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The first three items today deal with yet more failures of government. Slate starts us off with a overview of a devastating WaPo article on how, for decades, the FBI evidence gnomes falsified evidence in service to prosecutors. 

The Washington Post published a story so horrifying this weekend that it would stop your breath: “The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.”

What went wrong? The Post continues: “Of 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory’s microscopic hair comparison unit, 26 overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors in more than 95 percent of the 268 trials reviewed so far.” The shameful, horrifying errors were uncovered in a massive, three-year review by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the Innocence Project. Following revelations published in recent years, the two groups are helping the government with the country’s largest ever post-conviction review of questioned forensic evidence.

Chillingly, as the Post continues, “the cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death.” Of these defendants, 14 have already been executed or died in prison.

The massive review raises questions about the veracity of not just expert hair testimony, but also the bite-mark and other forensic testimony offered as objective, scientific evidence to jurors who, not unreasonably, believed that scientists in white coats knew what they were talking about. As Peter Neufeld, co-founder of the Innocence Project, put it, “The FBI’s three-decade use of microscopic hair analysis to incriminate defendants was a complete disaster.” …

Next Megan McArdle covers how the collection of past due support from dead beat dads has created catch-22 situations for many blacks; including Walter Scott who was gunned down by police in North Charleston, SC a few weeks ago. 

In the 1980s and 1990s, the government found itself financially supporting a lot of single-parent families in which one parent was not contributing to the support of their children. Unsurprisingly, this led authorities to crack down on “deadbeat dads,” with stiff penalties for parents who didn’t pay the money they owed. And that kind of situation might have helped lead to Walter Scott’s shooting death on April 4. Like many poor men, Scott owed back child support that had incurred severe penalties, including stints in jail, and his family argues that he probably fled from the police during a routine traffic stop because he feared another arrest. …

… Naturally, it’s not enough to just mandate payment; you also have to mandate penalties, or else selfish mothers or fathers will simply refuse to pay. Punishments were set up for noncompliance, and systems were set up to automatically garnish paychecks. It all seems very fair — unless the system makes a mistake, or Mom or Dad genuinely can’t find enough work, at which point it suddenly becomes Kafkaesque. I once watched a colleague struggle through New York state’s bureaucracy, which through its own screw-up had garnished so much of his paycheck that he basically had no money for food or rent. The error took months to fully resolve, because why should they care about some deadbeat dad feeding himself?

At least he was employed, and he knew he would probably get his money back. For the very poor, demands for child support can turn into an insurmountable mountain. And the penalties can actually make it harder for them to make their payments: Scott reportedly lost a $35,000-a-year job because the state of South Carolina misdirected his checks, then jailed him for nonpayment. …

The NY Times reports on missing black men. Or course, being the Times, they could not come up with the thought that maybe the government has, through our welfare system, made fathers and husbands superfluous. Our country is filled with similar perverse incentives, and this is perhaps the most damaging to our culture. 

In New York, almost 120,000 black men between the ages of 25 and 54 are missing from everyday life. In Chicago, 45,000 are, and more than 30,000 are missing in Philadelphia. Across the South — from North Charleston, S.C., through Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi and up into Ferguson, Mo. — hundreds of thousands more are missing.

They are missing, largely because of early deaths or because they are behind bars. Remarkably, black women who are 25 to 54 and not in jail outnumber black men in that category by 1.5 million, according to an Upshot analysis. For every 100 black women in this age group living outside of jail, there are only 83 black men. Among whites, the equivalent number is 99, nearly parity.

African-American men have long been more likely to be locked up and more likely to die young, but the scale of the combined toll is nonetheless jarring. It is a measure of the deep disparities that continue to afflict black men — disparities being debated after a recent spate of killings by the police — and the gender gap is itself a further cause of social ills, leaving many communities without enough men to be fathers and husbands.

Perhaps the starkest description of the situation is this: More than one out of every six black men who today should be between 25 and 54 years old have disappeared from daily life. …

Space junk, a problem created by many governments, is a target of lasers in a proposal reported in Spectrum.

The easiest (and probably best) way to deal with the space junk problem is to stop producing space junk in the first place. We’re trying to do that, which is great. But even if space agencies and commercial launch companies all commit, tomorrow, to rockets and satellites that will deorbit themselves after no more than 25 years, there’s still all kinds of debris flying around up there, threatening our orbital infrastructure.

Many ways of dealing with orbital debris have been proposed, and some are even being tried out. Researchers working at RIKEN, a research institution in Japan, are leading an international team that wants to put a laser cannon on the International Space Station to try to shoot down small pieces of junk on the fly.

One of the most difficult parts of dealing with space junk is finding it in the first place. To then shoot it with a laser at a distance of 100 kilometers or more, you have to be able to track it very precisely, which necessitates a very sensitive wide-angle optical telescope. Fortunately, the ISS is about to get one. EUSO, the Extreme Universe Space Observatory, will be installed on the ISS in 2017, and the researchers at RIKEN must have said to themselves, “hey, we could slap a laser on that thing and blast space junk.” So they’re going to give it a try. …

Science 2.0 has an idea for ending the summer break literacy slide.

Those “Diary Of A Wimpy Kid” books are not “The Good Earth”, they are not going to win Pulitzer Prizes, but they are a lot better for kids in the summer than staying glued to YouTube videos. And for most kids, that is going to be the choice. Rather than sending home a reading list (poor schools) or stacks of books (rich schools) in the hopes of combating the the literacy loss experienced during the summer break, a new study finds that letting kids choose the books is better.

The study, conducted in kindergarten, first-, and second-grade classrooms in the Rochester City School District, showed that students who were allowed to choose their own summer reading saw lower levels of literacy loss over the summer months. Erin T. Kelly, M.D., the study’s lead researcher, will present her findings at the Pediatric Academic Societies meeting on April 25. …

Anti-Social Media Week says Tuesday is the saddest day of the week on Twitter. 

Tuesday is the saddest day of the week on Twitter. I can tell you that because I’m looking at The Hedonometer, a digital graph created by data scientists to track happiness on the social network. Since 2009, The Hedonometer has been analyzing millions of tweets around the globe to calculate the average happiness levels. And those tweets have produced some very surprising results.

For example, one of the saddest days analyzed was the day Michael Jackson died. Some of the happiest days were US elections. On average, Louisiana is the saddest state. Hawaii is the happiest. If you’ve got more Twitter followers, you’re more likely to tweet happy things, and if you use the word “office” it’s likely you’re feeling down.

Buried deeper in the data are even bigger insights. Happiness researchers have long known that travel makes people happy. In fact, a Dutch study found that the greatest increase in happiness came from just anticipating travel, not even the actual vacation itself. Their study found that planning a trip boosted happiness levels significantly for eight weeks prior to departure. …

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The last few months have been an amazing period in the American left’s presidential politics. It is plain that a sizable portion of Democrats are not enthused with Hillary Clinton. But, they’ve let the Clintons suck the air out of any other campaign and now are trying to figure out how to extricate themselves. We began noting this with items by Maureen Dowd and Ron Fournier on February 24th, March 9th, March 10th, March 16th, And it continues today. We’ll let Ron Fournier, who has been in the anti-Clinton trenches for awhile, start us off.

Gennifer Flowers. Cattle futures. The White House travel office. Rose Law Firm files. The Lincoln Bedroom. Monica Lewinsky. And now, the Clinton Foundation. What ties these stories together is the predictable, paint-by-numbers response from the Bill and Hillary Clinton political operation.

1. Deny: Salient questions are dodged, and evidence goes missing. The stone wall is built.

2. Deflect: Blame is shifted, usually to Republicans and the media.

3. Demean: People who question or criticize the Clintons get tarred as right-wing extremists, hacks, nuts, or sluts.

The Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation is both an admirable charity and a shadow political operation awash in conflicts of interest—a reflection of the power couple who founded it. …

… The seedy side of the foundation is a legitimate campaign issue. While the Clintons deserve credit for making foundation donations largely transparent, other activities raise serious questions. They violated an ethics agreement with the Obama White House. Hillary Clinton deleted most emails she sent and received as secretary of State, including any concerning the foundation or its donors.

What did donors expect from the Clintons? Did they receive favors in return? Why did the Clintons do business with countries that finance terrorism and suppress the rights of women? Did family and friends benefit from their ties to the foundation? And, in a broader sense, what do the operations of the foundation say about Hillary Clinton’s management ability and ethical grounding? …

The NY Times report about Bill Clinton’s 2005 mission to Kazakhstan attracted a lot of media attention this week. The Clinton Group sure vacuumed up a lot of cash during that trip.

… At the heart of the tale are several men, leaders of the Canadian mining industry, who have been major donors to the charitable endeavors of former President Bill Clinton and his family. Members of that group built, financed and eventually sold off to the Russians a company that would become known as Uranium One.

Beyond mines in Kazakhstan that are among the most lucrative in the world, the sale gave the Russians control of one-fifth of all uranium production capacity in the United States. Since uranium is considered a strategic asset, with implications for national security, the deal had to be approved by a committee composed of representatives from a number of United States government agencies. Among the agencies that eventually signed off was the State Department, then headed by Mr. Clinton’s wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

As the Russians gradually assumed control of Uranium One in three separate transactions from 2009 to 2013, Canadian records show, a flow of cash made its way to the Clinton Foundation. Uranium One’s chairman used his family foundation to make four donations totaling $2.35 million. Those contributions were not publicly disclosed by the Clintons, despite an agreement Mrs. Clinton had struck with the Obama White House to publicly identify all donors. Other people with ties to the company made donations as well.

And shortly after the Russians announced their intention to acquire a majority stake in Uranium One, Mr. Clinton received $500,000 for a Moscow speech from a Russian investment bank with links to the Kremlin that was promoting Uranium One stock.

At the time, both Rosatom and the United States government made promises intended to ease concerns about ceding control of the company’s assets to the Russians. Those promises have been repeatedly broken, records show.

The New York Times’s examination of the Uranium One deal is based on dozens of interviews, as well as a review of public records and securities filings in Canada, Russia and the United States. Some of the connections between Uranium One and the Clinton Foundation were unearthed by Peter Schweizer, a former fellow at the right-leaning Hoover Institution and author of the forthcoming book “Clinton Cash.” Mr. Schweizer provided a preview of material in the book to The Times, which scrutinized his information and built upon it with its own reporting. …

Then ABC News reported Bill Clinton’s speaking fees more than doubled when his wife became SecState.

After his wife became Secretary of State, former President Bill Clinton began to collect speaking fees that often doubled or tripled what he had been charging earlier in his post White House years, bringing in millions of dollars from groups that included several with interests pending before the State Department, an ABC News review of financial disclosure records shows.

Where he once had drawn $150,000 for a typical address in the years following his presidency, Clinton saw a succession of staggering paydays for speeches in 2010 and 2011, including $500,000 paid by a Russian investment bank and $750,000 to address a telecom conference in China.

“It’s unusual to see a former president’s speaking fee go up over time,” said Richard Painter, who served as chief ethics lawyer in the White House Counsel’s office under President George W. Bush. “I must say I’m surprised that he raised his fees. There’s no prohibition on his raising it. But it does create some appearance problems if he raises his fee after she becomes Secretary of State.”

Public speaking became a natural and lucrative source of income for Clinton when he returned to private life in 2001. Records from disclosure forms filed by Hillary Clinton during her tenures in the U.S. Senate and then in the Obama Administration indicate he took in more than $105 million in speech fees during that 14 year period. …

New York Magazine calls it Bill Clinton’s disastrous post presidency. 

The qualities of an effective presidency do not seem to transfer onto a post-presidency. Jimmy Carter was an ineffective president who became an exemplary post-president. (That’s a stretch. The guy can’t shut up. - Pckrhd) Bill Clinton appears to be the reverse. All sorts of unproven worst-case-scenario questions float around the web of connections between Bill’s private work, Hillary Clinton’s public role as secretary of State, the Clintons’ quasi-public charity, and Hillary’s noncompliant email system. But the best-case scenario is bad enough: The Clintons have been disorganized and greedy.

The news today about the Clintons all fleshes out, in one way or another, their lack of interest in policing serious conflict-of-interest problems that arise in their overlapping roles:

The New York Times has a report about the State Department’s decision to approve the sale of Uranium mines to a Russian company that donated $2.35 million to the Clinton Global Initiative, and that a Russian investment bank promoting the deal paid Bill $500,000 for a speech in Moscow.

The Washington Post reports that Bill Clinton has received $26 million in speaking fees from entities that also donated to the Clinton Global Initiative.

The Washington Examiner reports, “Twenty-two of the 37 corporations nominated for a prestigious State Department award — and six of the eight ultimate winners — while Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State were also donors to the Clinton family foundation.”

And Reuters reports, “Hillary Clinton’s family’s charities are refiling at least five annual tax returns after a Reuters review found errors in how they reported donations from governments, and said they may audit other Clinton Foundation returns in case of other errors.”

For our fifth leftist to denigrate the Clintons we have Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post posting on all the stories that have come out recently.

… in terms of raising the “I don’t know if I want to go through all of this again” sentiment among average people, this collection of stories is just terrible.  It reminds them — or, if it doesn’t remind them yet, it will — of all the things in the 1990s that they didn’t like and certainly don’t want to go through again. Obviously the top of the mind issue there is Monica Lewinsky but there’s Whitewater, the travel office, the Buddhist monks — and so and so forth.

“It’s the Clinton way: raking in millions from foreign governments behind closed doors while making promises about transparency that they never intended to keep,” said Carly Fiorina, one of the 20 (or so) people likely to run for president on the Republican side. “Have we had enough of a ruling political class that doles out favors to the wealthy and well connected few?”

Republicans would be wise to follow Fiorina’s example as they strategize the best way to effectively attack Clinton in the campaign to come.  While hitting her on her resume or readiness for the office is a loser with the American public, raising questions about her honesty is far more fertile soil.

Check out the new Quinnipiac University national poll. More than six in ten (62 percent) of voters said Clinton has “strong leadership qualities.” In that same sample, however, less than four in ten (38 percent) said that Clinton was honest and trustworthy. A majority (54 percent) said she’s not honest and trustworthy, including 61 percent of independents. …

We close with one of our friends, John Podhoretz, who points out the problems the Clintons and obama have left for their party.

… Which brings up the Democratic party, its voters, and its overall health. The condition of the party is a complex one. At the presidential level, the results of the past five elections suggest Democrats go into 2016 with a mild structural advantage; it would seem that, all things being equal, they can depend on a nationwide floor around 48 percent, while the GOP floor is probably a point or a point and half below that. Brilliant get-out-the-vote innovations from 2008 and 2012 will doubtless be added to as we head into the coming year.

On the other hand, the national condition of the Democratic Party outside the presidential realm is terrible. Since 2009, Democrats are down 60 seats in the House and 14 seats in the Senate. Republicans held 22 governor’s mansions in 2009; now they hold 31. Democrats have an astounding 910 fewer state legislators than they did when Barack Obama took office. The GOP has majorities in 67 of the 99 state legislative bodies in the United States, more than at any time since the 1920s.

So Democrats go into 2016 in good structural shape for a presidential bid but in horrendous overall shape as a political party when it comes to holding the levers of power everywhere else.

Hillary Clinton’s ability so far to clear the field—with the exception of a former governor of Maryland who ended office wildly unpopular in his own state—is a mark of the party’s sclerosis. Even when George H.W. Bush was running as Ronald Reagan’s successor in 1987-88, there were six other serious contenders, five of them figures of note in the party: Senate GOP leader and one-time vice-presidential candidate Bob Dole, the wildly popular Rep. Jack Kemp, former secretary of state Alexander Haig, former Delaware Gov. Pete du Pont, and Pat Robertson. If Bush had stumbled badly, or if scandal had surrounded him, Dole in particular was right there to pick up the slack.

That was the mark of a party that had been strengthened rather than weakened by its years in the White House. …

The cartoonists have a lot of fun today.

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Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit devotes his weekly TODAY column to the story about the Wisconsin gestapo featured in April 21 Pickings.

When Vladimir Putin sends government thugs to raid opposition offices, the world clucks its tongue. But, after all, Putin’s a corrupt dictator, so what do you expect?

But in Wisconsin, Democratic prosecutors were raiding political opponents’ homes and, in a worse-than-Putin twist, they were making sure the world didn’t even find out, by requiring their targets to keep quiet. As David French notes in National Review, “As if the home invasion, the appropriation of private property, and the verbal abuse weren’t enough, next came ominous warnings. Don’t call your lawyer. Don’t tell anyone about this raid. Not even your mother, your father, or your closest friends. … This was the on-the-ground reality of the so-called John Doe investigations, expansive and secret criminal proceedings that directly targeted Wisconsin residents because of their relationship to Scott Walker, their support for Act 10, and their advocacy of conservative reform.”

Is this un-American? Yes, yes it is. And the prosecutors involved — who were attacking supporters of legislation that was intended to rein in unions’ power in the state — deserve to be punished. Abusing law enforcement powers to punish political opponents, and to discourage contributions to political enemies, is a crime, and it should also be grounds for disbarment.

If Republican officials treated political opponents this way it would be national news. But when Wisconsin’s Democratic apparat behaved like Putin’s thugs, it got little attention from the “mainstream” media. One of the good things about Scott Walker’s presidential run is that it will bring these abuses national attention. They deserve it, and the perpetrators deserve punishment.

FBI Director James Comey stepped in it last week when making comments on the Holocaust and its perpetrators. David Harsanyi has comments.

So a bureaucrat used some clumsy wording. That’s no reason to start whitewashing history

In a speech explaining why he requires all his new agents to visit the HolocaustMemorialMuseum, FBI director James Comey said this:

“In their minds, the murderers and accomplices of Germany, and Poland, and Hungary, and so many, many other places didn’t do something evil. They convinced themselves it was the right thing to do, the thing they had to do.”

This muddled statement outraged Poland’s Foreign Ministry, who “summoned” the U.S. Ambassador Stephen Mull to protest and demand an apology. And an apology was offered, of course. Mull emphasized that the position of the United States is that “Nazi Germany alone bears responsibility” for the Holocaust, even if nothing in Comey’s speech maintained otherwise.

Hungary, where the anti-Semitic far-right Jobbik party has been doing pretty well for itself lately, was also slighted.

There isn’t much to be gained from re-prosecuting the crimes of Nazis or their accomplices, especially when Jewry is faced with a similarly potent, if less dangerous (for now), strain of anti-Semitism emanating from the Middle East. What is perplexing, however, is that Comey chose Hungary and Poland, rather than a host of other nations with populations far more enthusiastic about the extermination of European Jewry—countries like Austria, Rumania, Croatia, France, Latvia, or Ukraine.

It almost as if the director of a department that deals with domestic intelligence and security service of the United States should not be giving speeches about this sort of thing. …

Cathy Young writes in Newsday about mis-guided leftist, cartoonist Garry Trudeau.

Four months ago, a dozen people, mostly cartoonists and journalists, died in an attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo because its provocative fare angered religious fanatics.

A week ago, a leading American political cartoonist receiving a top journalism award gave a speech blaming the victims and decrying “free-expression absolutism.”

It was a shameful moment for American journalism. But it should also be a moment of truth that reveals how anti-liberal — and how intellectually hollow — the modern left has become in its fixation on “privilege” and identity politics.

The cartoonist was Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau, chastising his murdered colleagues while speaking at the George Polk Awards at Long IslandUniversity. Charlie Hebdo, Trudeau asserted, violated the first rule of satire — to side with the “non-privileged” against the powerful — by provoking Muslims with cartoons of Muhammad: “By punching downward, by attacking a powerless, disenfranchised minority with crude, vulgar drawings . . . Charlie wandered into the realm of hate speech.”

Hate speech? The cartoons did not mock or vilify Muslim immigrants but used images of Muhammad to lampoon Islamic extremism. …

A Wall Street Journal report on deaths in oil storage facilities makes you wonder how this could have gone on so long. After all, OSHA which investigated the fatalities, was supposed to be able to connect the dots. Another example of mis-placed belief in the competence of government? 

The deaths of Trent Vigus and at least nine other oil-field workers over the past five years had haunting similarities. Each worker was doing a job that involved climbing on top of a catwalk strung between rows of storage tanks and opening a hatch.

There were no known witnesses to any of the men’s deaths. Their bodies were all found lying on top of or near the tanks. Medical examiners generally attributed the workers’ deaths primarily or entirely to natural causes, often heart failure.

But in the past few months, there has been a shift. Though still unsure of the exact cause of the deaths, government agencies and some industry-safety executives are now acknowledging a pattern and are focusing on the possible role played in the deaths by hydrocarbon chemicals, which can lead to quick asphyxiation or heart failure when inhaled in large quantities.

In the meantime, federal agencies and industry-safety groups are planning to send out a joint alert to the oil industry as early as this week, warning of the potential for imminent danger from inhaling hydrocarbons, according to several people involved in the effort. Much of the industry remains ignorant of the possible risks, they say. …

Brain Blogger post says musical training makes kids smarter.

… Multiple studies suggest that learning to play a musical instrument early in childhood induces long-term intellectual benefits that stay well into adulthood. One recent study demonstrated that children aged around four-and-a-half who learned music for about a year displayed improved cognitive functioning than their untrained peers.

Musical training affects the oscillatory connections in the brain related to executive functions like reasoning, switching between multiple tasks, forming working memory, planning and executing, and problem solving. Children who undergo musical training for a sustained length of time tend to have superior cognitive abilities in these specific domains. Musical children also tend to learn and perform better in subjects like languages and mathematics than their non-musical peers.

These findings do not come as a surprise. Sustained and intense musical training demands that individuals focus intently on dynamic sensory (auditory and visual) and motor signals. These are high-level cognitive abilities that go on to affect learning and performance in non-musical spheres as well.

It is also believed that intense musical training enhances the ability of the practitioner to string together abstract concepts and think relationally to make sense of these. This is why some scientists believe that musical training improves mathematical skills and non-verbal IQ. …

From a blog named War On The Rocks, we learn about the importance of colonial taverns.

… However, … the taverns’ most important role in society (and American history) is the role they played in the beginning of the Revolutionary War. As anger spread throughout the colonies, many took to the tavern to discuss, argue, and debate what needed to be done. One location in particular, Boston’s Green Dragon Tavern (or as Daniel Webster put it “the Headquarters of the Revolution”) played host to the infamous “Sons Of Liberty” who, presumably after a couple of pints of spruce beer or molasses-infused porters, plotted the “Boston Tea Party.” It’s not hard to imagine why a couple of ales could have played a role in nudging along the idea of dressing like a Native American and dumping some of the East India Company’s finest tea into Boston Harbor.

The implications of the tavern go beyond just the spread of ideas. Two of our nation’s most significant institutions, the Freemasons and the United States Marine Corps, trace their origin back to the same colonial taphouse. According to historical records, the Tun Tavern in Philadelphia hosted the first meetings of St. John’s Lodge No. 1 (the first American lodge of the Grand Lodge of the Masonic Temple). On November 10th, 1775, the tavern also became the birthplace of the United States Marine Corps. Historically, the tavern was a popular destination for military recruitment, with Ben Franklin recruiting for the Pennsylvania Militia there in 1756. Eventually, the tavern would play host to Washington, Jefferson, and the First Continental Congress, who would task the tavern’s owner, Samuel Nicholas, “to raise the first two battalions of Marines” out of the tavern’s guests (although some speculate this occurred at another tavern owned by the Nicholas family, the “Conestoga Waggon [sic]”). The USMC still commemorates November 10th annually, with Marines everywhere raising a glass in honor of the Tun Tavern. …

Andrew Malcolm with Late Night Humor.

Conan: Turns out, Hillary is not the first woman presidential candidate. That was Victoria Woodhull who ran in 1872. Her running mate was a young, scrappy John McCain.

Meyers: A new poll in Cuba shows that President Obama is more popular there than Fidel Castro. Then again, so is putting your whole family on a raft in the middle of the night.

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Streetwise Professor has some interesting posts on the current occupant. The first is titled “Alfred E. Obama.”

Obama reacted in his best Alfred E. Newman “what? me worry?” fashion to Putin punking him by selling S-300 missiles to Iran. Short version: “What took you so long, Vova?”:

“President Obama said that he was “not surprised” Russia sold an advanced missile system to Iran in the midst of his negotiations with the Ayatollah to prevent Iran’s nuclear facilities from making a bomb. He went even further to say that he expected the deal to happen a lot sooner than it did.

“I’m frankly surprised that it held this long given that they were not prohibited by sanctions from selling these defensive weapons,” President Obama said on Friday.”

Another example of the flexibility that Barry promised Vladimir via the whisper to messenger boy Dmitri.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but supposedly the big payoff to the Reset was Russian cooperation on Iran. But apparently Obama believes that the sell-by date of that cooperation has long passed. Or , he doesn’t really give a damn about keeping Iran in a box.

And look at what he did there. He totally buys the Russian and Iranian line that these are “defensive weapons”, and hence pose no problem: again, “what? me worry?” Is he that stupid? Does he not realize that a strong shield protects those who wield the sword? These AAMs dramatically undercut the credibility of any military response to Iran’s developing nuclear weapons: they thereby undercut the credibility of Obama’s vaunted deal. (Although that presumes that Obama actually intends to deprive Iran of the bomb. His actions repeatedly cast doubt on that presumption.) …

Next Craig Pirrong shared with us two points from a UVA prof comparing Woodrow Wilson to current occupant.

… First, Leffler pointed out that Wilson made many compromises in Paris, but adamantly refused to make any compromises with his domestic opposition. Leffler further noted that contemporaries noted the contrast.

Second, and relatedly, Leffler emphasized that Wilson hated and despised his domestic opponents, in particular Henry Cabot Lodge. MacMillan related some anecdotes about what she called Wilson’s “stupidity” in dealing with the opposition, in particular his very public scorn for the domestic opposition that just intensified their desire to defeat him. She said that Wilson didn’t just disagree with Lodge: he believed Lodge was evil, and wouldn’t do a deal with the Devil. MacMillan said that [I paraphrase] “Wilson believed if you disagreed with him, there was something morally wrong with you.” (This is around the 1:08 mark.) That is, Wilson’s refusal to compromise on the League (even though MacMillan claims that many of Lodge’s objections were reasonable) stemmed from a visceral hatred and disdain for his political opponents. This refusal to bend (indeed, Wilson instructed Democratic senators to vote against an amended treaty) doomed his beloved League to defeat.

The parallels with Obama are quite apparent. One wonders if the outcome will be as well, that is, whether Obama’s disdain for Republicans will doom his beloved Iran deal to defeat.

The last from Craig Pirrong today explains why he and Victor Davis Hanson have similar reactions to the current occupant.

… That is, similarly prepared or disposed minds, presented with the same facts, are likely to reach the same conclusion. Hanson and I are both conservatives who have spent our professional lives in the progressive swamps of academia, and who are hence quite familiar with the leftist infatuation with anti-Western movements abroad and disdain (and often hatred) for the United States. Through long exposure, we are well versed in leftist cant. We are both steeped in history, although Hanson is a real historian, and I am just an amateur. We both share a tragic view of man, and a belief that there are historical regularities that connect all ages: this gives us a neuralgia to progressivism (literally understood based on a knowledge of its Hegelian roots) and makes us shake our heads at people like Obama, who quite openly believes that things that happened before he was born, or came of age, are irrelevant (except, of course, if they can be used to shame western culture-the Crusades!-or the US-slavery!-or idealize “the other”-remember the beautiful Caliphate!).

In other words, we are almost destined to see Obama in the same way, and interpret his remarks and actions  nearly identically.

Max Boot posts on the negotiating style of the ”innocent abroad.” 

I’m guessing that President Obama, despite his roots in Kenya and Indonesia, has never negotiated for a carpet or anything else in a Middle Eastern bazaar. If his negotiations with Iran are any indication, he is the kind of innocent abroad who pays $100,000 for a carpet that’s worth $100.

Already his talks with Iran have been characterized by American concession after American concession. Talks that started with the express goal of dismantling the Iranian nuclear program and exporting their stockpile of enriched uranium are ending up with the program wholly intact and the enriched uranium still in Iran, albeit in a diluted form. All that Iran has to do is to promise not to enrich too much uranium or weaponize for the next decade or so and in return the world will, in essence, apply its seal of approval to the Iranian nuclear program.

But that still isn’t enough for the rapacious mullahs. Among other conditions, they are demanding that sanctions be lifted the minute the agreement gets signed. Obama has been insisting that the U.S. would lift sanctions only in stages, as Iranian compliance is verified. But on Friday Obama signaled that he is willing to make preemptive concessions on this issue so as to ensure that a deal gets done by his artificial deadline of the end of June. …

Scott Johnson of Power Line riffs the foreign policy team.

The Obama administration national security apparatus has to leave a knowledgeable man feeling a little queasy. You’ve got national security advisor Susan Rice, a knave or a fool with credibility somewhere south of zero. You’ve got assistant to the president and deputy national security advisor for strategic communications Ben Rhodes. What is this man doing here?

You’ve got Secretary of State John Kerry, the man whom Obama has entrusted to bring home the bacon in negotiations with his counterpart from Iran. Who will represent the United States?

You’ve got Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. He seems to be in over his head as he occasionally blurts out the truth. That’s a distinction with a difference in this crowd.

You’ve got Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, an apparently serious man.

You’ve got Valerie Jarrett, the woman with her finger in every pot. What is she doing here? Even former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates found her tough to take in matters involving national security.

And you’ve got CIA Director John Brennan. In their recent Wall Street Journal column on the need for a CIA Team B on Iran, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey and Kevin Carroll open with a recitation of some of Brennan’s greatest hits, here denominated “gaffes”: …

More on the “negotiator.” This time from Jennifer Rubin.

… His blind spot extends outside the negotiating room. When presented with a challenge Obama invokes a false choice: doing what he wants or war! (Sometimes, as in Iraq, the choice is doing something of marginal military utility or hundreds of thousands of troops on the ground.) Danielle Pletka notices, “In Iraq, after engineering the ouster of a once favored prime minister, the only support the administration can muster for the new PM seems to be arms sales and air strikes. (Mind you, not even enough of that…) In Libya, after the NATO effort the US joined ended Muammar Qadhafi’s brutal reign, Washington simply washed its hands of Libya. In Syria, where the United States is nominally training the ‘moderate Syrian opposition,’ the US is languidly conducting airstrikes and occasionally launching a pallet of MREs at the millions of Syrian refugees that have fled to neighboring countries. In Yemen, where Barack Obama’s new ally Tehran is seeking to overthrow a US ally in the fight against al Qaeda, the United States is providing intel and logistical support to the Saudis now bombarding . . . the country.”

In other words, whether it is before or after military action, Obama has no patience for the hard work of knitting alliances, leaving a stay-behind force. providing ongoing support, etc.

In sum, as bad a commander in chief as Obama is, he is a worse negotiator and strategist. …

John Fund writes on the candidate that worries the defenders of the proposed occupant.

A long parade of presidential contenders presented themselves before a convention of New Hampshire Republicans this weekend. But only one was a former top business executive, and only one was a woman, and they were the same candidate. Carly Fiorina is no doubt getting attention because of her unique background, but more and more people are staying to listen because she has something fresh to say.

“For the first time in U.S. history, we are destroying more businesses than we are creating,” Fiorina told her audience in Nashua. “The weight of the government is literally crushing the potential of the people of this nation.” Electing standard-issue politicians will no longer do, she said. “Managers are people who do the best they can within the existing system. Leaders are people who do not accept what is broken just because it has been that way for a long time.”

Fiorina also seems to relish the role of being the most pointed critic of Hillary Clinton. “She tweets about women’s rights in this country and takes money from governments that deny women the most basic human rights,” she jabbed back in February when a scandal involving the Clinton Foundation surfaced. She contrasts her background as a “problem solver” with Clinton’s record as a professional politician. Her critique of Clinton’s record is withering: “I come from a world where speeches are not accomplishments. Activity isn’t accomplishment. Title isn’t accomplishment. I come from a world where you have to actually do something; you have to produce results.” …

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For years Pickings has been pointing out the public safety folks are getting out of control. David French in National Review writes on the gestapo tactics of the Wisconsin left.

‘They came with a battering ram.”

Cindy Archer, one of the lead architects of Wisconsin’s Act 10 — also called the “Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill,” it limited public-employee benefits and altered collective-bargaining rules for public-employee unions — was jolted awake by yelling, loud pounding at the door, and her dogs’ frantic barking. The entire house — the windows and walls — was shaking.

She looked outside to see up to a dozen police officers, yelling to open the door. They were carrying a battering ram.

She wasn’t dressed, but she started to run toward the door, her body in full view of the police. Some yelled at her to grab some clothes, others yelled for her to open the door.

“I was so afraid,” she says. “I did not know what to do.” She grabbed some clothes, opened the door, and dressed right in front of the police. The dogs were still frantic.

“I begged and begged, ‘Please don’t shoot my dogs, please don’t shoot my dogs, just don’t shoot my dogs.’ I couldn’t get them to stop barking, and I couldn’t get them outside quick enough. I saw a gun and barking dogs. I was scared and knew this was a bad mix.”

She got the dogs safely out of the house, just as multiple armed agents rushed inside. Some even barged into the bathroom, where her partner was in the shower. The officer or agent in charge demanded that Cindy sit on the couch, but she wanted to get up and get a cup of coffee.

“I told him this was my house and I could do what I wanted.” Wrong thing to say. “This made the agent in charge furious. He towered over me with his finger in my face and yelled like a drill sergeant that I either do it his way or he would handcuff me.”

They wouldn’t let her speak to a lawyer. She looked outside and saw a person who appeared to be a reporter. Someone had tipped him off.

The neighbors started to come outside, curious at the commotion, and all the while the police searched her house, making a mess, and — according to Cindy — leaving her “dead mother’s belongings strewn across the basement floor in a most disrespectful way.”

Then they left, carrying with them only a cellphone and a laptop.

 

“It’s a matter of life or death.”

That was the first thought of “Anne” (not her real name). Someone was pounding at her front door. It was early in the morning — very early — and it was the kind of heavy pounding that meant someone was either fleeing from — or bringing — trouble.

“It was so hard. I’d never heard anything like it. I thought someone was dying outside.”

She ran to the door, opened it, and then chaos. “People came pouring in. For a second I thought it was a home invasion. It was terrifying. They were yelling and running, into every room in the house. One of the men was in my face, yelling at me over and over and over.”

It was indeed a home invasion, but the people who were pouring in were Wisconsin law-enforcement officers. Armed, uniformed police swarmed into the house. Plainclothes investigators cornered her and her newly awakened family. Soon, state officials were seizing the family’s personal property, including each person’s computer and smartphone, filled with the most intimate family information.

Why were the police at Anne’s home? She had no answers. The police were treating them the way they’d seen police treat drug dealers on television.

In fact, TV or movies were their only points of reference, because they weren’t criminals. They were law-abiding. They didn’t buy or sell drugs. They weren’t violent. They weren’t a danger to anyone. Yet there were cops — surrounding their house on the outside, swarming the house on the inside. They even taunted the family as if they were mere “perps.”

As if the home invasion, the appropriation of private property, and the verbal abuse weren’t enough, next came ominous warnings.

Don’t call your lawyer.

Don’t tell anyone about this raid. Not even your mother, your father, or your closest friends. …

 

… For dozens of conservatives, the years since Scott Walker’s first election as governor of Wisconsin transformed the state — known for pro-football championships, good cheese, and a population with a reputation for being unfailingly polite — into a place where conservatives have faced early-morning raids, multi-year secretive criminal investigations, slanderous and selective leaks to sympathetic media, and intrusive electronic snooping.

Yes, Wisconsin, the cradle of the progressive movement and home of the “Wisconsin idea” — the marriage of state governments and state universities to govern through technocratic reform — was giving birth to a new progressive idea, the use of law enforcement as a political instrument, as a weapon to attempt to undo election results, shame opponents, and ruin lives.

Most Americans have never heard of these raids, or of the lengthy criminal investigations of Wisconsin conservatives. For good reason. Bound by comprehensive secrecy orders, conservatives were left to suffer in silence as leaks ruined their reputations, as neighbors, looking through windows and dismayed at the massive police presence, the lights shining down on targets’ homes, wondered, no doubt, What on earth did that family do?

This was the on-the-ground reality of the so-called John Doe investigations, expansive and secret criminal proceedings that directly targeted Wisconsin residents because of their relationship to Scott Walker, their support for Act 10, and their advocacy of conservative reform.

Good column this week by Glenn Reynolds on why politicians should obey the law.

Some people are now encouraging President Obama to basically ignore the Supreme Court where its rulings might impede the implementation of Obamacare. And a recent Rasmussen poll showed that 26% of likely voters — a minority, but still a significant number — say the president should be able to disregard federal court rulings “if they are standing in the way of actions he feels are important for the country.”

Faced with a Supreme Court order to turn over the White House tapes, President Nixon complied and, shortly thereafter, resigned. But if Obama were to violate a high court decision, he wouldn’t be the first president to do so. President Andrew Jackson, after all, ignored the justices’ decision in favor of the Cherokee Nation in Worcester v. Georgia and sent the Cherokees on the Trail of Tears. His picture is on the $20 bill today, and although there’s now a move to replace him, it’s motivated more by a desire to have a woman on U.S. currency than by any disgust over Jackson’s lawlessness.

The only remedy for presidential lawlessness, short of a coup or a civil war, is impeachment, and only two presidents, Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, have ever been impeached. Neither was removed from office.

Of course, presidential lawlessness is a special case. Because the president controls not only the nation’s law enforcement apparatus but also its military, it’s pretty hard to call him to account. But what about the rest of us? If presidents can violate the law, why can’t we? …

Joel Kotkin says the drought and how it has been handled, shows that “California is so over.”

California’s drought and how it’s handled show just what kind of place the GoldenState is becoming: feudal, super-affluent and with an impoverished interior.

California has met the future, and it really doesn’t work. As the mounting panic surrounding the drought suggests, the GoldenState, once renowned for meeting human and geographic challenges, is losing its ability to cope with crises. As a result, the great American land of opportunity is devolving into something that resembles feudalism, a society dominated by rich and poor, with little opportunity for upward mobility for the state’s middle- and working classes. 

The water situation reflects this breakdown in the starkest way. Everyone who follows California knew it was inevitable we would suffer a long-term drought. Most of the state—including the Bay Area as well as greater Los Angeles—is semi-arid, and could barely support more than a tiny fraction of its current population. California’s response to aridity has always been primarily an engineering one that followed the old Roman model of siphoning water from the high country to service cities and farms.  

But since the 1970s, California’s water system has become the prisoner of politics and posturing. The great aqueducts connecting the population centers with the great Sierra snowpack are all products of an earlier era—the Los Angeles aqueduct (1913), Hetch-Hetchy (1923), the Central Valley Project (1937), and the California Aqueduct (1974). The primary opposition to expansion has been the green left, which rejects water storage projects as irrelevant. 

Yet at the same time greens and their allies in academia and the mainstream press are those most likely to see the current drought as part of a climate change-induced reduction in snowpack. That many scientists disagree with this assessment is almost beside the point. Whether climate change will make things better or worse is certainly an important concern, but California was going to have problems meeting its water needs under any circumstances. …

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John Hinderaker posts on John Dickerson who CBS has picked to anchor Face the Nation.

Bob Schieffer is retiring as host of CBS’s Sunday morning political talk show, Face the Nation. CBS has announced that his replacement will be John Dickerson, who, among other things, is both the political director for CBS News and chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. Dickerson, a graduate of Sidwell Friends, is a perfect 21st century Democrat. This is how Dickerson described his upbringing:

“In McLean, Va., in the 1970s, the suburban clusters had names written in script at the entrance gates, but my house was the only one I knew that had a name of its own. When my parents gave parties, it was my job to open the door, look each new arrival in the eye and say: “Welcome to Merrywood.”

The house, a 36-room Georgian-style mansion built in 1920, was veined with ivy and surrounded with old boxwood bushes that looked like broccoli when you flew over on the descent into nearby NationalAirport. Jacqueline Kennedy grew up there and Jack Kennedy worked on “Profiles in Courage” on the third floor.

Gore Vidal, who lived in what would become my brother’s room, put the house at the center of his 1967 novel “Washington, D.C.” …
My mother, Nancy Dickerson, was a reporter for CBS and NBC and the first female star of television news; my father, Wyatt Dickerson, was a successful businessman. Their parties, from the ’60s to the ’80s, attracted cabinet officials, movie stars and presidents.”

Dickerson was a regular guest on Al Franken’s long-defunct Air America show. How far left is he? Ed Driscoll takes us down memory lane to this 2013 Slate piece: “Go for the Throat! Why if he wants to transform American politics, Obama must declare war on the Republican Party.” …

More from Ed Driscoll. As Glenn Reynolds says; they’re not journalists, they’re partisans with bylines.

John Dickerson, replacing Bob Schieffer as the new host of Face the Nation, will continue the same level of objectivity that CBS has brought to viewers for half a century. In 1964, when CBS was one third of all television news, Walter Cronkite and Daniel Schorr repeatedly smeared Barry Goldwater as a crypto-Nazi. His successor, Dan Rather, blew himself up in spectacular fashion with RatherGate in 2004, as dissected by all those bloggers in their Pajamas, to coin a Website name. …

… Slate is what it is and some bloodthirsty Slate writer orgasmic over the prospect of Obama permanently pulverizing and destroying the GOP is as noteworthy as green on grass.

Oh, except after someone like Brit Hume connects the dots.

The author of this outrageous left-wing fever dream is John Dickerson, whom Slate describes as “Slate’s chief political correspondent”. What Slate leaves out of its little bio, though, is that Dickerson is also the political director at CBS News.

Dickerson is merely being Dickerson, and  there’s no doubt he speaks for legions upon legions of those in the media today. …

Turning our attention to Hillary Clinton, John Fund says she has serious problems.

In the run-up to Hillary Clinton’s presidential announcement, a lot of commentators dismissed criticism of her or suggested it would boomerang against Republicans. Her former consultant James Carville accused MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough of “scandalmongering.” On Sunday, Chuck Todd of NBC’s Meet the Press, speaking to radio talk-show host Hugh Hewitt, expressed his skepticism of Republican efforts against the Clintons: “I look at sort of an obsession on the right of beating Obama and beating Bill Clinton over the years . . . is there a point where you do this too much?”

But clearly many voters disagree. A new Bloomberg poll finds approval of Hillary at 48 percent in the wake of her e-mail scandal. The poll finds 53 percent of Americans believe “she purposely withheld or deleted some relevant e-mails from a private account and home server she used while in office.” Just 29 percent of respondents think she is being truthful.

“Voters do think she is a strong leader — a key metric — but unless she can change the honesty perception, running as a competent but dishonest candidate has serious potential problems,” concludes Quinnipiac’s assistant polling director Peter Brown. His firm’s new polls find majorities in the swing states of Colorado, Iowa, and Virginia don’t believe she is honest or trustworthy. …

Charles Krauthammer writes on the “Marie Antoinette tour.”

See Hillary ride in a van! Watch her meet everyday Americans! Witness her ordering a burrito bowl at Chipotle! Which she did wearing shades, as did her chief aide Huma Abedin, yielding security-camera pictures that made them look (to borrow from Karl Rove) like fugitives on the lam, wanted in seven states for a failed foreign policy.

There’s something surreal about Hillary Clinton’s Marie Antoinette tour, sampling cake and commoners. But what else can she do? After Barack Obama, she’s the best-known political figure in America. She has papal name recognition. Like Napoleon and Cher, she’s universally known by her first name. As former queen consort, senator and secretary of state, she has spent a quarter-century in the national spotlight — more than any modern candidate.

She doesn’t just get media coverage; she gets meta-coverage. The staging is so obvious that actual events disappear. The story is their symbolism — campaign as semiotics.

This quality of purposeful abstractness makes everything sound and seem contrived. It’s not really her fault. True, she’s got enough genuine inauthenticity to go around — decades of positioning, framing, parsing, dodging — but the perception is compounded by the obvious staginess of the gigantic political apparatus that surrounds her and directs her movements. …

Seth Mandel thinks Clinton is terrified of people and wonders if that will matter to voters. 

If, as a child, you expressed fear of a certain kind of insect, or a dog or a cat perhaps, you were probably told by an adult to buck up because “it’s more afraid of you than you are of it.” If so, you might find it endearing to learn that the same could probably be said about Hillary Clinton. It’s true that she seeks to punish dissent, embraces Nixonian power lust and rule breaking, and is even willing to support amending the Constitution to trash free-speech protections if it means keeping a negative movie about her out of theaters. But as we’re learning this week, as creepy and destructive as her view of government is, she’s almost certainly more afraid of you than you are of her.

IJ Review has a fun side-by-side comparison of what happened when the entertainment-news site TMZ attempted to question Marco Rubio in an airport, and what happened when TMZ tried to corner Hillary Clinton in an airport. Rubio walked over to the cameraman smiling, and chatted for a bit about his campaign, music, and even gracefully handled a question about his wife being an ex-cheerleader. He never looked uncomfortable, or bothered by the questions.

The video of Clinton consists entirely of her walking away in silence, hearing but ignoring the cameraman.

You may think that if there’s any fear at play in that video, it’s fear of the media or of accountability. And that’s surely true. But Hillary’s campaign rollout is revealing that it’s a more generalized fear than that: the woman who wants to be the next president is terrified of people. …

According to Jonah Goldberg, Clinton is the candidate of yesterday. For proof he points out she was the only candidate who supported the war in Iraq.

… Personally, I don’t think support for the war should be disqualifying. And I have no doubt that most anti-war Democrats will nonetheless work through their cognitive dissonance and vote for Clinton. They hardly put up much protest when anti-war Obama selected Clinton, Joe Biden, and John Kerry, all of whom voted for the war, as his top foreign-policy gurus.

Perhaps this generational wave of post-Iraq Republican politicians says something interesting about the GOP? Likewise, perhaps Clinton’s support for the war — until she apologized in her 2014 memoir — says something about her? Reasonable (and unreasonable) people will differ on all that.

But Clinton’s support for the war underscores a broader vulnerability. Unlike her probable opponents, she’s truly a creature of yesterday’s battles. From the fight over “Hillarycare,” to the endless scandals of her husband’s administration, to the ugly brawls over the Iraq War, Hillary Clinton has been a partisan fixture of Washington at its most exhausting and ugly moments. A Midwestern road trip in a van dubbed “Scooby,” even one punctuated by burrito breaks, won’t make people forget that, nor will defensive outbursts from her supporters stop her critics from pointing it out.

And the NY Times reports Clinton was asked about her emails two years ago.

Hillary Rodham Clinton was directly asked by congressional investigators in a December 2012 letter whether she had used a private email account while serving as secretary of state, according to letters obtained by The New York Times.

But Mrs. Clinton did not reply to the letter. And when the State Department answered in March 2013, nearly two months after she left office, it ignored the question and provided no response.

The query was posed to Mrs. Clinton in a Dec. 13, 2012, letter from Representative Darrell Issa, the Republican chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Mr. Issa was leading an investigation into how the Obama administration handled its officials’ use of personal email.

“Have you or any senior agency official ever used a personal email account to conduct official business?” Mr. Issa wrote to Mrs. Clinton. “If so, please identify the account used.” …

 

The Cartoonists have a lot of fun with the Clinton logo. Go to the WORD or PDF versions to see those.

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We are early because the debate contained herein amongst our friends, about global warming and the reasons for it, is hard to take all at once, so this will give everyone a chance to go back to it a few times before the next Pickings is posted Sunday night or Monday morning.  

Ron Bailey of Reason Magazine, the house organ of the libertarian movement, posts on his growing belief that there is some human cause to the increase in temperatures.

In 2005, I changed my mind about climate change: I concluded that the balance of the scientific evidence showed that man-made global warming could likely pose a significant problem for humanity by the end of this century. My new assessment did not please a number of my friends, some of whom made their disappointment clear.

At the 2007 annual gala dinner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a D.C.-based free-market think tank, the master of ceremonies was former National Review editor John O’Sullivan. To entertain the crowd, O’Sullivan put together a counterfeit tale in which I ostensibly had given a lecture on environmental trends pointing out that most were positive. After my talk, O’Sullivan told the audience, a young woman supposedly approached me to express her displeasure with regard to my change of mind on climate change.

Continuing his fable, O’Sullivan recounted to the hundreds of diners that I had tried to explain why my views had shifted. Eventually realizing that the young woman was having none of it, I then purportedly asked her if it wasn’t enough that we two actually agreed on most environmental policy issues. The young woman paused for a moment, said O’Sullivan, and then retorted, “I suppose that Pontius Pilate made some good decisions, too.” Being compared, even in jest, to the Roman governor who consented to the crucifixion of Jesus is, to say the least, somewhat disconcerting.

Welcome to the most politicized science of our time. …

Jonathan Adler, law prof at Case Western, posts in Volokh Conspiracy about his arrival at the same beliefs.

When it comes to climate change, there is an amazing confluence of policy preferences and scientific assessments.  Those who generally favor aggressive regulatory interventions to address environmental concerns are convinced global warming is a serious (if not catastrophic) environmental concern, while those who generally oppose governmental interventions in the marketplace are skeptical of mainstream climate science.  Each side of the policy debate has adopted a view of the science that confirms — or at least conforms with — its policy preferences.

It would be nice if reality lined up just so, but that’s not the world in which we live. As I wrote in 2008:

“Given my strong libertarian leanings, it would certainly be ideologically convenient if the evidence for a human contribution to climate change were less strong. Alas, I believe the preponderance of evidence strongly supports the claim that anthropogenic emissions are having an effect on the global climate, and that effect will increase as greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere. While I reject most apocalyptic scenarios as unfounded or unduly speculative, I am convinced that the human contribution to climate change will cause or exacerbate significant problems in at least some parts of the world. For instance, even a relatively modest warming over the coming decades is very likely to have a meaningful effect on the timing and distribution of precipitation and evaporation rates, which will, in turn, have a substantial impact on freshwater supplies. That we do not know with any precision the when, where, and how much does not change the fact that we are quite certain that such changes will occur.”

Over at Reason, Ronald Bailey points out that the cumulative evidence in support of the basic proposition that human emissions of greenhouse gases are contributing to a gradual warming of the atmosphere is substantial — even if it is inconvenient for a libertarian to admit.

Next Ron Bailey linked to a couple of critics of his post.

Last week, I wrote an article asking, “What Evidence Would Persuade You That Man-Made Climate Change Is Real?” Let’s just say that it provoked some readers a bit. Now some participants in the climate change science controversy are explaining how I misinterpret or misunderstand what is going on. For the convenience of Reason readers I link to a couple below. …

… Folks, as I have said, my best judgment is that the preponderance of the evidence – not beyond a reasonable doubt – suggests that man-made global warming could become a significant problem later in this century. Given my ideological commitments I would much prefer (and do hope) to be wrong. As noted, I intend to monitor the predictions made by those who think warming will be rapid and dangerous. If they fail, believe me, I will happily report those failures. …

The first answer came from Roy Spencer who is a climatologist and principal research scientist at U of Alabama at Huntsville.

I just found out that Ron Bailey at Reason.com published an article a few days ago entitled, “What Evidence Would Persuade You That Man-Made Climate Change Is Real?”

I’ve spent some time with Ron, and he is a very sharp guy. That’s why I’m a little disappointed that he would publish this mixture of straw man arguments and uncritical thinking. He is the only deep thinker I know of who switched from being a skeptic about the causes of global warming to a believer…an epiphany which occurred in 2005, according to the article. (Hmmm…I wonder if he was fooled by all those major hurricanes that hit the U.S. that year? It’s now almost 10 years later, and we haven’t had one since.)

The first problem I have is with his premise: that skeptics believe humans have no role in climate change. I don’t know of any serious skeptics who hold such a view. Now, maybe he is addressing people who deny any human involvement in global warming. His article is vague, and maybe he can clarify his intent for us.

The second problem I have is with Ron’s list of a variety of evidences of global-average warming, which (again) no skeptic worth their salt disputes. The science dispute is over how much of the warming is manmade versus natural. Like too many others, Ron conflates climate change with human-caused climate change, which are not the same thing. …

Next up is Christopher Monckton who sometimes appeers to write as Lord Monckton. He goes into serious detail. He’s the main reason it’s hard to read this all at once.  

“What Evidence,” asks Ronald Bailey’s headline (www.reason.com, April 3, 2015), “Would Convince You That Man-Made Climate Change Is Real?”

The answer: a rational, scientific case rooted in established theory and data would convince me that manmade climate change is a problem. That it is real is not in doubt, for every creature that breathes out emits CO2 and thus affects the climate.

The true scientific question, then, is not the fatuous question whether “Man-Made Climate Change Is Real” but how much global warming our sins of emission may cause, and whether that warming might be more a bad thing than a good thing.

However, Mr Bailey advances no rational case. What, then, are the elements of a rational, scientific case that our influence on the climate will prove dangerous unless the West completes its current self-shutdown?

Here is the mountain the tax-gobbling classes who tend to favor profitable alarmism must climb before they can make out a rational, scientific case for doing anything about our greenhouse-gas emissions. …

Now here’s where Monckton can light you up.

… Whether mitigation measures should be attempted in any event is an economic question, answered by investment appraisal. The UK’s $8333-per-auto subsidy for electric cars will serve as an example. The two initial conditions for the appraisal are the fraction of global CO2 emissions a mitigation measure is intended to abate, and the cost of the measure.

Typical gasoline-powered auto engines are approximately 27% efficient. Typical fossil-fueled generating stations are 50% efficient, transmission to end user is 67% efficient, battery charging is 90% efficient and the auto’s electric motor is 90% efficient, so that the fuel efficiency of an electric car is also 27%. However, the electric car requires 30% more power per mile traveled to move the mass of its batteries.

CO2 emissions from domestic transport account for 24% of UK CO2 emissions, and cars, vans, and taxis represent 90% of road transport (DfT, 2013). Assuming 80% of fuel use is by these autos, they account for 19.2% of UK CO2 emissions. Conversion to electric power, 61% of which is generated by fossil fuels in the UK, would abate 39% of 19.2% (i.e. 7.5%) of UK CO2 emissions.

However, the battery-weight penalty would be 30% of 19.2% of 61%: i.e. 3.5% of UK CO2 emissions. The net saving from converting all UK cars, vans, and taxis to electricity, therefore, would be 4% of UK CO2 emissions, which are 1.72% of global CO2 emissions, abating 0.07% of global CO2 emissions of 2 μatm yr–1, or 0.00138 μatm. From eqn. (2), assuming 400 μatm concentration at year end on business as usual, forcing abated by the subsidy for converting all UK cars to electricity would be 5.35 ln[400/(400-0.00138)], or 0.00002 W m–2, which, multiplied by the Planck parameter λ0, gives 0.000006 K warming abated by the subsidy.

The cost to the UK taxpayer of subsidizing the 30,000 electric cars, vans, and taxis bought in 2012 was a flat-rate subsidy of $8333 (£5000) for each vehicle and a further subsidy of about $350 (£210) per year in vehicle excise tax remitted, a total of $260.5 million. On that basis, the cost of subsidizing all 2,250,000 new autos sold each year (SMMT, 2013), would be $19.54 bn. …

Monckton is a show-off.

Last today is Robert Tracinski who writes often for The Federalist. He closes with this; 

… Given the abysmal record of climate forecasting, we should tell the warmists to go back and make a new set of predictions, then come back to us in 20 or 30 years and tell us how these predictions panned out. Then we’ll talk.

Ah, but we’re not going to be allowed to wait. And that’s one of the things that is deeply unscientific about the global warming hysteria. The climate is a subject which, by its nature, requires detailed study of events that take many decades to unfold. It is a field in which the only way to gain knowledge is through extreme patience: gather painstaking, accurate data over a period of centuries, chug away at making predictions, figure out 20 years later that they failed, try to discover why they failed, then start over with a new set of predictions and wait another 20 years. It’s the kind of field where a conscientious professional plugs away so maybe in some future century those who follow after him will finally be able to figure it all out.

Yet this is the field that has suddenly been imbued with the Fierce Urgency of Now. We have to know now what the climate will do over the next 100 years, we have to decide now, we have to act now. So every rule of good science gets trampled down in the stampede. Which also explains the partisan gap on this issue, because we all know which side of the political debate stands to benefit from the stampede. And it’s not the right.

So yes, I know exactly what it would take to convince me that catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is really happening. And no, the warmists haven’t even come close.

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We’ve had items about our ancestors’ sleep patterns before. Before It’s News has a post.  

Ok, maybe your grandparents probably slept like you. And your great, great-grandparents. But once you go back before the 1800s, sleep starts to look a lot different. Your ancestors slept in a way that modern sleepers would find bizarre – they slept twice. And so can you.

The History

The existence of our sleeping twice per night was first uncovered by Roger Ekirch, professor of History at Virginia Tech.

His research found that we didn’t always sleep in one eight hour chunk. We used to sleep in two shorter periods, over a longer range of night. This range was about 12 hours long, and began with a sleep of three to four hours, wakefulness of two to three hours, then sleep again until morning.

References are scattered throughout literature, court documents, personal papers, and the ephemera of the past. What is surprising is not that people slept in two sessions, but that the concept was so incredibly common. Two-piece sleeping was the standard, accepted way to sleep.

“It’s not just the number of references – it is the way they refer to it, as if it was common knowledge,” Ekirch says.

An English doctor wrote, for example, that the ideal time for study and contemplation was between “first sleep” and “second sleep.” Chaucer tells of a character in the Canterbury Tales that goes to bed following her “firste sleep.” …

I Stacker posts on how doctors can’t insult patients face-to-face without their knowledge. Further proof Pickerhead will read anything.

Medical lingo can be confusing—but maybe ignorance is bliss. In his new book, The Secret Language of Doctors, Toronto-based ER physician Brian Goldman decodes the slang that doctors and nurses use to talk about their jobs, patients, and each other—and some of it is far from flattering.

Of course, not all slang is derogatory. In some cases, it’s a way to pack a lot of information into a single phrase, or to warn colleagues about a potentially difficult patient. A surgeon might say “High Five,” when entering the OR to let other staff know they’ll be operating on someone with HIV. Sometimes slang helps hospital staff sound more professional during awkward situations; a nurse might refer to “Code Brown” during a miserable shift with a man who is having constant diarrhea in bed.

In other situations, the book reveals, slang is therapeutic, a form of comic relief that builds camaraderie between overworked doctors and nurses, and which helps them get through long, emotionally heavy days. “The inability to laugh on rounds in an environment like our ICU, where there’s very little to laugh about, is going to be tragic and injurious to safety and to the quality of care,” one respirologist told Goldman. “You need to have those moments where you take a little break and reset.” In any case, check out a selection of lingo below, all pulled from Goldman’s book, so that the next time you’re in the hospital you know what your doctor really thinks of you.

The Bunker: This is a room in the hospital where medical students, residents and their attending physicians meet behind closed doors to rest and talk about their days. There, one might laugh about the patient in the “monkey jacket,” or hospital gown, who had a case of “chandelier syndrome,” practically leaping up toward the ceiling in surprise when she felt the cold stethoscope. A surgeon might cringe while recalling a “peek-and-shriek,” an operation in which she opened a patient’s belly to find something unexpected, like cancer, and quickly stitched up again. …

Newsweek on the value of dirt. More proof here, too. 

There was a glorious and liberating moment for parents about 10 years ago when we were told the job had got too clean. All that mollycoddling was doing more harm than good: we should let them take risks, play in the dirt, go in the sun bare-skinned and pick their noses. The last was a particular joy – ever tried to keep a toddler’s finger out of their nose? It fits perfectly, which tells you something.

The science was convincingly simple. The bacteria collected in the nose-pickings were essential, when they found their way to the mouth, to help small humans cultivate antibodies, resist diseases and avoid allergies. So bogeys and mud were in – all that anti-bacterial wiping and antibiotic guzzling was over. Another 20th-century folly. The clincher came when it turned out that nut allergy had soared once we stopped small children eating nuts.

Science writer Alanna Collen’s fascinating study of the intertwined lives of microbes and humans, 10% Human, is a manual for the new, healthy way of being dirty. …

Now for some serious fun. We have three items on the caddie who was on the bag for Jordan Spieth the new Master’s Champion. The first is by Brian Costa in the Wall Street Journal.

The man who celebrated with Jordan Spieth on the 18th green at Augusta National Golf Club on Sunday made his first trip here only three years ago. Michael Greller wasn’t even a professional caddie at the time. He was a sixth-grade math teacher who won a lottery for Masters tickets and spent the day following Rory McIlroy. “I had a few beers and enjoyed the walk,” he said.

Greller’s path from standing outside the ropes to carrying the bag of the Masters champion is far more improbable than Spieth’s impressive victory. And it reveals both the randomness of the caddying business and the way Spieth has approached the game.

When Tiger Woods won the Masters in 1997—at 21, the same age as Spieth—the man carrying his bag was Mike “Fluff” Cowan. With more than two decades of experience caddying on the PGA Tour, Cowan offered the kind of in-depth course knowledge that Woods, for all his prodigious talent, lacked.

But in hiring Greller, 37, at the start of Spieth’s career and sticking with him as he ascended to this point, Spieth prioritized personal chemistry. That he went so far as to hire someone who had caddied only occasionally for amateurs ranked as one of the bigger upsets in pro caddying. …

Seattle Post-Intelligencer claims Michael Greller is a home town boy. 

Jordan Spieth had quite a weekend. The 21-year-old Dallas native led wire-to-wire at the Masters to become the second-youngest golfer to win golf’s biggest tournament, tying Tiger Woods’ course record of 18-under in the process.

His caddie had quite a weekend, too.

Michael Greller, 37, is from GigHarbor, and was there on the green in Augusta, Georgia, as Spieth’s final putt fell. He embraced Spieth, 16 years his junior, after the young man’s bogey putt clinched a four-stroke victory over Phil Mickelson and Justin Rose. …

… In the last 30 days, Spieth has competed in four tournaments, winning two and finishing second in two. If Greller is on a typical caddie salary, according to Golf Digest, he has likely made about $375,000 in the past month. …

Last and always least, NY Times.

The caddie Jim Mackay took the golf bag and moved it out of the path of the foot traffic in the scoring area. He picked up the pin from the 18th hole at Augusta National Golf Club and placed it against the bag.

Mackay’s golfer, the three-time Masters winner Phil Mickelson, had cobbled together a 14-under-par 274, which would have tied or bettered the winning number in the four Masters after his last title run here, in 2010. But on Sunday, the score left Mickelson tied for second with Justin Rose, four strokes behind the winner, Jordan Spieth.

Over dinner the previous night with Spieth’s caddie, Michael Greller, Mackay discovered their paths had first crossed here in 2012, two years before Spieth had shared second place in his Masters debut. The story Greller told was so sweet, Mackay was happy to help Greller in any way he could. And after acing the big test, Greller needed a hand with the extraneous stuff, like where to drop the bag so it was not in the way and when to double back to the 18th green for the green jacket presentation.

“Michael’s a wonderful, wonderful person,” Mackay said of Greller, who was teaching sixth grade math outside Seattle in 2012 when he won the Masters online ticket lottery, which enabled him to buy two tickets to the Tuesday practice rounds.

He arrived with his brother, and they made their way to the 16th green, where Mickelson and Mackay, whose nickname is Bones, happened to be standing. From outside the ropes, Greller posed so that Mickelson and Mackay were in the background, and his brother snapped a photograph.

“I need to find that picture,” Greller said, adding: “Obviously I was a huge Phil and Bones fan. I still am.” …

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Craig Pirrong, the Streetwise Professor, posts on reactions to the Iran agreement.

… Outside of Obama’s amen corner, virtually everyone in the foreign policy establishment is aghast. Eminences grise Henry Kissinger and George Schultz wrote a long and devastating oped in the WSJ that eviscerated virtually every aspect of the deal. The administration’s response? State Department interim spokesidiot Marie Harf (whom I would say is right out of a dumb blonde joke, except that would be insulting to the subjects of dumb blonde jokes) said that the Kissinger-Schultz piece was “sort of” full “a lot big words and big thoughts.” Wow. What a telling riposte to the two most experienced diplomats of the post-WWII US.  The only more inane response would have been “Is NOT!”

And then there’s Obama himself, dishing out his usual sneering disdain at critics. For instance, he said that those who opposed the deal were taking “a foolish approach” and needed to “bone up on foreign policy.”

Maybe what he meant to say is that they need to be boneheads on foreign policy, and therefore more like him. This is a guy who has lurched from one foreign policy misjudgment (or disaster) to another. The examples are endless. Calling ISIS the JV is one. The recent FUBAR with the Chinese International Development Bank is another. But my favorite, because it illustrates Obama’s unique (and toxic) mixture of warped judgment and narcissistic belief in his own Olympian discernment, was his response to Romney’s statement that Russia is the US’s greatest geopolitical threat: “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”

Hahahahaha. Touche! What a zinger! Silly Romney, living in the past, not like the progressive, hip, future-focused Obama.

Well, the problem with that is that Putin is living in the past too, and is itching to refight the Cold War. But our Barry knows better. …

That’s the opinion of one of our regulars. How about an editor of the Washington Post, Jackson Diehl?

The weakest point in President Obama’s defense of his deal with Iran is his claim that “it is a good deal even if Iran doesn’t change at all.”

Let’s consider that scenario. An Iran that does not change will reap hundreds of billions of dollars in fresh revenue from the lifting of sanctions, and it will surely use much of that to fund its ongoing military adventures in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen. It will supply more weapons to Hamas and other radical Palestinian groups, and invest more in its long-range missiles, cyberweapons and other military technologies not covered by the agreement. It will continue developing advanced centrifuges for uranium enrichment and after a decade will begin installing them. …

… Today it’s difficult to find an expert who believes Iran will soon evolve into a more benign power, notwithstanding the 2013 election of the moderate Hassan Rouhani as president. Present and former senior administration officials I consulted said they expected the Iranian regime would remain the same in the next few years, or maybe get worse. One predicted Khamenei — if he doesn’t kill the accord outright — would set out to prove that it won’t change the state’s “revolutionary” agenda.

That widely shared analysis may well be too gloomy. But it probably explains why Obama keeps insisting in media interviews that he’s not banking on an Iranian transformation. In reality, he is. It’s the apotheosis of his worldview, the sine qua non of the nuclear deal — and the riskiest bet of his presidency.

Next, Streetwise Professor posts on the obama doctrine.

… The roots of this doctrine have also been quite obvious. There are two main ones.

The first is his very progressive view that the United States has been a malign force in the world. This is best encapsulated in his Cairo speech, with its criticism of American arrogance. It is also demonstrated in word and deed, in his insistence that American presence in foreign places creates disorder rather than reduces it, and his concerted effort to withdraw from the world and to defer to others (to “lead from behind”, if you will).

In his younger days, he was a supporter of the nuclear freeze movement, which was animated at the very least by morally relativistic beliefs, but that moral relativism was usually merely a fig leaf to disguise deep-seated anti-Americanism (and anti-Westernism). He is a product of romanticism about the Third World that flourished in the 70s and 80s, and he came by it honestly, from both parents, inveterate leftists both.

It shows.

Indeed, Obama’s views on these matters are quite aligned with Ayatollah Khamanei’s, as set out in this fawning (but revealing) piece in Foreign Affairs. Khamenei’s constant invocation of American arrogance is an eerie echo of Obama’s: or is it the other way around? Either way, it is easy to understand Obama’s benign attitude towards the most strident rhetoric coming out of the Iranian regime, e.g., the motto of “Death to America.” (One of Obama’s spokesman said that this rhetoric should be ignored, even when uttered by the Supreme Leader, because it is just “background noise” intended for domestic consumption.) He views it as an understandable, if somewhat overwrought, expression of a legitimate critique of the United States.

This helps explain his willingness to treat with Iran, and to make concession after concession. …

Salon has someone else on the left who thinks Hillary will be a disaster. Says she’s already running a losing campaign.

… On Friday, Clinton’s campaign began the quick, quiet buildup to her Sunday announcement by placing a new epilogue to her last memoir in the Huffington Post. It’s mostly about how being a grandmother gives her new energy and insight. At the end of the piece she says it also inspires her to work hard so every child has as good a chance in life as her new granddaughter has. Her recent speeches, even those her leakers tout as campaign previews, say little more than that.

Barring a Jeremiah Wright-level crisis, a presidential candidate gets just two or three chances to make her case to a big audience. Her announcement is often her best shot. That Hillary passed on hers is unsettling. If she thinks she doesn’t have to make her case real soon she’s wrong. If she thinks she can get by on the sort of mush Democratic consultants push on clients she’s finished. On Thursday the Q poll released three surveys. In two states, she now trails Rand Paul. In all three a plurality or majority said she is ‘not honest or trustworthy.’ You can bet the leak about her $2.5 billion campaign will push those negatives up a notch.

Clinton seems as disconnected from the public mood now as she did in 2008.  I think it’s a crisis. If she doesn’t right the ship it will be a disaster. In politics it’s always later than you think. Advisors who told her voters would forget the email scandals probably say this too will pass. If so, she should fire them.

Leaders as progressive as Howard Dean and Barney Frank urge Democrats to circle the wagons and spare the party the bloodshed of a real contest, but this party needs to get its blood moving. Clinton needs a real challenge and a real debate, not just a sparring partner; not some palooka to dance her around the ring for a couple of rounds, but a real fighter. She needs the debate. We all do.  But who will bring it?

Underdogs always need to get an early start, so it’s surprising that Clinton beat all of her prospective primary opponents into the race. Some seem to be auditioning for the second spot on her ticket. Others may not make the race. If no champion emerges, progressives must mount their own debate and relearn some of the skills they applied so successfully back in the days before everybody had a PAC.

The Democrats’ third problem is policy. They don’t really have clear policies to deal with our biggest problems.  It’s why Hillary won’t have the answers those Iowa families seek and why so few Democrats do. It’s why we need a real debate. It is Clinton’s misfortune to find herself master of a dying system. …

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Tonight is the start of the second season for AMC’s Revolutionary War spy drama – Turn. The Wall Street Journal gave it a good send off.

As the second season begins of AMC’s lush and often tense Revolutionary War drama “Turn: Washington‘s Spies,” it’s the autumn of 1777. The young Long Island farmer turned secret rebel Abraham Woodhull (Jamie Bell) is looking for a way to collect information on British military strength in occupied New York City and transmit it via his friend on George Washington’s staff, Ben Tallmadge (Seth Numrich), to the general. Ranged against Abe and other members of the little anti-British spy network called the Culper Ring is the might of the king’s army in America, bolstered by loyalist colonials.

The patriots’ chief adversaries include the cultured and debonair British espionage mastermind Maj. John Andre (JJ Feild), who is based in occupied Philadelphia. There is also a sadistic killing machine, the disgraced British officer John Graves Simcoe (Samuel Roukin), who has been recalled to duty by a reluctant Andre to train a guerrilla-type force to eradicate colonial spies and other enemies of the crown.

With those basics in mind, newcomers to the series—which returns Monday with a two-hour premiere—can just let the pleasures of this handsome and well acted period piece wash over them. It doesn’t hurt at all, for instance, that “Turn” is filmed in Virginia and that this week, for instance, it makes use of authentically appointed rooms and buildings in and around Colonial Williamsburg and at the College of William and Mary. Even the accents—mostly British or versions thereof, with a smattering of Irish, Scottish and others appropriate for the time and place—promote the sense that we are peeking behind the curtain of life as it really happened, not watching another gimcrack re-creationof the bandaged head, flute and limp sort. …

Kevin Williamson writes on another aspect of the left’s “rape project.” This is a further reason for the Rolling Stone UVA fraud.

… the major obstacles to the progressive project are the rule of law, our constitutional order, and competing centers of power outside the state, all of which are on the progressive enemies list: corporations, churches, private schools, tradition-minded social organizations, etc. It takes a certain highly cultivated view of the world to see the Boy Scouts as the enemy.

Put another way: Progressives have had great success shouting “Racist!” to end debate; they hope to add shouting “Rapist.” But this will be difficult to do if rape remains — as it should remain — primarily a matter for the criminal-justice system rather than a nebulous social concern that can be shaped with distortion and exaggeration or, in the case of Rolling Stone, with outright fiction.

This is, to reiterate, not the result of conspiracy with malice aforethought, but of something much worse: a culture of totalitarianism.

Consider the global-warming argument. That argument has a scientific piece, an economic piece, and a political piece. (And other pieces, too.) The Left has for some time tried to discredit arguments about the economic and political aspects of global warming as rejection of science, of “denialism,” a term coined expressly for its association with Holocaust denial. That has not worked, partly because people understand that the political questions and the scientific questions are different questions, but also because the scientific case has been so exaggerated and overstated, generally by non-scientists, that people have come to regard it with some skepticism. What the Left would very much like to do at this point is to silence dissent, for example by pressuring media outlets to suppress criticism (“There aren’t ‘two sides’ to the science, nor to the policy response,” the same conflation of the scientific and the political) or by simply locking up those who disagree in prison, the response favored by Robert Kennedy Jr., writers at Gawker, and certain highly regarded philosophy professors, to mention nothing of Harry Reid, who was quite recently the Senate majority leader. (Mrs. Gandhi was not the first or the last to get that big idea.) This would require doing violence to the constitutional order — beginning with repealing the First Amendment, which Senator Reid attempted — which would be, in ordinary times, a difficult thing to do. But if you believe that the world is ending — and you can convince others that the world is ending, too — then there is nothing that one could not justify doing to prevent that.

But there isn’t a global-warming emergency, at least not one that is going to be fixed by throwing AEI scholars in jail. …

Manhattan Contrarian posts on the looming disaster of federal student loans.

While our federal government continues to chase many mortgage lenders for so-called “predatory lending” practices, perhaps we should check in on the situation of far and away the biggest predatory lender of all, the federal government itself.  Its most odious practices are in the area of student loans.  I find the term “predatory” a stretch when applied to a mortgage loan for a house, given that in the worst case the borrower got to live in the house, and even if he gets foreclosed and has a deficiency balance he can normally discharge that in bankruptcy.  Not a pleasant process, but sometimes life can be tough.  Compare that to federal student loans, where the government lends inexperienced 18 – 24 year-olds open-ended amounts, often for dubious and overpriced trade schools, and then flatly forbids discharge in bankruptcy.   Many borrowers’ finances are ruined for life, and they don’t even have marketable job skills to show for it.  Now that’s predatory! …

The student loan debacle is just one of the areas students are being failed by the modern university system. Victor Davis Hanson has more.

Modern American universities used to assume four goals.

First, their general education core taught students how to reason inductively and imparted an aesthetic sense through acquiring knowledge of Michelangelo, the Battle of Gettysburg, “Medea” and “King Lear,” Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” and astronomy and Euclidean geometry.

Second, campuses encouraged edgy speech and raucous expression — and exposure to all sorts of weird ideas and mostly unpopular thoughts. College talk was never envisioned as boring, politically correct megaphones echoing orthodox pieties.

Third, four years of college trained students for productive careers. Implicit was the university’s assurance that its degree was a wise career investment.

Finally, universities were not monopolistic price gougers. They sought affordability to allow access to a broad middle class that had neither federal subsidies nor lots of money.

The American undergraduate university is now failing on all four counts.

A bachelor’s degree is no longer proof that any graduate can read critically or write effectively. National college-entrance-test scores have generally declined the last few years, and grading standards have as well. …