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We start with a couple of items about the relationship between Russia and Germany. On trips to Russia in the early 90′s Pickerhead was struck with how Germany was referred to by Russians when discussing the Second World War. When discussing the manifold German atrocities would never say “Germans” it was always ” the Nazis.” Without going into detail, suffice it to say the Germans were guilty of the most unspeakable and disgusting things. That there were any Germans left alive in areas controlled by the Russians at the end of the war, is a demonstration of Russian forbearance.

Craig Pirrong of Streetwise Professor is first.

In a sign of the impending apocalypse, Der Spiegel has run several articles that evaluate critically Germany’s all too accepting and “understanding” approach to Russia, including during the Ukraine and Crimea crises. The articles argue that there is a volatile brew of psychology (neuroses, actually), philosophy, and ideology, which when combined with the economic interests of German industry, makes Germany ambivalent at worst about Russia.

World War II of course plays a central role in this. One of the articles notes that the Germans are acutely conscious of the horrific things they did in the East, and that despite that, the Russians do not really hold that over the Germans. This impels the Germans to make amends, and makes them somewhat grateful to the Russians. In contrast American moralism about German actions during the war rankles the Germans deeply: this helps explain why the Germans revel in shrieking about American transgressions, notably Viet Nam and more lately, Snowden. If the Americans are morally tainted, Germans can feel less guilty about their past. (Similar considerations apply with force to German attitudes towards Israel.)

One point that the articles all make is the deep anti-western streak in German thought and attitudes. The similar anti-westernism in Russia, which is central to Putin’s new ideology, therefore resonates deeply in Germany and makes Germans think that Russians are kindred spirits.  These attitudes are particularly pronounced in the former GDR.

More specifically, there is a strong element of anti-Anglo Saxon-ism in both German and Russian thought. …

And here’s Christian Neef, Der Spiegel’s Foreign Editor.

Since the start of the Crimea crisis, we’ve constantly heard that Germans somehow understand Russians. Indeed, hardly any other view has been repeated as often. But nothing could possibly be more misleading. The Germans don’t understand Russians: They understand less about the Russians than they do about the British, Spanish or French.

It’s true that Germany had a special relationship with the Russian Empire long ago. Germans served as czars and czarinas, once as the Russian prime minister, and they were officers, doctors and teachers in the royal court in St. Petersburg. German engineers operated ore mines in the Ural Mountains, German farmers plowed land along the Volga and Dnieper rivers. In turn, they were introduced to Russian writers. Pushkin introduced Germans to the strange but likable Russian soul. And cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg wouldn’t be what they are today without Germans. That’s the romanticized side of German-Russian relations.

Then came the wars of the past century and the devastation the Germans unleashed on the Soviet Union. Since then, the image Germans have of Russia is inaccurate.

The postwar generation grew up with a latent fear of the Russians. In the east of Germany, people saw them as an occupying force, while in the west many believed that an invasion was imminent. Then came Gorbachev. The Germans celebrated him because he gave them the gift of reunification. In one blow, the aversion of the 1960s and 1970s to everything that came out of the Kremlin seemed to be forgotten. It was a time of enthusiasm and relief, especially in the West. Gorbachev became a much-admired figure for Germans. They projected their fantasies for a new relationship between Germans and Russians on him and the new Russia. The Germans believed the Russians might somehow become just like them.

But Russia isn’t Europe, and it never will be. Russia never went through any period of enlightenment after the destruction wrought by Stalin on the country’s soul. Germans never seriously considered that fact, because it would have interfered with their image of Russia.

They should have been warned. Not only because Mikhail Gorbachev in no way represented the kind of hard-nosed leaders the Russians had become accustomed to over hundreds of years. Nor did they listen to what Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had to say about perestroika’s inventor. He said Gorbachev’s leadership style wasn’t governance, but rather “a thoughtless renunciation of power.” Gorbachev ultimately became the most unpopular Kremlin leader in recent history.

The Soviet Union’s implosion, which they blame on Gorbachev, didn’t just rob them of their homeland. It also plunged them headfirst into a kind of capitalism that was even more reckless than Manchester capitalism. In no time at all, a handful of oligarchs appropriated the country’s most precious assets and a majority of the Russian people fell into poverty. …

A couple of our favorites have posted on the issue of women’s wages. Thomas Sowell is first.

The “war on women” political slogan is in fact a war against common sense.

It is a statistical fraud when Barack Obama and other politicians say that women earn only 77 percent of what men earn — and that this is because of discrimination.

It would certainly be discrimination if women were doing the same work as men, for the same number of hours, with the same amount of training and experience, as well as other things being the same. But study after study, over the past several decades, has shown repeatedly that those things are not the same.

Constantly repeating the “77 percent” statistic does not make them the same. It simply takes advantage of many people’s ignorance — something that Barack Obama has been very good at doing on many other issues. …

And then Michael Barone.

… The Democrats’ problem is that sex discrimination by employers was outlawed by the Equal Pay Act signed by John Kennedy in 1963 — 51 years ago. To make “the war on women” an issue and rally single women to the polls, the Obama Democrats have had to concoct legislation putting new burdens on small employers and ginning up business for their trial lawyer contributors, as the 2009 Lilly Ledbetter Act’s extended statute of limitations did.

Such legislation attacks a problem very largely solved. The male-female pay differential for those working at similar levels has been reduced nearly, but not quite, to the vanishing point. Remaining differences result almost entirely from personal choices by women and men.

Those choices shifted sharply 40 years ago but haven’t changed much lately. The percentage of mothers seeing full-time work as an ideal, Pew Research Center reports, was 30 percent in 1997 and 32 percent in 2012.

By any realistic standard the equal pay problem is minor, certainly in comparison to the growth-stifling effects of the current tax code and the unsustainable trajectory of current entitlement programs.

But this president, unlike his two predecessors, has chosen not to address such major problems in his second term. …

Andrew Malcolm with late night humor.

Fallon: Hugh Hefner’s friends threw him a big 88th birthday party today. They had a naked woman jump out of a giant bran muffin.

Fallon: Top movie this weekend was ‘Captain America.’ Earned $303 million worldwide. In other words, Captain America has more money than regular America

Conan: There’s a new website that helps people write elaborate works of personalized fiction. It’s called “Match.com.”

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It’s Eric Holder Day as we examine another appointment, which like Kerry and Hagel, is a perfect compliment to the president. John Fund and Hans Von Spakovsky are first up.

A veteran Justice Department lawyer says that Attorney General Eric Holder has politicized the department in a way he hadn’t seen before. In short, “Holder is the worst person to hold the position of attorney general since the disgraced John Mitchell.”

Now in his sixth year as attorney general, Holder has increasingly tilted the department in an ideological direction. It’s one thing to emphasize President Obama’s legal priorities. It’s quite another to decide not to enforce certain federal laws — such as the ban on marijuana — or urge state attorney generals to refuse to defend local laws on same-sex marriage. Legal changes are achieved through legislation, not through a sudden whim not to enforce them. No other attorney general has acted in this manner. …

Victor Davis Hanson posts on the divisive attorney general.

… is this not the same Attorney General Holder who once called the nation collectively “cowards” and referred to African Americans as “my people” — not to mention a president who has called for some “to punish our enemies”? All that sounds pretty divisive and ugly.

And wasn’t Holder making his allegations of unprofessionalism while speaking before the demagogic Mr. Sharpton’s group? This is the same Al Sharpton who is on record inflaming the Crown Heights riots, provoking violence at the fatal Freddie Fashion Mart riot, helping to invent the Tawana Brawley caper, defaming and attempting to destroy the career of Duchess County prosecutor Steven Pagones, and with a long history of racist outbursts and threats (“white interloper,” “white folks was in caves . . .”, “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house”), homophobic outbursts (“We taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it”), …

Peter Wehner says Holder can, “Man up.” 

Attorney General Eric Holder, in a speech to the National Action Network, accused his congressional critics of launching “unprecedented, unwarranted, ugly and divisive” attacks on him and the Obama administration.

“Forget about me [specifically]. Look at the way the attorney general of the United States was treated yesterday by a House committee,” Holder said. “What attorney general has ever had to deal with that kind of treatment? What president has ever had to deal with that kind of treatment?”

Let’s take these topics in reverse order. What president has been on the receiving end of such ugly and divisive attacks? Try George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, just for openers. For example, Senator Ted Kennedy declared, from the well of the United States Senate, that “before the [Iraq] war, week after week after week after week, we were told lie after lie after lie after lie.” He also accused President Bush of hatching a phony war, “a fraud … made up in Texas” to boost his political career. Prominent Democrats made these kind of charges all the time against Bush. …

Corner post with more.

… Holder’s notion that past attorneys general have escaped widespread criticism, or that criticism directed toward him is solely race-based, overlooks incidents of those before him, including one of his most recent predecessors. As Mediaite’s Noah Rothman points out, Bush-era attorney general Alberto Gonzales faced calls for his impeachment during his time in the office.

In 2007, seven Democratic representatives, including some still in Congress, urged the House Judiciary Committee to investigate fully whether sufficient grounds existed for the House of Representatives to impeach Gonzales for “​high crimes and misdemeanors.”​

Additionally, Reagan-era attorney general Edwin Meese hardly escaped criticism while in office. Taking issue with his handling of the Iran-Contra investigation, among other issues, critics of Meese and the administration printed posters and t-shirts with the phrase “Meese is a Pig”​ in an effort to remove him.

NY Post Editors too.

… if General Holder checked the record, he’d see the chief reason he’s the first sitting Cabinet member held in contempt of Congress is that — unlike previous cabinet members who faced this sanction — he obstinately refused any accommodation.

Naomi Schaefer Riley says it’s not just athletes who get screwed by colleges.

In its recent ruling that athletes at Northwestern University have the right to unionize, the National Labor Relations Board cited the case of senior quarterback Kain Colter, who naively thought that he could pursue a pre-med degree while also playing on the school’s football team.

When he attempted to enroll in a required chemistry class during his sophomore year, “Colter testified that his coaches and advisors discouraged him from taking the class because it conflicted with morning football practices. Colter consequently had to take this class in the summer session, which caused him to fall behind his classmates who were pursuing the same pre-med major. Ultimately he decided to switch his major to psychology which he believed to be less demanding.”

In other words, despite the fact that Division I athletes are making oodles of money for their schools, their interests are not being served by coaches or administrators. Athletes’ academics and future career prospects are being sacrificed for a few more points on the field.

But athletes are not alone. Regular students are also contributing to the university’s bottom line through tuition payments and the spigot of federal financial aid — yet their interests are not being served, either.

In exchange for their eye-popping tuition checks, students are getting a dizzying array of pointless classes that don’t prepare them for the real world. Colleges have gotten more and more esoteric in what they teach, more specialized to the point of being useless to anything but . . . academia. …

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Charles Krauthammer writes on the left’s totalitarian efforts to find and purge the “deniers” in our midst.

Two months ago, a petition bearing more than 110,000 signatures was delivered to The Post, demanding a ban on any article questioning global warming. The petition arrived the day before publication of my column, which consisted of precisely that heresy.

The column ran as usual. But I was gratified by the show of intolerance because it perfectly illustrated my argument that the left is entering a new phase of ideological agitation — no longer trying to win the debate but stopping debate altogether, banishing from public discourse any and all opposition.

The proper word for that attitude is totalitarian. It declares certain controversies over and visits serious consequences — from social ostracism to vocational defenestration — upon those who refuse to be silenced.

Sometimes the word comes from on high, as when the president of the United States declares the science of global warming to be “settled.” Anyone who disagrees is then branded “anti-science.” And better still, a “denier” — a brilliantly chosen calumny meant to impute to the climate skeptic the opprobrium normally reserved for the hatemongers and crackpots who deny the Holocaust.

Then last week, another outbreak. The newest closing of the leftist mind is on gay marriage. Just as the science of global warming is settled, so, it seems, are the moral and philosophical merits of gay marriage.

Mark Steyn posts on Brandeis’ disinvitation of Ayann HIrsi Ali.

Today, BrandeisUniversity announced that it was reversing its decision to award an honorary degree to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, following complaints from faculty, an online petition, and pressure from the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which represents nobody but is flush with Saudi cash. The biases of the academy are well known: Robert Spencer is in no danger of getting an honorary degree any time soon, nor Douglas Murray. Nevertheless, in this instance, BrandeisUniversity is stiffing someone who’s a black feminist atheist from Somalia. Which makes their decision the most explicit recognition yet that, in the hierarchy of identity-group politics, Islam trumps everything, including race, gender and secularism.

Brandeis said they had changed their mind about Ms Hirsi Ali’s degree because “we cannot overlook certain of her past statements that are inconsistent with Brandeis University’s core values“. Presumably, Tony Kushner’s statement that the state of Israel shouldn’t exist is entirely consistent with BrandeisUniversity’s core values, because no one bothered rescinding his honorary degree. …

… So getting an honorary degree at Brandeis, like serving on the board at Mozilla, is open only to those who make sure they never cross the Conformity Enforcers. And apostates to Islam, as Ayaan is regarded, must accept that they are apostates to American campus conformity, too, and be prepared to lead a life without the consolations of honorary degrees. Accepting the loss of A-list commencement gigs doesn’t take a lot of courage, but it still takes more than Frederick Lawrence has displayed. And ultimately, as I said re Brandon Eich, such a land will be bloody boring – and a society in decline. …

Ross Douthat writes on the similarities between Brandeis and Mozilla.

… What both cases illustrate, with their fuzzy rhetoric masking ideological pressure, is a serious moral defect at the heart of elite culture in America.

The defect, crucially, is not this culture’s bias against social conservatives, or its discomfort with stinging attacks on non-Western religions. Rather, it’s the refusal to admit — to others, and to itself — that these biases fundamentally trump the commitment to “free expression” or “diversity” affirmed in mission statements and news releases.

This refusal, this self-deception, means that we have far too many powerful communities (corporate, academic, journalistic) that are simultaneously dogmatic and dishonest about it — that promise diversity but only as the left defines it, that fill their ranks with ideologues and then claim to stand athwart bias and misinformation, …

… And with the pretense, increasingly, comes a dismissive attitude toward those institutions — mostly religious — that do acknowledge their own dogmas and commitments, and ask for the freedom to embody them and live them out.

It would be a far, far better thing if Harvard and Brandeis and Mozilla would simply say, explicitly, that they are as ideologically progressive as Notre Dame is Catholic or B. Y.U. is Mormon or Chick-fil-A is evangelical, and that they intend to run their institution according to those lights.

I can live with the progressivism. It’s the lying that gets toxic.

Matthew Continetti uses divorce proceedings to write on what he calls “Washington’s rotten core.”

I see lobbying,” Tony Podesta has said, “as getting information in the hands of people who are making decisions so they can make more informed decisions.” Last week the information Tony Podesta was giving was the divorce complaint he had filed in D.C. Court against his wife, Heather. The hands receiving that information belonged to a gossip columnist for the Washington Post, who made the “informed decision” to report on it. Later in the day Heather, who is also a lobbyist, gave the Post the text of her counter-suit. It published a follow-up.

The documents, which you can read below, did not become available to the rest of us until yesterday. They tell stories not only of a May–December romance gone sour but of how obscene wealth can be amassed through rent-seeking and influence-peddling in Washington, D.C., and of the hoary means by which the princelings of the capital and their consorts maintain and grow that wealth. They tell stories not only of an ugly divorce but of the power of lobbying, of how one family maneuvered to the center of the nation’s dominant political party, of the transactional relationships, gargantuan self-regard, and empty posturing that insulate, asbestos-like, the D.C. bubble.

That the broken couple now uses the tools of their trade — the phone call to a friend, the selective leaking of documents, the hiring of attorneys, the launch of a public-relations campaign — against one another is more than ironic. It is fitting. Tony and Heather Podesta reached the pinnacle of wealth and influence in Barack Obama’s Washington. Now they, like he, are in eclipse. …

An Instapundit reader with an interesting discourse on Swiss and American education.

… My opinion: the United States has a high structural unemployment rate (including a low ‘labor participation rate’) due to a seriously flawed educational model beginning with Kindergarten. You are losing an understanding of the founding principles of your country, such as what is the Natural Law. The role of parents in your system is no longer understood or deemed important. Study the Swiss model. It has practical answers that serve a free people and a free society based on private enterprise. There is no occupational or religious coercion. But, there is a well defined Judeo-Christian societal role of parents; of teachers, advisors, testing authorities and of course the students. There is no “Common Core”. Our cantons are all somewhat different in their academic curricula for the primary and secondary levels because the cantons are different. But they are united in the objective that as young men and women approach maturity, they complete rational paths that yield life skills having value within the society, and for which their remuneration is based on “the market”.

I would be pleased to try to answer any questions you might have. I love the United States, and it pains me to see a problem there that could be fixed, but requires a sustained effort to change attitudes toward trades, and the important role of parentage. …

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Recently there has been a lot of activity in the investigation of the IRS. Kimberley Strassel starts off our review. 

Nearly a year into the IRS scandal, we still don’t know exactly what happened—though we are finally getting an inkling. That’s thanks to the letter House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp sent this week to the Justice Department recommending a criminal probe of Lois Lerner.

The average citizen might be dizzied by the torrent of confusing terms—BOLO lists, Tigta, 501(c)(4)—and the array of accusations that have made up this IRS investigation. Mr. Camp’s letter takes a step back to remind us why this matters, even as it provides compelling new information that goes to motive and method—and clarifies some of the curious behavior of Democrats during the investigation.

Motive: Republicans began this investigation looking for a direct link between the White House and IRS targeting. The more probable explanation all along was that Ms. Lerner felt emboldened by Democratic attacks against conservative groups to do what came naturally to her. We know from the record that she disdained money in politics. And we know from her prior tenure at the Federal Election Commission that she had a particular animus against conservative organizations.

As the illuminating timeline accompanying the Camp letter shows, Ms. Lerner’s focus on shutting down Crossroads GPS came only after Obama adviser David Axelrod listed Crossroads among “front groups for foreign-controlled companies”; only after Senate Democrats Dick Durbin, Carl Levin, Chuck Schumer and others demanded the IRS investigate Crossroads; only after the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee launched a website to “expose donors” of Crossroads; and only after Obama’s campaign lawyer, Bob Bauer, filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission about Crossroads. …

The Editors of National Review have more.

… That a not inconsiderable portion of the moral credibility of the United States government now rests in the hands of Eric Holder is not a comforting thought. Mr. Holder holds the title of attorney general, but he is in effect very little more than a political enabler. The president himself denies that there exists a “smidgen” of corruption at the IRS. The evidence says otherwise. What the attorney general will say is anybody’s guess.

Now that the Oversight Committee has voted, the contempt proceedings against Ms. Lerner will go to a vote of the full House. If the House votes to proceed, it may either hand the case over to the U.S. attorney or move forward with its own tribunal. If she is found in contempt, Congress can press suit, wait for the DOJ to prosecute, or demand that she comply with a subpoena and have her incarcerated — where she belongs — if she refuses. The criminal case is in the end more important than the contempt proceedings, but we would be astounded if it went anywhere under the leadership of Eric Holder, who evinces very little enthusiasm for doing his job when he could be doing the political bidding of his president.

The Democrats are determined to turn a blind eye to all this — every one of them voted against holding her in contempt. Here is a taste of what they intend to tolerate:

Ms. Lerner, in direct contravention of federal law, specifically directed the IRS to target Crossroads GPS, the conservative activist outfit associated with Karl Rove, and when the IRS did not act with satisfactory alacrity demanded to know why the organization had not been audited and its application for tax-exempt status denied. She specifically directed IRS employees to make sure that all actions regarding Crossroads were coordinated with her office. The targeting of Crossroads by the IRS came directly after Illinois Democratic senator Dick Durbin sent the IRS commission a letter demanding such an investigation. In correspondence, Lerner did not write that the Crossroads application was under review; she wrote that “we are working on a denial of the application.” According to the House document, the IRS agent working on the Crossroads case reported that “specific guidance” was given to him by Ms. Lerner’s office as to the desired result — i.e., that the application was to be denied. All the while, Democrats maintained that there was no intentional political targeting. …

And Jennifer Rubin.

President Obama’s comment that there’s “not even a smidgen of corruption [at the IRS] may prove to be as accurate as “If you like your plan, you can keep it.”

Yesterday it was reported: “For the first time since it released President Nixon’s tax returns in 1974, a House committee voted Wednesday to release confidential tax documents as part of a request for a criminal investigation into the Internal Revenue Service. This time, the House Ways and Means Committee is seeking criminal charges against former Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner.” Of particular concern are Lerner’s e-mails appearing to push IRS employees to disallow the GOP group American Crossroads its tax-exempt status while she was angling for a political job with Organizing for America. (“The letter to Holder alleges that Lerner singled out Crossroads GPS, a group co-founded by former George W. Bush political aide Karl Rove, for an audit and a denial of tax-exempt status after meeting with campaign finance reform activists in January 2013. That same month, Lerner spoke of hoping to get a job at Organizing for Action, an Obama-affiliated group that was also seeking tax-exempt status. ‘Oh — maybe I can get the DC office job!’ she wrote in an e-mail.” Holder is unlikely to do anything about Lerner, but the House Republicans made their point: There is a smidgen of something going on at the IRS. …

We’ll close this section with a WSJ Editorial.

… The most troubling new evidence are documents showing that Ms. Lerner actively corresponded with liberal campaign-finance groups Democracy 21 and the Campaign Legal Center, which had asked the IRS to investigate if conservative groups including Crossroads GPS were violating their tax-exempt status. After personally meeting with the two liberal outfits, Ms. Lerner contacted the director of the Exempt Organizations Examinations Unit in Dallas to ask why Crossroads had not been audited.

“You should know that we are working on a denial of the application,” Ms. Lerner wrote in an email. “Please make sure all moves regarding the org are coordinated up here before we do anything.” The Cincinnati agent assigned to the case at the time, Joseph Herr, noted on his timesheet, “[b]ased on conference, begin reviewing case information, tax law and draft/template advocacy denial letter, all to think about how best to compose the denial letter.”

Mr. Herr had not made any indications in 2012 of an intent to deny the application, nor was any denial recommendation contained in the November 2011 analysis of the group by Exempt Organizations lawyer Hillary Goehausen. Crossroads GPS, which was cofounded by Journal contributor Karl Rove, says it applied for tax-exempt status in 2010 but still hasn’t received formal IRS approval.

Ways and Means also discloses that in January 2013 Ms. Lerner asked her staff to examine five conservative groups that the website ProPublica had called “controversial dark money groups,” including Americans for Responsible Leadership, Freedom Path, Rightchange.com, America is Not Stupid, and A Better America. Four of those five groups ultimately got the IRS deluxe scrutiny treatment and three were audited. …

John Fund went to London for a few days and saw the future. 

London – Americans can’t really snigger about political correctness in other countries too much. After all, this week a six-year-old Colorado boy was accused of sexual harassment for kissing a fellow student on the hand. He was suspended and the incident will be entered on his record.

But a three-day trip to Britain has convinced me that the country that gave the world Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, and free trade has gone far beyond us in kowtowing to political correctness. (Or is the use of “kowtowing” now impermissible?)

The papers here this week were full of the story of Tracey Trigg, a 51-year-old social worker in Lincolnshire, who was twice barred from buying wine at a supermarket because she was accompanied by her children. On the first occasion she was with her 24-year-old son, Josh, and then with both Josh and her 13-year-old daughter, Ella. Both had gone with her to help her carry her Christmas shopping home. Since they had just strolled to the store from home, neither child was carrying full ID. …

Priceonomics posts on UPS and its no left turns policy.

… When better tracking systems emerged in 2001, the package delivery service took a closer look at how trucks performed when delivering packages. As a logistics company with some 96,000 trucks and several hundred aircraft, much of UPS’s business can be distilled to a series of optimization problems around reducing the amount of fuel used, saving time, and using space more efficiently. (Trucks in UPS facilities park just a few inches apart with their side mirrors overlapping to save space.)

UPS engineers found that left-hand turns were a major drag on efficiency. Turning against traffic resulted in long waits in left-hand turn lanes that wasted time and fuel, and it also led to a disproportionate number of accidents. By mapping out routes that involved “a series of right-hand loops,” UPS improved profits and safety while touting their catchy, environmentally friendly policy. As of 2012, the right turn rule combined with other improvements — for the wow factor, UPS doesn’t separate them out — saved around 10 million gallons of gas and reduced emissions by the equivalent of taking 5,300 cars of the road for a year. …

Twisted Sifter has cool pics of Queen Mary II’s captain standing on the liner’s bulbous bow.

Cunard recently captured dramatic photographs of Captain Kevin Oprey, Master of Queen Mary 2, standing on the ship’s bulbous bow a mile off the coast of Bali during the ship’s World Cruise in her 10th anniversary year.

A bulbous bow is a protruding bulb at the bow (or front) of a ship just below the waterline. The bulb modifies the way the water flows around the hull, reducing drag and thus increasing speed, range, fuel efficiency, and stability. Large ships with bulbous bows generally have 12-15% better fuel efficiency than similar vessels without them. A bulbous bow also increases the buoyancy of the forward part and hence reduces the pitching of the ship to a small degree. …

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Jennifer Rubin spots the difference between two presidents.

Secretary of State John Kerry’s testimony on Tuesday served to remind us how a single presidential decision can have monumental effects. For the president who said a decade of war was ending, the decision not to act in a bloody war in which WMD’s had been repeatedly used was the tipping point in an already floundering foreign policy. The contrast with his predecessor is stark.

George W. Bush’s arguably finest moment as president and President Obama’s worst moment involved a similar dilemma: When does the commander in chief put country above politics and lead on foreign policy despite the adverse political consequences? When the chips were really down, Bush championed the surge in Iraq; when the chips were down in Syria for violation of the red line, Obama blinked.

Bush went outside the chain of command to find experts and a general to devise a new strategy when he saw the war strategy wasn’t going well. Obama hid behind obvious catastrophizing by the military when he decided to avoid holding to his red line.

Bush took full responsibility for the strategy. Obama claimed it wasn’t “his red line,” but Congress’s and the international community’s.

Bush knew it would cost him politically and his party the House. (It did.) Obama saw the results of the vote in the British parliament and ran for cover. He punted the decision at the last moment to Congress to provide him with a vote on authorization for use of force. …

Jonathan Tobin explains Kerry’s lies about Israel.

… Kerry probably thinks no harm can come from blaming the Israelis who have always been the convenient whipping boys of the peace process no matter what the circumstances. But he’s wrong about that too. Just as the Clinton administration did inestimable damage to the credibility of the peace process and set the stage for another round of violence by whitewashing Yasir Arafat’s support for terrorism and incitement to hatred in the 1990s, so, too, do Kerry’s efforts to portray Abbas as the victim rather than the author of this fiasco undermine his efforts for peace.

So long as the Palestinians pay no price for their refusal to give up unrealistic demands for a Jewish retreat from Jerusalem as well as the “right of return” for the 1948 refugees and their descendants and a refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and end the conflict, peace is impossible no matter what the Netanyahu government does. Appeasing them with lies about Israel, like the efforts of some to absolve Arafat and Abbas for saying no to peace in 2000, 2001, and 2008, only makes it easier for the PA to go on saying no. Whether they are doing so in the hope of extorting more concessions from Israel or because, as is more likely, they have no intention of making peace on any terms, the result is the same.

Telling the truth about the Palestinians might make Kerry look foolish for devoting so much time and effort to a process that never had a chance. But it might lay the groundwork for future success in the event that the sea change in Palestinian opinion that might make peace possible were to occur. Falsely blaming Israel won’t bring that moment any closer.

Charlie Gasparino provides another grown-up look at Michael Lewis’ book about high frequency trading.

It’s easy to bash Wall Street as the root cause of all financial problems (and some non-financial ones), which is why Michael Lewis is getting away with blowing so much smoke about the latest supposed ripoff of the “little guy.”

Easy, but completely and utterly disingenuous.

The “scandal” Lewis points to in a new book (and in his high-profile publicity campaign) is something called high-frequency trading, or HFT. In a scam of epic proportions, we’re told, smart Wall Street fellows can miraculously figure out when, where and how much stock you, the individual investor, want to buy — and then rip you off.

The HFT guys supposedly do this by jumping in front of your order at the speed of light and forcing you to pay more for a stock than you would’ve if the high-speed computer never existed. Even as the market hits record highs, Lewis wants you to believe the system is rigged.

The book is a fast read — as long as you suspend your disbelief over Lewis’ thesis: These evil traders are screwing the American people once again, just as they did during the financial crisis.

But, as with that easy lefty interpretation of the 2008 crisis, Lewis conveniently leaves out some important facts …

Well, here’s something to burst some bubbles! According to a study from Great Britain the consumption of organic foods does little to help women avoid cancer. You’ll learn a new word here – boffin. It is British slang for scientist or technical expert. Sounds derogatory, but it’s not. So you wouldn’t call someone a boffo boffin because it would tend to be redundant. The story come from The Register, which looks to be a Brit equivalent to Wired.

One of the primary drivers of the growth in organic food sales over the last couple of decades is the perception that organic food is healthier than conventionally farmed food.

It stands to reason, doesn’t it? After all conventional crops depend on chemicals and organic food doesn’t.

And we all know that chemicals, in this case mainly pesticides, are bad for you. Ergo organic food should be healthier, and the strong growth in organic food sales (up 2.8 per cent last year, after a few years of downturn during the recession) attests to how popular opinion has accepted this assertion.

This is why the results of a new UK study that looked at cancer risk and the consumption of organic food is so damned inconvenient. Where organic food advocates have pushed organics as a way of reducing cancer risk, the study shows that it makes little difference one way or another. Hence uncomfortable headlines from the likes of the Daily Mail: Eating organic foods does NOTHING to reduce the cancer risk among women, says new study.

The study in question appears in the latest edition of the British Journal of Cancer and is by OxfordUniversity cancer epidemiology boffin Dr Kathryn Bradbury and co-workers. Part of the Million Women Study funded by Cancer Research UK and the Medical Research Council, this particular bit of research tracked 623,080 middle-aged British women for almost 10 years and looked at their pattern of organic food consumption and the incidence of 16 different cancer types, as well as overall cancer incidence. …

Since we’re in the business of bursting bubbles today, how about a blind taste test for violins? Do you think the $3 million Stradivari did well? A blog named Phys.Org has the answers.

Ten world-class soloists put costly Stradivarius violins and new, cheaper ones to a blind scientific test. The results may seem off-key to musicians and collectors, but the new instruments won handily.

When the lights were dimmed and the musicians donned dark glasses, the soloists’ top choice out of a dozen old and new violins tested was by far a new one. So was the second choice, according to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Of the six old violins tested, five were by made by the famous Stradivari family in the 17th and 18th centuries. The newer violins were about 100 times cheaper, said study co-author Joseph Curtin, a Michigan violin maker. But the Strads and other older Italian violins have long been considered superior, even almost magical.

The idea was to unlock “the secrets of Stradivari,” the study said.

So the study tries to quantify something that is inherently subjective and personal, the quality of an instrument, said Curtin and lead author Claudia Fritz of Pierre and MarieCurieUniversity in France. A few years earlier, the duo tested violins blind in an Indianapolis hotel room, but this one was more controlled and comprehensive, putting the instruments through their paces in a rehearsal room and concert hall just outside Paris. They even played with an orchestra, the results of which will be part of a future study.

“I was surprised that my top choice was new,” said American violinist Giora Schmidt. …

Late night humor from Andy Malcolm.

Conan: Did you know, Texas was an independent nation that bordered the U.S. from 1836 to 1845? And then in 1845, the U.S. surrendered to Texas.

Fallon: The White House says it’s surpassed its goal for people enrolled in ObamaCare. Man, it’s amazing what you can achieve when you make something mandatory and fine people if they don’t do it, and keep extending the deadline for months.

Fallon: If you don’t enroll in ObamaCare you might get a penalty of 1% of your salary. Then Americans said, “Man — good thing I don’t have a job!” …

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Michael Barone has a thoughtful piece on how history can determine thoughts and opinions.

… It seems farfetched to suppose that centuries-old events and migrations could be reflected in the election results of 2010 and the overthrow of a regime in 2014. But you can see the mark of history on current electoral politics elsewhere, in Europe and North America.

Take Poland. In its 2010 election one candidate carried the regions that were part of the German Empire and most that were in Austria-Hungary before 1918; the other carried the areas that were part of Czarist Russia except for metro Warsaw.

Or move west to Germany. In post-World War II politics, the Christian Democrats have carried most regions that were Catholic after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, and the Social Democrats have carried most regions that were Protestant.

And then there is the United States. Southern whites remained overwhelmingly Democratic for almost 100 years after the Civil War. During that period, the Republican strongholds were northern areas settled by New England Yankees and their progeny.

Party allegiances were reversed in a process that took half a century, but the regions are still distinctive, with southern whites heavily Republican and the Yankee diaspora generally Democratic.

Many counties in the Appalachian chain still vote as they fought in 1861. Exceptions are coal counties, which swung Democratic with unionization and now swing Republican thanks to Barack Obama’s “war on coal.” …

Joel Kotkin calls it “the debate is over syndrome” and says the left is becoming increasingly totalitarian.

On climate and other issues, many in academia, media, government insist their viewpoint is unassailable and won’t tolerate dissent.

The ongoing trial involving journalist Mark Steyn – accused of defaming climate change theorist Michael Mann – reflects an increasingly dangerous tendency among our intellectual classes to embrace homogeneity of viewpoint. Steyn, whose column has appeared for years on these pages, may be alternatingly entertaining or over-the-top obnoxious, but the slander lawsuit against him marks a milestone in what has become a dangerously authoritarian worldview being adopted in academia, the media and large sections of the government bureaucracy.

Let’s call it “the debate is over” syndrome, referring to a term used most often in relationship with climate change but also by President Barack Obama last week in reference to what remains his contentious, and theoretically reformable, health care plan. Ironically, this shift to certainty now comes increasingly from what passes for the Left in America.

These are the same people who historically have identified themselves with open-mindedness and the defense of free speech, while conservatives, with some justification, were associated more often with such traits as criminalizing unpopular views – as seen in the 1950s McCarthy era – and embracing canonical bans on all sorts of personal behavior, a tendency still more evident than necessary among some socially minded conservatives. …

… Political uniformity is certainly in vogue. A remarkable 96 percent of presidential campaign donations from the nation’s Ivy League faculty and staff in 2012 went to Obama, a margin more reminiscent of Soviet Russia than a properly functioning pluralistic academy.

Writing in the Telegraph, UK, Christopher Booker says future generations will find it hard to understand the globalony hysteria of the left.

When future generations come to look back on the alarm over global warming that seized the world towards the end of the 20th century, much will puzzle them as to how such a scare could have arisen. They will wonder why there was such a panic over a 0.4 per cent rise in global temperatures between 1975 and 1998, when similar rises between 1860 and 1880 and 1910 and 1940 had given no cause for concern. They will see these modest rises as just part of a general warming that began at the start of the 19th century, as the world emerged from the Little Ice Age, when the Earth had grown cooler for 400 years.

They will be struck by the extent to which this scare relied on the projections of computer models, which then proved to be hopelessly wrong when, in the years after 1998, their predicted rise in temperature came virtually to a halt. But in particular they will be amazed by the almost religious reverence accorded to that strange body, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which by then will be recognised as having never really been a scientific body at all, but a political pressure group. It had been set up in the 1980s by a small band of politically persuasive scientists who had become fanatically committed to the belief that, because carbon dioxide levels were rising, global temperatures must inevitably follow; an assumption that the evidence would increasingly show was mistaken. …

Also in the Telegraph, Charles Moore has more on globalony.

… The theory of global warming is a gigantic weather forecast for a century or more. However interesting the scientific inquiries involved, therefore, it can have almost no value as a prediction. Yet it is as a prediction that global warming (or, as we are now ordered to call it in the face of a stubbornly parky 21st century, “global weirding”) has captured the political and bureaucratic elites. All the action plans, taxes, green levies, protocols and carbon-emitting flights to massive summit meetings, after all, are not because of what its supporters call “The Science”. Proper science studies what is – which is, in principle, knowable – and is consequently very cautious about the future – which isn’t. No, they are the result of a belief that something big and bad is going to hit us one of these days.

Some of the utterances of the warmists are preposterously specific. In March 2009, the Prince of Wales declared that the world had “only 100 months to avert irretrievable climate and ecosystem collapse”. How could he possibly calculate such a thing? …

… The origins of warmism lie in a cocktail of ideas which includes anti-industrial nature worship, post-colonial guilt, a post-Enlightenment belief in scientists as a new priesthood of the truth, a hatred of population growth, a revulsion against the widespread increase in wealth and a belief in world government. It involves a fondness for predicting that energy supplies won’t last much longer (as early as 1909, the US National Conservation Commission reported to Congress that America’s natural gas would be gone in 25 years and its oil by the middle of the century), protest movements which involve dressing up and disappearing into woods (the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, the Mosleyite Blackshirts who believed in reafforestation) and a dislike of the human race (The Club of Rome’s work Mankind at the Turning-Point said: “The world has cancer and the cancer is man.”).

These beliefs began to take organised, international, political form in the 1970s. …

Associated Press reports on efforts to clear the Great Lakes of ice.

U.S. and Canadian Coast Guard crews kept up their battle Monday to clear pathways for vessels hauling vital raw materials on the ice-clogged Great Lakes, where a shipping logjam forced a weeklong shutdown of the nation’s largest steel (mill).

Traffic remained largely at a crawl after a winter that produced some of the heaviest ice on record across the five inland seas, where more than half the surface area remained solid this week. Icebreaking ships slogging across Lake Superior were still encountering ice layers 2 feet to 3 feet thick. In some areas, wind and wave action created walls of ice up to 14 feet high.

United States Steel Corp.’s plant in Gary, Ind., had resumed limited operations after receiving a shipment over the weekend of iron ore from a company mill near Detroit, which was sending one additional load, spokeswoman Courtney Boone said.

Two ships were scheduled to arrive Tuesday with ore from mines in northern Minnesota following a two-week voyage across Lake Superior, which ordinarily would take three days.

Other companies were hoping their supplies would be adequate to avoid significant disruptions. …

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Time to have a look at the healthcare act. Peggy Noonan calls it “A Catastrophe Like No Other.”

… Support it or not, you cannot look at ObamaCare and call it anything but a huge, historic mess. It is also utterly unique in the annals of American lawmaking and government administration.

Its biggest proponent in Congress, the Democratic speaker of the House, literally said—blithely, mindlessly, but in a way forthcomingly—that we have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it. It is a cliché to note this. But really, Nancy Pelosi‘s statement was a historic admission that she was fighting hard for something she herself didn’t understand, but she had every confidence regulators and bureaucratic interpreters would tell her in time what she’d done. This is how we make laws now. … 

… There’s a brute test of a policy: If you knew then what you know now, would you do it? I will never forget a conversation in 2006 or thereabouts with a passionate and eloquent supporter of the decision to go into Iraq. We had been having this conversation for years, he a stalwart who would highlight every optimistic sign, every good glimmering. He argued always for the rightness of the administration’s decision. I would share my disquiet, my doubts, finally my skepticism. One night over dinner I asked him, in passing, “If we had it to do over again, should we have gone in? would you support it?”

And he said, “Of course not!”

Which told me everything.

There are very, very few Democrats who would do ObamaCare over again. Some would do something different, but they wouldn’t do this. The cost of the blunder has been too high in terms of policy and politics.

They, and the president, are trying to put a good face on it.

Republicans of all people should not go for the happy face. They cannot run only on ObamaCare this year and later, because it’s not the only problem in America. But it’s a problem, a big one, and needs to be hard and shrewdly fought.

Peter Ferrara documents how statistics are used to lie about the healthcare act. He goes on to propose alternatives.

The population of the U.S. is 314 million. On the day Obamacare was passed, the estimate of the uninsured was 60 million. So in this context, the supposed 7 million Americans signed up for insurance on the Obamacare Exchanges, even if that is a valid number, and all of those have actually started paying premiums, both of which are highly dubious, does not mean any significant success for Obamacare.

That is especially so since at least 6 million Americans have lost their health insurance due to Obamacare, so far, with more to come once the illegally and arbitrarily delayed employer mandate becomes effective, if it is ever allowed to do so. The estimate based on a new Rand Corporation study is that only 858,000 Americans signed up on the Obamacare Exchanges were previously uninsured. That is barely a dent of just over 1% in the original number of uninsured, from the historic Obamacare program that was supposed to provide “universal” coverage.

Yes, there are other sources of coverage under Obamacare. President Obama told us in his celebratory, hocus pocus, Obamacare address on April Fools’ Day that “more than 3 million young adults have gained insurance under this law by staying on their family’s plan.”

But that number is a publicly documented fabrication. It comes from a 2010 survey by the highly politicized Department of Health and Human Services estimating coverage for 19 to 25 year olds from all sources, including taxpayer financed Medicaid, and private insurance, which includes employer provided insurance and individually purchased plans, not just coverage from their parents’ health insurance, as David Hogberg explained at Spectator.org on April 2.

Moreover, that data is now outdated, as later HHS surveys show that health coverage for 18 to 25 year olds has since declined from 2010, Hogberg adds. That is why HHS has not released any new data on the point for almost two years now. …

 

… Obama doesn’t get it. He said further on April Fools’ Day, Obamacare is “helping people from coast to coast, all of which makes the lengths to which some critics have gone to scare people or undermine the law, or try to repeal the law without offering any plausible alternative so hard to understand. I’ve got to admit, I don’t get it. Why are folks working so hard for people not to have health insurance?”

Many readers are not going to understand this. But my job here is to tell the truth, not to play politically correct footsie with you. What our President is telling us here, actually, is that he has so carefully avoided hearing any of the debate on this issue, that he actually does not understand the issue, on which he imagines himself as the historic founding father of American health care.

The plan I support to replace Obamacare, root and branch, is the reform proposal developed by John Goodman, President of the NationalCenter for Policy Analysis. That proposal, unlike Obamacare, actually would ensure universal health care. But it would do so at far less cost. It would do so, again unlike Obamacare, while actually reducing health costs. That proposal is actually far more plausible than Obamacare, which has already proven itself implausible in the real world. That is why Obama has already acted to change the enacted Obamacare law without the approval of Congress, in violation of the Constitution and his own oath of office.

But Obama continued, “Many of the tall tales that have been told about this law have been debunked. There are still no death panels.” Mr. Obama, the death panel in the law is called the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). You have carefully avoided appointing members to this board and making it operative, until after the mid-term elections.

He knows what he is doing here, but not what he is talking about. …

 

… the tragedy of Obamacare extends beyond health care.

Obamacare has been a major drag on the economy, preventing full recovery from the recession. Employers trying to avoid the costs of the employer mandate have reduced many full time jobs to part time jobs. Or they have frozen hiring, and the associated costs due to Obamacare. This is contributing to income stagnation and decline for the middle class, the working class, and the poor. And it is actually increasing inequality.

The new taxes of Obamacare are also deterring job creating investment, or capital investment that would increase worker productivity, and consequently wages and incomes. The costly regulatory burdens of Obamacare are increasing rather than reducing health insurance costs, which is a further drag on the economy.

The alternative, John Goodman, NCPA plan would achieve universal health care, with no employer mandate, no individual mandate, reduced taxes and spending, and sharply reduced regulatory burdens and costs as compared to Obamacare. All of that would be sharply pro-growth, and promote more jobs, and higher wages.

But Obama says that would not be a plausible alternative. The real problem is that he is not plausible as President. Only once he leaves the White House can the American economy be liberated to grow, and American health care be liberated to once again serve the sick, especially the most sick and in need of health care.

During his April Fool’s Day remarks on healthcare, the president offered his ideas on what is news. Carl Cannon schools the bystanding president.

… As a student, Barack Obama attended ColumbiaUniversity, which has a world-class journalism program. Unfortunately, he didn’t study journalism. After graduation, he attended another famed Ivy League institution, HarvardLawSchool, where he honed his skills as an advocate. So he is well-trained to engage in adversarial discourse, and he excels at it. As an appraiser of journalism, however, he has neither training nor the temperament. So let’s help him:

When a president campaigns for his sweeping new law while claiming repeatedly that it won’t impact those who already have health insurance—and this turns out to be utterly false—that is news.

When the same president repeatedly assures voters who already have insurance that they can keep their doctors—and wins re-election while stressing this fallacious claim—that is news.

When it turns out that the federal government, despite a three-year rollout, isn’t competent enough to provide the service it is making people purchase – yes, that is news. If it keeps happening in the future, sorry, Mr. President, that is news.

When the president states that 7.1 million Americans signed up via the government-run health care exchanges because of his own selfless efforts and those of his allies—but his administration claims it has no idea how many of those people enrolled because their private sector plans were canceled—that is news.

When respected third party organizations estimate that between two-thirds and three-fourths of those who bought the government plan did so because their previous plan was canceled due to the Affordable Care Act—that is also news. …

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The fool John Kerry as SecState has been a perfect compliment to his boss. Throw in Hagel as SecDef and we have a hat trick of ignorance. The Pollard gambit was too much and is receiving the world’s opprobrium. It was kinda like a foreign policy “stinkburger.”  Jonathan Tobin starts our look at Kerry.

It was just a couple of months ago that Secretary of State John Kerry was being lauded as, in the words of CNN, “a surprise success.” He was hailed by the chattering classes as having exceeded Hillary Clinton’s record by showing daring instead of her instinctive caution. After all, hadn’t he managed to preside over a nuclear deal with Iran, saved President Obama’s face by negotiating a good deal with Russia about Syrian chemical weapons, and made progress on a withdrawal agreement in Afghanistan? Most of all, his audacious decision to restart Middle East peace talks when everyone was warning him it was a fool’s errand was seen as having great promise. As the Atlantic gushed, “It’s looking more and more possible that when the history of early-21st-century diplomacy gets written, it will be Kerry who is credited with making the State Department relevant again.”

But that was then. Today, Kerry is being rightly lambasted by the left, right, and center for his idiotic decision to introduce the issue of convicted spy Jonathan Pollard’s release into the Middle East peace negotiations. …

Tobin also posts on what he calls “the disturbing Pollard debate.”

… Anyone listening to the debate about Pollard being conducted in the last week must understand that his name is synonymous with charges of dual loyalty against American Jews who serve in both the U.S. government and its armed forces. As I detailed in my 2011 article, the damage that the cynical decision to employ a foolish and unstable person as a spy has done to American Jews and to the vital alliance between the U.S. and Israel is incalculable.

While after serving so much time in prison he is deserving of clemency, I stand by my previous conclusion about what should be the final word about this subject:

Long after his release or death, Pollard’s behavior will still be used to bolster the slurs of those who wish to promote the pernicious myth that there is a contradiction between American patriotism and deep concern for the safety of the State of Israel. It is this damning epitaph, and not the claims of martyrdom that have been put forward to stir sympathy for his plight, that will be Jonathan Pollard’s true legacy.

Which brings us to Krauthammer’s column for the week – “Kerry’s Folly – Chapter 3.”

When has a secretary of state been involved in so many disastrous, self-initiated negotiations? First, John Kerry convenes — against all advice and holding no cards — Geneva negotiations to resolve the Syria conflict and supposedly remove Bashar al-Assad from power. The talks collapse in acrimony and confusion.

Kerry’s response? A second Geneva conference that — surprise! — breaks up in acrimony and confusion.

Then, even as Russian special forces are taking over Crimea, Kerry goes chasing after Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov — first to Paris, then Rome, then London — offering a diplomatic “offramp.” Lavrov shrugs him off. Russia annexes Crimea.

The crowning piece of diplomatic futility, however, is Kerry’s frantic effort to salvage the Arab-Israeli negotiations he launched, also against all odds and sentient advice. He’s made 12 trips to the region, aiming to produce a final Middle East peace within nine months.

It is month nine. The talks have gone nowhere. But this has been a fool’s errand from Day One. There never was any chance of Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas concluding a final peace. …

… To keep stringing along the Israelis, some genius decided to dangle Jonathan Pollard. What’s he got to do with anything? Why is he being offered as an incentive for Israel to accept otherwise unacceptable conditions?

Normally, the United States facilitates agreements by offering Israel compensation for the security risks it takes upon giving up territory, because the Arabs either cannot or will not offer security guarantees of their own. Thus the United States might try to re-establish the military balance with advanced weaponry or access to timely intelligence.

But Pollard? He is an American traitor who is up for parole next year anyway. It has long been a mistake for Israel to agitate for his release. He disgracefully betrayed his country. What kind of corrupt and cynical quid pro quo is this? …

We have been treated to the breathless accounts by Michael Lewis about the Wall Street skullduggery in High Frequency Trading. Lewis’s claims that we’re all cheated have been repeated for the week since he was interviewed on 60 Minutes. It is time for some grownups to consider these claims. Craig Pirrong of Streetwise Professor is first.

Michael Lewis’s new book on HFT, Flash Boys, has been released, and has unleashed a huge controversy. Or put more accurately, it has added fuel to a controversy that has been burning for some time.

I have bought the book, but haven’t had time to read it. But I read a variety of accounts of what is in the book, so I can make a few comments based on that.

First, as many have pointed out, although this has been framed as evil computer geniuses taking money from small investors, this isn’t at all the case. If anyone benefits from the tightening of spreads, especially for small trade sizes, it is small investors. Many of them (most, in fact) trade at the bid-ask midpoint via internalization programs with their brokers or through payment-for-order-flow arrangements. (Those raise other issues for another day, but have been around for years and don’t relate directly to HFT.)

Instead, the battle is mainly part of the struggle between large institutional investors and HFT. Large traders want to conceal their trading intentions to avoid price impact. Other traders from time immemorial have attempted to determine those trading intentions, and profit by trading before and against the institutional traders.  Nowadays, some HFT traders attempt to sniff out institutional orders, and profit from that information.  Information about order flow is the lifeblood of those who make markets.

This relates to the second issue. This has been characterized as “front running.” This terminology is problematic in this context. Front running is usually used to describe a broker in an agency relationship with a customer trading in advance of the customer’s order, or disclosing the order to another trader who then trades on that information. This is a violation of the agency relationship between the client and the broker.

In contrast, HFT firms use a variety of means-pinging dark pools, accessing trading and quoting information that is more extensive and obtained more quickly than via the public data feeds-to detect the presence of institutional orders. They are not in an agency relationship with the institution, and have no legal obligation to it. …

Joe Nocera is next. 

There is always something just a little frustrating about reading a Michael Lewis book. On the one hand, Lewis’s core point — whether it is that left tackle has become the second most important position in football (“The Blind Side”), or that the stock market has become rigged by high-frequency traders, as his new book, “Flash Boys,” claims — is almost always dead-on. His ability to find compelling characters and tell a great story through their eyes is unparalleled. He can untangle complex subjects like few others. His prose sparkles.

On the other hand, there usually comes a point in a Michael Lewis narrative when it all starts to feel just a little too perfect. “Flash Boys,” which is excerpted in The New York Times Magazine, is no exception. The book’s hero, Brad Katsuyama, is a young executive at the Royal Bank of Canada who realizes that something has gone awry with the stock market.

As he digs deeper, he realizes that secretive high-frequency trading firms, taking advantage of lightning-fast computers, willing accomplices in the stock exchanges and some poorly thought-out federal regulation, have effectively hijacked the equity markets. Roused to action by what he has discovered, Katsuyama quits his job and starts up a new exchange, IEX, which includes a clever “speed bump” that levels the playing field for investors.

So far, so good. But Lewis doesn’t stop there. To make his hero appear even more heroic, he casts Katsuyama as the only person on Wall Street to figure out the high-frequency trading scam, and the only person with the courage to do something about it. That’s not quite the case.

Nearly two years ago, Scott Patterson of The Wall Street Journal wrote a book titled “Dark Pools: The Rise of the Machine Traders and the Rigging of the U.S. Stock Market,” which also exposed the scam. The book is structured remarkably like Lewis’s — Patterson’s got a heroic central character who learns the tactics of the high-frequency bunch and then acts on it by going to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Except Patterson’s hero isn’t Brad Katsuyama; he is Haim Bodek. When I caught up with Bodek, he groused about how Katsuyama had only part of the picture, and how there were other elements of high-frequency trading that needed as much if not more exposure. …

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Good time to look at November’s voting for the senate. Jason Riley is first.

When Democratic Sen. Carl Levin announced that he would retire this year, few people saw a pickup opportunity for the GOP. Yet it’s turning into that kind of year for Republicans, who need a net gain of six seats in the fall to retake control of the Senate.

Terri Lynn Land, who’s running to replace Mr. Levin, was not the Republican establishment’s first choice (that would have been Rep. Mike Rogers), but the former Michigan secretary of state continues to perform above expectations. Yet another poll, out this week, has her statistically tied with Democratic Rep. Gary Peters in a state that President Obama carried by nearly 10 points in 2012.

In Colorado last month, a tea party Republican who lost a previous Senate race agreed to step aside for a more viable candidate, Rep. Cory Gardner. Suddenly, incumbent Democratic Sen. Mark Udall isn’t as invulnerable as everyone thought when the cycle began. Scott Brown‘s decision to challenge Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen in New Hampshire has had a similar effect. …

Jennifer Rubin is next.

To the dismay of Democrats, the playing field for control of the Senate has expanded beyond what even Republicans imagined would be possible. Let’s consider the total picture, and which seats are now in play.

While they won’t admit it, Democrats have all but lost Senate seats in West Virginia, Montana and South Dakota. Republicans recruited top candidates, and the Democrats are unlikely to spend significant money. That is in large part because there is a very good possibility they will also lose Arkansas (where incumbent Mark Pryor trails in recent polling), North Carolina (same there for Kay Hagan) and Alaska (where Dan Sullivan now seems the most capable opponent.) So stop there. If only these races go as expected and the Republicans lose no seats, then the GOP wins the Senate. It is very easy to imagine this occurring. And we haven’t yet mentioned the imperiled Mary Landrieu, who is trying to survive the association with the party of Obamacare and opposition to domestic energy production).

Take then the next level of races. …

Karl Rove devoted his weekly column to the races. 

With seven months until the midterm election, there’s little for Democrats to cheer in the growing number of polls on this year’s Senate contests.

Republicans have double-digit leads in the three races in red states Mitt Romney carried where the incumbent Democrat retired. West Virginia Rep. Shelley Moore Capito is up by 14 points, 49%-35%, over Secretary of State Natalie Tennant in a Feb. 20 Rasmussen poll. Former South Dakota Gov. Mike Rounds leads Democratic congressional staffer Rick Weiland 51%-31% in a Feb. 26 Rasmussen survey. Montana Rep. Steve Daines is 14 points ahead of interim Sen. John Walsh, 51%-37% in a March 18 Rasmussen matchup. These public polls mirror private ones, suggesting Republicans are positioned to win if they keep the pressure on.

The next benchmark for these races is the April 15 Federal Election Commission fundraising reports for the first quarter. All three Republican candidates had a commanding financial advantage at the end of 2013. If they maintain the money edge for 2014′s first and second quarters, Democratic donors may start cutting their losses and shifting funds elsewhere.

Then there are the four red states where incumbent Democratic senators are trying to retain their seats. Each race is a dogfight, though every Democrat has much higher name identification than the Republican challenger. …

Tablet Magazine has a profile of Eugene Volokh and the Volokh Conspiracy. 

Last week, when the Supreme Court heard arguments over whether religiously owned corporations like Hobby Lobby should be exempt from providing contraception coverage to their employees, the government’s reply brief cited dozens of cases and statutes—and one blog with a weird name, The Volokh Conspiracy.

It wasn’t the first time the site made itself heard before the nation’s highest court. In the wake of the passage, in 2010, of the Affordable Care Act—the cornerstone of President Obama’s domestic agenda—libertarian writers for The Volokh Conspiracy were instrumental in building the constitutional challenge to the law’s individual mandate. “When the Affordable Care Act was going through the legislative process, most law professors agreed that the ACA was constitutional,” said South Texas College of Law’s Josh Blackman, who wrote the definitive scholarly account of the challenge.

Then The Volokh Conspiracy entered the fray, and everything changed. “Usually these kinds of legal arguments develop over the course of many years in law reviews, in conferences and symposiums,” Blackman continued, “but this was on warp speed. You had blog posts on the day where you could actually see the arguments shaping before you.” Soon the challenge was being hotly debated among law professors and was adopted by state attorneys general across the United States. What the legal establishment once considered an open-and-shut laugher turned into a 5-4 Supreme Court nail-biter.

It was, perhaps, the first time that a highly technical legal debate on a matter of national policy importance—the sort of discussion usually confined to law reviews, academic panels, and conference rooms at the Justice Department—played out in real time for the consumption of lay readers as well as professionals, and it cemented the site’s role as a public clearinghouse for cutting-edge legal debate. As Paul Clement, the former U.S. solicitor general who represented the 26 states opposing Obamacare, put it, “The Constitution had its Federalist Papers, and the challenge to the Affordable Care Act had The Volokh Conspiracy.”

Founded as a solo operation in April 2002, the site is now one of the Internet’s most-read legal blogs, boasting a diverse readership of scholars and policymakers—as well as Supreme Court Justices—across the ideological spectrum. (Justice Elena Kagan has said she reads it daily.) In January, The Volokh Conspiracy moved to the Washington Post, giving it an even more prominent role in the national conversation—and more power to shape the discourse surrounding issues currently being decided in the courts, from religious freedom to gay marriage.

How did a center-right blog written by libertarian-leaning professors become the most influential in American legal circles? The story begins with its founder and namesake, a Soviet Jewish refugee named Eugene Volokh.

In 1975, Volokh arrived with his parents in the United States from Ukraine. The family settled in California; five years later, Volokh was admitted to UCLA on a full scholarship after scoring 780 out of 800 on the mathematical portion of his SAT. It would have been an impressive achievement for any student, let alone any recent immigrant—but Volokh was also just 12 years old at the time. In 1981, the Los Angeles Times ran a profile in which the writer dubbed Volokh a “prodigy, a genius, or, simply, staggeringly bright,” and reported his IQ at 206. He chose to attend UCLA, the article noted, because he wanted to stay close to home—and because he wasn’t old enough to drive. …

The Economist has come around to the point of view that much of the money spent on higher education is wasted. Virginia residents will be heartened by the four most rewarding degrees. First is University of Virginia and fourth is William and Mary. And, this is further proof of Pickerhead’s sagacity since four of his children earned degrees at those two schools.

WHEN LaTisha Styles graduated from KennesawStateUniversity in Georgia in 2006 she had $35,000 of student debt. This obligation would have been easy to discharge if her Spanish degree had helped her land a well-paid job. But there is no shortage of Spanish-speakers in a nation that borders Latin America. So Ms Styles found herself working in a clothes shop and a fast-food restaurant for no more than $11 an hour.

Frustrated, she took the gutsy decision to go back to the same college and study something more pragmatic. She majored in finance, and now has a good job at an investment consulting firm. Her debt has swollen to $65,000, but she will have little trouble paying it off.

As Ms Styles’s story shows, there is no simple answer to the question “Is college worth it?” Some degrees pay for themselves; others don’t. American schoolkids pondering whether to take on huge student loans are constantly told that college is the gateway to the middle class. The truth is more nuanced, as Barack Obama hinted when he said in January that “folks can make a lot more” by learning a trade “than they might with an art history degree”. An angry art history professor forced him to apologise, but he was right.

College graduates aged 25 to 32 who are working full time earn about $17,500 more annually than their peers who have only a high school diploma, according to the Pew Research Centre, a think-tank. But not all degrees are equally useful. And given how much they cost—a residential four-year degree can set you back as much as $60,000 a year—many students end up worse off than if they had started working at 18. …

… What is not in doubt is that the cost of university per student has risen by almost five times the rate of inflation since 1983, and graduate salaries have been flat for much of the past decade. Student debt has grown so large that it stops many young people from buying houses, starting businesses or having children. Those who borrowed for a bachelor’s degree granted in 2012 owe an average of $29,400. The Project on Student Debt, a non-profit, says that 15% of borrowers default within three years of entering repayment. At for-profit colleges the rate is 22%. Glenn Reynolds, a law professor and author of “The Higher Education Bubble”, writes of graduates who “may wind up living in their parents’ basements until they are old enough to collect Social Security.” …

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Thomas Sowell says weak and vacillating foreign policies lead to wars.

Many people are lamenting the bad consequences of Barack Obama’s foreign policy, and some are questioning his competence.

There is much to lament, and much to fear. Multiple setbacks to American interests have been brought on by Obama’s policies in Libya, Egypt, Syria, Crimea and — above all — in what seems almost certain to become a nuclear Iran in the very near future.

The president’s public warning to Syria of dire consequences if the Assad regime there crossed a “red line” he had drawn seemed to epitomize an amateurish bluff that was exposed as a bluff when Syria crossed that red line without suffering any consequences. Drawing red lines in disappearing ink makes an international mockery of not only this president’s credibility, but also the credibility of future American presidents’ commitments.

When some future President of the United States issues a solemn warning internationally, and means it, there may be less likelihood that the warning will be taken seriously. That invites the kind of miscalculation that has led to wars. …

Mr. Sowell has Part II in his look at foreign policies.

Japan recently turned over to the United States enough weapons-grade nuclear material to make dozens of nuclear bombs. This was one of President Barack Obama’s few foreign policy “successes,” as part of his nuclear disarmament initiative. But his foreign policy successes may be more dangerous than his “failures.” Back in 2005, Senator Barack Obama urged the Ukrainians to drastically reduce their conventional weapons, including anti-aircraft missiles and tons of ammunition. Ukraine had already rid itself of nuclear missiles, left over from the days when it had been part of the Soviet Union.

Would Vladimir Putin have sent Russian troops so boldly into Ukraine if the Ukrainians still had nuclear missiles? The nuclear disarming of Japan and Ukraine shows how easy it is to disarm peaceful nations — making them more vulnerable to those who are not peaceful.

Ukraine’s recent appeal to the United States for military supplies, with which to defend itself as more Russian troops mass on its borders, was denied by President Obama. He is sending food supplies instead. He might as well send them white flags, to facilitate surrender.

According to Bret Stephens, dissing the president is in vogue.

I’ve never liked the word diss—not as a verb, much less as a noun. But watching the Obama administration get the diss treatment the world over, week-in, week-out, I’m beginning to see its uses. …

… Diss: On Friday, Vladimir Putin called President Obama to discuss a resolution to the crisis in Ukraine. The Russian president “drew Barack Obama’s attention to continued rampage of extremists who are committing acts of intimidation towards peaceful residents,” according to the Kremlin, which, as in Soviet days, no longer bothers distinguishing diplomatic communiqués from crass propaganda.

Mr. Kerry was immediately dispatched to Paris to meet with Sergei Lavrov, his Russian counterpart. Mr. Lavrov—who knows a one-for-me, one-for-you, one-for-me deal when he sees it—is hinting that Russia will graciously not invade Ukraine provided Washington and Moscow shove “constitutional reforms” favorable to the Kremlin down Kiev’s throat. And regarding the invasion that brought the crisis about: “Mr. Kerry on Sunday didn’t mention Crimea during his remarks,” reports The Wall Street Journal, “giving the impression that the U.S. has largely given up reversing the region’s absorption into Russia.” …

… Diss: “Rather than challenging the Syrian and Iranian governments, some of our Western partners have refused to take much-needed action against them,” warned Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the U.K. late last year. “The foreign policy choices being made in some Western capitals risk the stability of the region and, potentially, the security of the whole Arab world. This means the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has no choice but to become more assertive in international affairs.”

This would have been a diss were it whispered in the corridor of a foreign chancellery. The ambassador published it as an op-ed in the New York Times. All this in just the past four months. And all so reminiscent of the contempt the world showed for Jimmy Carter in the waning days of his failed presidency. The trouble for us is that the current presidency has more than 1,000 days to go.

I was wrong about diss. It’s a fine word. It means diss-respect. And connotes diss-may. And diss-honor. And diss-aster. (Kinda like ”clueless, hapless, feckless, and hopeless.”) 

Roger Simon calls it the “silence of the liberals.”

Am I the only one or have you noticed your liberal friends and family have been strangely silent lately?

I tweeted as much Friday and, given the number of retweets in a matter of minutes, I gather I am not alone.

So why are these normally voluble people suddenly doing a disappearing act? (I’m not talking about the politicians and pundits.  They’re being paid to move their mouths.)  It’s pretty obvious.

They are bewildered and embarrassed.  Some are even ashamed of themselves, not that they will readily admit it.  The man who was their hero has now been unmasked in every direction as the worst president since the Civil War and possibly earlier. Not only is he a cheesy liar, everything he has done, domestic and foreign, has failed, sometimes to extraordinary degrees. The domestic part is bad enough, but at least that might be reparable.  The foreign is another matter.  The world is spinning out of control.  Who knows where that will end?

Hence, the silence. …

Worse still, Craig Pirrong wonders why the new Ukrainian constitution was drafted by Kerry and Lavrov in Paris. Craig wants to know if Munich was unavailable.

Following up on Putin’s phone call to Obama, Kerry is making a detour to Paris to negotiate with Lavrov over the fate of Ukraine.

Lavrov has laid out Russia’s terms, and intimates that Obama and Kerry have accepted the principles underlying these terms.

First, Russia demands that Ukraine adopt a new constitution that establishes a federal structure that gives each region considerable autonomy.  Translate this to mean that these regions would be able to pull a Crimea.  Or, more accurately, that Russia would be able to pull a Crimea, slicing off pieces of Ukraine and splicing them onto Russia.

Crucially, Lavrov said: “I can say that ‘federation’ is no longer a taboo word in our negotiations.”  Meaning that if he is telling the truth (always a big if) Obama has conceded that Ukraine’s constitutional order is up for negotiation, on Moscow’s terms.

Second, Russia demands that Ukraine’s new constitution incorporate guarantees that Ukraine will not join Nato or any other alliance. …

Leaving foreign policy and heading for the president’s domestic mess, Andy Malcolm thinks Sebelius is gonna get thrown under the bus.

… Then, Obama thanked two — and only two — people by name — ex-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who said we’d have to pass the bill to learn what was in it. And he thanked Dick Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate. Strangely, Obama did not thank the Senate’s top Democrat, Harry Reid, who runs that place for the moment.

Even more striking, however, Obama did not even mention Sebelius, the face of this long, painful implementation struggle. Not one word, though she was sitting right in front of him. …

… Sure, she made some gaffes, as all public officials do. With TV cameras rolling at a Florida photo op, Sebelius cheerily asked one ObamaCare navigator what she was doing. The worker’s reply: She couldn’t anything because the healthcare.gov website had crashed again.

Asked if she was going to resign in those anguishing days early last October, Sebelius told reporters the people she worked for were quite satisfied with her job performance. Later, she apologetically explained that she knew she really works for the American people.

If Washington was the Kremlin, Pyongyang or Chicago, such a glaring public omission of praise for a senior aide by the supreme leader would be a sure sign she was on the way out the door of the office or airplane. We’ll soon see.

Meanwhile, Obama unintentionally added a moment of humor to his self-celebration of how easily ObamaCare allegedly reached 7.1 million enrollment: “We didn’t make a hard sell.”

Nate Silver yesterday, and now Al Jazeera! What’s happened to Pickerhead? Shikha Dalmia moved her byline as she exposes the fraud in the healthcare numbers.

… First off, the exchanges: The 7 million enrollment figure that the administration is bandying about is misleading. The actual number of uninsured covered by the marketplace will be much smaller. For starters, if the current trend continues, 20 percent of the 7 million will drop out without paying. Out of the remaining 5.6 million, only about half were likely previously uninsured. Why? Because reliable early surveys found that a whopping 65 to 90 percent of those flocking to the exchange already had insurance. Even assuming that uninsured people were waiting until the end to sign up, it is hard to see how that figure would exceed 50 percent, given that 6 out of 10 uninsured people surveyed by the Kaiser Family Foundation recently didn’t know about the March 31 deadline and after being told about it, half of them still planned to remain uninsured.

Second, Medicaid. The administration claims that the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid has allowed 4 million to 4.5 million uninsured people to gain coverage. But a substantial portion of that stems from regular Medicaid growth (unrelated to “Obamacare”). In January, Real Clear Politics’ Sean Trende estimated the number to be closer to 400,000, although he expected that number to improve. And last month, Avalere, a health advisory company, put the new enrollees due to Obamacare at 2.4 million to 3.5 million. (Some states are reporting higher rates of uninsured Medicaid enrollment, but it is unclear how representative or reliable they are or how many of these uninsured might have been covered even under the old eligibility criteria.)

Things are not likely to get better next year. The new ‘Obamacare’ sign-ups are so skewed toward the old and the sick that some experts expect premiums to double. …

Econ prof from Cornell, Robert Frank, has interesting thoughts about the sale of Detroit’s art.

… Fortunately, costs are easier to estimate, and those for displaying a painting derive largely from its market value. Consider “The Wedding Dance,” a 16th-century work by the Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Detroit museum visitors have enjoyed this painting since 1930. How much would it cost to preserve that privilege for future generations?

A tidy sum, as it turns out. According to Christie’s, this canvas alone could fetch up to $200 million. Once interest rates return to normal levels — say, 6 percent — the forgone interest on that amount would be approximately $12 million a year.

If we assume that the museum would be open 2,000 hours a year, and ignore the cost of gallery space and other indirect expenses, the cost of keeping the painting on display would be more than $6,000 an hour. Assuming that an average of five people would view it per hour, all year long, it would still cost more than $1,200 an hour to provide the experience for each visitor.

Notwithstanding the crudeness of these approximations, we can say that even a very wealthy taxpayer would be reluctant to pay anything close to $1,200 an hour for the privilege of viewing this painting. And that suggests that most taxpayers think the same money could deliver much greater value if spent in other ways. Of course, the painting might still justify its cost if other indirect benefits were large enough.

Yet the point remains that prices affect the options we face. …