence, they were using a virus to make bacteria immune to another virus. Viral infections went down by three orders of magnitude.

To make it useful to us, the researchers added a second set of genes for targeting RNAs. These directed the CRISPR-Cas9 system to cut up antibiotic resistance genes. This worked as expected: λ infected cells couldn’t pick up the antibiotic resistance genes and, if they had any before the infection, they were lost. The bacteria remained susceptible to antibiotics. …

Washington Post tells us why there’s so much BS about eating. 

Here’s how public thinking on food gets shaped: Every year, researchers publish hundreds of academic studies about the health effects of various foods – chocolate, kale, red wine, anything. Those studies, in turn, become fodder for  newspaper articles, books and blog posts.

But how much of this torrent of information is worth the trouble? Surprising little, according to a number of key researchers.

In recent years, these skeptics have caused a stir by poking big holes in the nutritional science behind popular diet advice. Even the findings published in distinguished health journals have come under fire.

Collectively, their work suggests that we know far less than we think we do about what to eat.

“Is everything we eat associated with cancer?” a much noted paper in this vein asked. …

A few weeks ago we had a review of David McCullough’s book about the Wright Brothers. NY Times reviewed it also. Pickerhead has to plead guilty to too much interest in the Wright Bros.. However, it is an interesting story in that these two men spent very little money compared to the government funded efforts of Samuel Langley. Just another example of Pickerhead’s Iron Rule of Government – It always f**ks up.

… The Wrights have been a welcome inspiration to David McCullough, whose last big book, “The Greater Journey” (2011), was about assorted, unrelated Americans venturing to Paris in pursuit of culture and badly needed a better raison d’être. And Mr. McCullough’s primary audience is not kids, though many of them may appreciate “The Wright Brothers.” He writes for fathers, as in Father’s Day, with publication dates usually well timed for that holiday. (Marketing aside, anyone can enjoy them.) So the same dads who got blue-ribbon gifts of “1776,” “John Adams,” “Truman,” “Mornings on Horseback” or other McCullough chestnuts should enjoy the way this author takes the Wrights’ story aloft

Merely by choosing them, Mr. McCullough makes his subjects extra-estimable. And in the case of the Wrights that may be fitting. If Wilbur, the older, bossier and more rigorous brother, ever had an impassioned relationship with any human being who was not a blood relative or fellow aviation enthusiast, this isn’t the book to exhume it. Mr. McCullough appreciates Wilbur’s aloofness, intelligence and austerity, even after he became a celebrity. During the Wrights’ grand, two-day welcome home whoop-de-do in Dayton, a New York Times reporter caught them sneaking off to work in their shop three times on the first day. …

WSJ Essay on some modest looking models on display in a New York museum

Among the treasures in “Sculpture in the Age of Donatello: Renaissance Masterpieces From Florence Cathedral,” on view through June 14 at New York’s Museum of Biblical Art, are two rather plain wooden models. Placed alongside breathtaking sculptures by leading artists of the 15th century, these unadorned representations of the dome and lantern that crown the Florence church seem ordinary by comparison—until one discovers that they were likely crafted by the very genius whose architectural and engineering talents made the construction one of the marvels of the age. …

… It all began when the Commune of Florence in 1294 announced plans to replace a crumbling fifth-century church on the site of Santa Maria del Fiore with “a more beautiful and honorable temple than any in any other part of Tuscany.” It was to be capped with the widest dome that anyone had ever seen. In 1296 a foundation stone was laid. But by 1418, after more than a century of effort had gone into raising the building, a gaping hole remained where the dome had been planned. …

NY Times reports on stone tools found in Kenya. 

One morning in July 2011, while exploring arid badlands near the western shore of Lake Turkana in Kenya, a team of archaeologists took a wrong turn and made a big discovery about early human technology: Our hominin ancestors were making stone tools 3.3 million years ago, some 700,000 years earlier than previously thought.

The findings promise to extend knowledge of the first toolmakers even deeper in time, probably before the emergence of the genus Homo, once considered the first to gain an evolutionary edge through stone technology.

“Immediately, I knew that we had found something very special,” said Sonia Harmand, a research associate professor at Stony Brook University in New York, in a telephone interview from Nairobi, Kenya. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Charles Krauthammer says the mess in Iraq is the president’s fault. 

Ramadi falls. The Iraqi army flees. The great 60-nation anti-Islamic State coalition so grandly proclaimed by the Obama administration is nowhere to be seen. Instead, it’s the defense minister of Iran who flies into Baghdad, an unsubtle demonstration of who’s in charge — while the U.S. air campaign proves futile and America’s alleged strategy for combating the Islamic State is in freefall.

It gets worse. The Gulf states’ top leaders, betrayed and bitter, ostentatiously boycott President Obama’s failed Camp David summit. “We were America’s best friend in the Arab world for 50 years,” laments Saudi Arabia’s former intelligence chief.

Note: “were,” not “are.”

We are scraping bottom. Following six years of President Obama’s steady and determined withdrawal from the Middle East, America’s standing in the region has collapsed. …

The Streetwise Professor calls it the “fiasco on the Euphrates.”

The situation in Ramadi (and Anbar generally) is an utter fiasco, with the Iraqi forces reprising the rout that occurred in Mosul almost exactly a year ago, thereby helping re-equip Isis with brand new American equipment. To paraphrase Wellington: Isis came on in the same old way, and the Iraqi army ran away in the same old way.

The Shia Hashd militia are claiming that they will retake Ramadi. As if. In Patton’s felicitous phrase, they couldn’t fight their way out of a piss soaked paper bag, especially in the offensive: “militia” means “militarily ineffective amateurs”. Oh they will no doubt die in large numbers, but in another Patton phrase: “No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.” (Or sect, as is the case here.) Their reputation alone will drive those few Anbari Sunnis who haven’t thrown over to Isis out of self-preservation into arms of the caliphate.

The only thing that can redeem the situation is a major commitment of American ground forces. But that is not in the cards. The most Obama could muster today was a milquetoast statement that he was “weighing” “accelerating” training of Iraqi troops. That is so wildly inadequate to the emergency of the moment that one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. …

Our friends in Great Britain can also recognize the president’s mistakes. This from The Telegraph,UK.

Have any words come back to haunt President Obama so much as his description of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant last team as a “JV” – junior varsity – team of terrorists?

This wasn’t al-Qaeda in its 9/11 pomp, he said; just because a university second team wore Manchester United jerseys didn’t make them David Beckham.

How times change. As of this weekend, the JV team is doing a lot better than Manchester United. With its capture of Palmyra, it controls half of Syria. …

Never fear the disasters in the Middle East, Andrew Malcolm says the president has just the solution – fighting global warming.

Finally, President Obama addressed what he sees as the nation’s worst security threat, just days after the fall of Ramadi to ISIS and North Korea’s declaration that it has miniaturized a nuclear warhead to fit on an ICBM capable of reaching the United States.

In a speech to graduates at the CoastGuardAcademy, Obama said, yes, yes, terrorism is a grave danger. But there’s another one. “We cannot, and we must not, ignore a peril that can affect generations,” the commander-in-chief declared ominously.

That threat? Global warming.

“Cadets,” Obama intoned, “the threat of a changing climate cuts to the very core of your service. You’ve been drawn to water -— like the poet who wrote, ‘the heart of the great ocean sends a thrilling pulse through me.’ You know the beauty of the sea, but you also know its unforgiving power.” …

Turning our attention, once again, to the disaster in waiting, Matthew Continetti comments on Clinton’s press strategy.

There it was—the classic Hillary charm. Close to a month had passed since the Democratic frontrunner answered questions from the press. So this week, when reporters were invited to gawk at the spectacle of Clinton sitting with “everyday Iowans,” Ed Henry of Fox wanted to know: Would the former secretary of state take a moment to respond to inquiries from non-stage-managed reporters?

Before Henry was able even to finish his sentence, however, Clinton interrupted him, tut-tutting his impertinent shouting and raising her hand, empress-like, to quell her subject. After a few seconds of talking over each other Clinton must have realized that she had to give Henry an answer. Whereupon she said, slowly and sarcastically: “I might. I’ll have to ponder it.” What a kidder.

After the photo-op was over, Clinton did take six questions from reporters—raising the total number of media questions she has answered since announcing her candidacy in April to a whopping 26. She committed no gaffes, but unleashed the full blizzard of Clintonian misdirection, omission, dodging, bogus sentimentality, false confidence, and aw-shucks populism. Voting for the Iraq war was a “mistake,” like the kind you make on a test; she and Bill are lucky people (that’s one way of describing them); Charlotte needs to be able to grow up in an America where every little boy and girl has the chance to go from public office to a foreign-funded slush fund; and family courtier and dirty trickster Sid Blumenthal is just an “old friend” who sent her emails about Libya, where he had business dealings, so that she could get out of her “bubble.”

Not much for an enterprising reporter to go on. And for all we know, the ice caps will have melted before Clinton submits to more questions. It’s part of her strategy: limiting press availabilities also lessens the chances of another “dead broke” moment, of giving answers that raise more questions. Clinton is busy—raising money, positioning herself on the left to thwart a liberal insurgent, doting on Iowa so as not to repeat her defeat there in 2008. Talking to reporters would be a distraction or, worse, an error. …

Congrats to the president and other leftists – the police in Baltimore have given up. Jonathan Tobin knows who the real victims will be. So we get more unintended consequences of liberal foolishness.  

From last summer’s disturbances in Ferguson, Missouri to the more recent riots in Baltimore, the country has been engaged in a debate about police violence that has hinged on accusations of systematic racism. Regardless of the findings about the shooting in Ferguson or the racial identity of the Baltimore officers charged in the death of Freddie Gray, a narrative about police racism has become entrenched in our popular culture that has remained impervious to reason or the facts. One of the consequences of this war on police that has been encouraged by statements coming from the very top of our government, including the president and the attorney general, have been incidents of violence against police. When officers go down that generates some attention, yet less discussed is the way the lives of people in poverty-stricken minority neighborhoods are affected by this attempt to blame the nation’s ills on white racism. But as the Wall Street Journal reports today, it is precisely they who are suffering as arrests have gone down in Baltimore in the last month while violent crime has increased dramatically.

In the weeks after Gray’s death as scrutiny and criticism of the Baltimore police has intensified, arrests have gone down by a rate of 40 percent when compared to the same period of time in 2013 and 2014. What makes this figure so startling is that it includes the hundreds that were arrested during the riots that rocked portions of the city. At the same time, violence in the Western district of the city where the riots occurred has gone up in a way far outpacing the increase in the rest of the city. …

Not all American cities are governed by Baltimore style idiots. Paul Mirengoff posts on Cleveland’s police.

On Saturday, a Cleveland judge ruled that Officer Michael Brelo was not guilty of voluntary manslaughter and felonious assault in the 2012 deaths of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams following a 22-mile car chase. The judge found that although Brelo did fire many shots at Russell and Williams, so did other officers. Thus, he could not find beyond a reasonable doubt that Brelo’s bullets — and no others — killed Williams and Russell.

The judge also found Brelo not guilty of the charge of felonious assault. He ruled that Brelo’s decision to use force was “constitutionally reasonable.” Although no gun was found in the vehicle of the deceased, the officer’s “perceptions were objectively reasonable,” the judge concluded.

It was feared that, in the aftermath of this controversial decision, the inevitable protests might turn into riots. So far, however, they have not.

Why not? Probably because the Cleveland police have declined to tolerate lawlessness. Paula Bolyard of PJ Media reports: …

The Cartoonists are strong again.