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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. …

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It can make your hair hurt, but getting the story straight on the West’s understanding about Iraq’s WMD’s is going to be a point historians will find important. Peter Berkowitz of Real Clear Politics reviews Judith Miller’s new book. Miller was in Pickings a few days ago introducing her book.

… That is where Miller almost ends her book.

In the epilogue, however, she discloses that she now believes she gave incorrect testimony in United States v. Libby and that she did so because prosecutor Fitzgerald—who declined to respond to written questions about the case—withheld crucial information from her.

Of the nine journalists who testified at Libby’s trial about conversations with him—including Bob Woodward of The Washington Post, Times reporter David Sanger, and syndicated columnist Robert Novak—Miller was the only one to say that Libby voluntarily revealed Plame’s CIA employment. She writes that her testimony “was also crucial to Fitzgerald’s assertion that the vice president had been involved, since Libby had told the grand jury that Cheney had approved his suggestion that he discuss the intelligence estimate [the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate] about Iraq and WMD with me.”

Before she appeared before the grand jury in the autumn of 2005, Miller writes, Fitzgerald led her by pointed queries to believe that a four-word question contained between parentheses in her notebook—“(wife works in Bureau?)”—was the smoking gun that proved that Libby, in a June 23, 2003 conversation, had told her about Plame’s CIA employment. She so testified to the grand jury in 2005 and at trial in 2007.

Three years later, while reading Plame’s book, “Fair Game,” Miller was astonished to learn that “while working overseas for the CIA, Plame’s cover were jobs at the State Department.” This threw “a new light” on Miller’s notebook jotting, because the State Department has “bureaus,” while the CIA is organized into “divisions.”

Miller saw that she must have begun her conversation with Libby wondering whether Wilson’s wife worked at the State Department. Moreover, had a seasoned Washington insider like Libby sought to reveal Plame’s CIA job, Miller realized, he would not have referred to the place she worked as a “bureau,” but rather as a “division.” These revelations, according to Miller, shattered her confidence in her recollection and led her to believe that Fitzgerald misled her into providing false testimony.

The prosecution had the classified file of Plame’s service and Fitzgerald knew, or should have known, of Plame’s State Department cover. But despite his obligation to provide exculpatory evidence to witnesses as well as to the defendant, he withheld this information not only from Judy Miller, but also from Scooter Libby’s lawyers even though they had requested Plame’s employment records.

It would have been easy for Miller to take her knowledge of her mistaken testimony to her grave. Who would have known? Who would have cared?

Nevertheless, as she had done with the prewar intelligence failures, Miller investigated.  In addition to finding injustice to Libby she also revealed that Fitzgerald’s three-and-half year pursuit of him damaged American national security.

In a 2013 interview, former Vice President Cheney told Miller that but for Fitzgerald’s sidelining of Libby, the Iraq War might have turned out differently. In 2003, Libby was the principal figure in the White House arguing for the counterinsurgency strategy that President Bush only embraced in late 2006 after many wrong turns and much carnage, and which Gen. David Petraeus successfully implemented in 2007. It is painful to contemplate how many lives—American and Iraqi—might have been spared had Libby, the foremost champion within the White House in 2003 of stabilizing Iraq through counterinsurgency operations, not been hindered by, and eventually forced to resign because of, Fitzgerald’s overwrought federal investigation and prosecution.

Serendipity, a biased press, and a fanatical prosecutor combined to yoke together the fates of Scooter Libby and Judith Miller. Elite left-wing opinion demanded that the Bush administration pay for its supposed lies about Iraqi WMD. The left wanted to take down Bush or Cheney and when they couldn’t destroy either, they settled for Libby.

At the same time, the left had no interest in toppling their beloved New York Times, but relished the newspaper’s guilt offering of Miller. That the only lies of consequence were those they promulgated about Libby and Miller does not yet seem to have registered in, much less troubled, the left-liberal conscience.

Miller’s sobering book, which demonstrates her devotion to getting the story right, makes a major contribution to correcting the record.

For another back-story that exposes the lies of the left, The Daily Caller shows the link between the obama administration and the fraudulent Rolling Stone article about UVA.

A top-ranking official at the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has emerged as a potentially key figure in Rolling Stone’s false article, “A Rape on Campus.”

Catherine Lhamon, who heads the Department’s civil rights wing, was identified in a letter sent last month by University of Virginia Dean of Students Allen Groves to Steve Coll and Sheila Coronel, the two Columbia Journalism School deans who conducted a review of the Nov. 19 article, written by disgraced reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely.

Groves’ letter was included as a footnote to the Columbia deans’ report, which was released on Sunday and cataloged the failures and lies that led to the article’s publication.

In the letter, Groves wrote that he has suffered “personal and professional” damage as a result of Erdely’s reporting and comments Lhamon made about him which were included in the article.

As the Rolling Stone article fell apart, Lhamon’s involvement has gone virtually unmentioned. But a deeper look reveals her ties to Emily Renda, a University of Virginia employee and activist who put Erdely in touch with Jackie, the student whose claim that she was brutally gang-raped by seven members of a fraternity on Sept. 28, 2012, served as the linchpin for the 9,000-word Rolling Stone article. President Obama nominated Lhamon to become the Education Department’s Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights in July 2013. The Senate approved her unanimously the following month.

She has served as the Education Department’s designee to the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault which Obama created on Jan. 22, 2014. Renda served on the same task force.

Besides that link, both spoke at a February 2014 University of Virginia event entitled “Sexual Misconduct Among College Students.” …

The above is not the first time Emily Renda’s fingerprints were found in the Rolling Stone disaster. The blog 28 Sherman posted on her involvement last December.

Even after my Erdely-Renda post from Thursday, the Rolling Stone article continues to unravel elsewhere. The Washington Post managed to do the yeoman’s work on the problems to the story. Chuck Ross at the Daily Caller has interviewed Jackie’s friend Randall, adding to the catfish elements to the story. Emily Renda’s still skating free from scrutiny except here. A really weird coincidence is found between Renda’s words and Jackie’s story in the Rolling Stone. This plays into who came up with Sabrina Erdely’s story details. The media should be asking Emily Renda deeper questions than the softballs NPR threw her way.

Jackie’s story to her friends differs from Erdely’s reporting. Jackie has accused Erdely of lying, people have accused Jackie of lying, and it is a tornado of lies. This is where Renda fits in. Emily Renda’s testimony to the Senate was in June. Here is a passage about a vicious rape on campus.

“One of the student survivors I worked with, Jenna*, was gang-raped by five fraternity men early in her freshman year. Despite the severity of the assault and injuries she sustained, Jenna still experienced a feeling of personal responsibility. Looking for affirmation, she sought out peers and told her story. Sadly, each and every one of the friends she reached out to responded with varying denials of her experience; these responses worsened her feelings of self-blame – that she must be confused because that fraternity “is full of great guys”; that she must have made them think she was “down for that”; questioning how no one else at the party could have heard what was going on if she was telling the truth; or discouraging her from seeking help because “you don’t want to be one of those girls who has a reputation” for reporting “that kind of thing.” These statements haunted Jenna. She told me that they made her feel crazy, and made her question whether her own understanding of the rape was legitimate.”

Sounds familiar? …

And the blog The Other McCain posts on the “coven of liars” that promoted the story.

… The Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross reports that Lhamon and Emilly Renda are part of the same federal apparatus:

“[Lhamon] has served as the Education Department’s designee to the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault which Obama created on Jan. 22, 2014. Renda served on the same task force.
Besides that link, both spoke at a February 2014 University of Virginia event entitled “Sexual Misconduct Among College Students.”
Lhamon has been invited to the White House nearly 60 times, according to visitor’s logs. Renda has been invited six times. Both were invited to the same White House meeting on three occasions. One, held on Feb. 21, 2014, was conducted by Lynn Rosenthal, then the White House Advisor on Violence Against Women. Twenty-one people, mostly activists, were invited to that meeting. Lhamon and Renda were invited to two other larger gatherings — one on April 29 and the other on Sept. 19.
It is unclear if both attended the three meetings. Renda did not respond to an emailed request for comment.
Renda and Lhamon also testified at a June 26, 2014, Senate hearing on campus sexual assault. It was at that hearing that Renda cited Jackie’s story that she was brutally gang-raped by five fraternity members — a statement that was inconsistent with Jackie’s claim to Erdely that she was raped by seven men. According to the Columbia report, Renda first told Erdely about Jackie’s allegation on July 8, nearly two weeks after her Senate testimony.
During her testimony, Lhamon claimed that “The best available research suggests that 20% of college women, and roughly 6% of college men, are victims of attempted or completed sexual assault.” That “one-in-five” claim about the prevalence of sexual assault on campus has been heavily disputed.”

Now, read the second page of Chuck Ross’s report:

“In his letter, Groves wrote that he filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking correspondence between Lhamon and Erdely. Likewise, The Daily Caller filed a FOIA request but expanded the inquiry to include emails Lhamon and her assistant sent to Renda.
In his letter to Coll and Coronel, Groves wrote that he was “one of the professionals vilified by name” in Erdely’s article.
He claimed that Erdely completely mischaracterized remarks he made at a Sept. 2014 meeting with university trustees about sexual assault and that Lhamon disparaged him with comments she made to Erdely. . . .
Despite the context provided by Groves, the Department of Education is not backing off of Lhamon’s comments to Erdely.
“We stand by the statement Catherine made during her interview with Rolling Stone,” Dorie Turner Nolt, the agency’s press secretary, told The DC.”

This is serious. Here you have Erdely misrepresenting a UVA dean’s words and a federal official disparaging the dean on the basis of that misrepresentation, and the Department of Education declares that it will “stand by” this smear? More than that, however, Lhamon and Renda appear to have a very close connection through the White House task force, and both were sources for Erdely’s now-discredited article. …

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It’s been awhile since we have spent time on the Clinton campaign. Now that she is about to announce it is time to correct that. The left is getting worried. New York Magazine has a long piece that asks if Hillary is any good at running for president. 

A lot can happen between now and then, but barring something truly unprecedented and totally unforeseen — a meteorite, a Benghazi revelation, a health scare, or a Martin O’Malley groundswell — on July 28, 2016, Hillary Clinton will step onto a stage in Philadelphia. There, surrounded by red-white-and-blue bunting and balloons — as well as Bill, Chelsea, baby granddaughter Charlotte, and tens of thousands of screaming Democrats — she will officially become her party’s presidential nominee. It will be a long-awaited and historic moment, the first time a woman (and the second time a Clinton) has topped a major party’s presidential ticket. And already some Republicans are licking their chops, while some Democrats are experiencing pangs of buyer’s remorse.

For much of the Obama presidency, there has been a general sense of calm among Democrats about their chances to retain the White House. Clinton’s tenure as secretary of State was distinguished, if not especially consequential. Her favorability ratings hovered around all-time highs. It wasn’t just that her nomination seemed a foregone conclusion; given the dysfunction of the Republican Party and the demographic changes in the American electorate, the race seemed hers to lose. It was hard to find a Democratic operative not in fairly high spirits.

Then, over the past few weeks, the country watched as Clinton dealt with the fallout from the revelation that she used a personal email server while heading up the State Department. Her fiercest critics have charged that she employed the private email system to skirt government transparency laws and, in the process, endangered national security. Her supporters worry that, even if Clinton’s private email was legal and innocent, it was a self-inflicted error that has needlessly handed her enemies yet another cudgel to wield against her. But the glee and regret among Republicans and Democrats have been most pronounced over the disastrous press conference Clinton held at the United Nations to try to put the matter to rest, which served to remind them of something many had forgotten: what an abominable candidate she can be. …

 

… Pat Buchanan, the venerable Republican operative who advised Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, likes to assess politicians as “political athletes.” Putting aside ideologies, policy preferences, even personalities, how do they perform on the political playing field? “It’s charisma, charm, savvy,” he says. “Being a political athlete is having an extra dimension — it’s not learned; you’re born with it.” In Buchanan’s long career, the greatest political athletes he’s encountered have been John F. Kennedy, Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. “They’re naturals: Roy Hobbs or Mickey Mantle,” he says. Hillary, in Buchanan’s view, is the furthest thing from a natural: “She’s like Pete Rose, who has to grind out every hit.”

The grind can be obvious watching Clinton on the campaign trail. In her two successful Senate races and her unsuccessful presidential run in 2008, she often struggled to exhibit the basic qualities required of politicians. “Let’s remember who she’s beaten in her career: Rick Lazio and John Spencer,” says a Democratic consultant who has worked for and against Hillary. “The only time she’s run against anyone decent, she’s lost.” …

 

… Campaigns are punctuated by moments of high stagecraft — debates, convention speeches — that require oratorical talents that Clinton does not possess in abundance. “She doesn’t make mistakes in the debates, but that’s different than being good,” says a Democratic operative. “She doesn’t win a lot of people over.” The former Obama aide Bill Burton, who thought Clinton did well in her 2008 debates, nonetheless sums up her performances another way: “Maya Angelou said people won’t remember what you say or do but they’ll remember how you made them feel. If anything, she was a little too driven by data and less driven by how she was going to come off.” In fact, one of the greatest sources of agita among Democrats these days is that, deprived of a competitive primary, Clinton will face her well-seasoned Republican opponent without having debated in more than eight years.

But various academic studies have shown that even the debates that we consider most game-changing — Kennedy’s besting of a sweaty, five-o’clock-shadowed Nixon in 1960; Michael Dukakis’s botching of a question involving the hypothetical rape and murder of his wife; George H.W. Bush’s impatiently glancing at his watch in 1992 — had little or no impact on voter preferences. …

 

… Clinton’s worst gaffe of late came last year, in response to a question from Diane Sawyer about her sky-high speaking fees. Recognizing her vulnerability, she overcompensated, claiming that she and Bill were “dead broke” when they left the White House. According to one Republican operative who’s conducted focus groups on Clinton in Ohio and Colorado, “when you play that Diane Sawyer interview for lower-income women, women who really have struggled to put food on the table for their kids, they got physically upset at her about that remark.” Clinton only compounded the error when, in subsequent interviews, she tried to defend it as literally true. “She’s not very adept at cleaning that stuff up,” says the Republican operative. “Her tendency is to double down, rather than say that was a ridiculous comment.” Or, as Luntz says, “She doesn’t know when or how to say, ‘Hey, I f**ked up.’ ” ..

 

… The biggest difficulty in analyzing Clinton’s candidacy right now is, of course, that we don’t know whom she will be running against. In her wildest dreams, it will be Ted Cruz or Rand Paul, two senators skilled at rallying the Republican base but distrusted (or, in Cruz’s case, loathed) by the party Establishment. But let’s assume that David Karol is correct, and that the GOP nominee will be a familiar name popular among the party’s core donors. Let’s also assume that though his campaign will be extraordinarily well funded (groups backed by Charles and David Koch have pledged to spend almost $1 billion leading up to 2016), Clinton’s fund-raising will be equal to the task, and the finance race will roughly balance out.

Perhaps, then, Clinton will be positioning herself against Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. Unless Walker dramatically shifts strategy, he will be running a campaign focused less on broadening the GOP tent than on increasing the turnout of his base. This, in turn, would give Clinton ammunition to increase minority turnout for her. A Walker candidacy would clarify certain themes for Clinton — her vision for the role of government is considerably more expansionist than his, and it polls better. A recent Washington Post poll proposing a Clinton/Walker election had her leading 55 percent to 38 percent. But Walker complicates Clinton’s life in one major way. He’d be, as he calls himself, “a face for the future.” Time for a Change, in spades.

A campaign against Jeb Bush would present different opportunities and different challenges. A Bush surname would certainly help neutralize Clinton fatigue, and he might have more trouble getting his base to turn out. …

 

… It’s almost impossible to overstate just how much Clinton hates the press. She doesn’t trust it, avoids it at all costs, assumes the worst intentions, and generally wishes it would just go away. Her contempt for the people who cover her was on full display in her press conference last month — as was their contempt for her. It’s a poisonous relationship with multiple levels of dysfunction on both sides. Unfortunately for Clinton, she’s the one who bears the brunt of the fallout. …

And Karl Rove turns a critical eye on Hillary’s efforts.

… Mrs. Clinton’s main problem in 2008 was lack of a compelling message—and she lacks one now. She has recently tried channeling her inner Elizabeth Warren by talking about income inequality, but her comments had a check-the-box quality. 

She is someone searching for a rationale to run, rather than seeking how best to present it to the public. Mr. Podesta is smart enough to realize this, but slogans and soft lighting can’t substitute for real convictions and an authentic sense of purpose. 

Mrs. Clinton’s run for the White House seems more about personal political ambition than the country’s well being. Aides, consultants and even spouses can’t change that. …

National Review calls it Hillary’s Truman Show.

In the catalogue of stock political events, a campaign launch may be as easy as it gets. Sure, first impressions are important. But you find a setting that is historically or personally significant, you hang a few American flags, you gather a crowd of cheering supporters, you talk about America’s great promise, you march out to an upbeat tune. The bar is low. It’s hard to screw up a campaign launch.

But Hillary Clinton might be about to do it. According to the Guardian, Clinton plans to announce her presidential campaign at noon on Sunday, en route to Iowa, “on Twitter . . . followed by a video and email announcement.” Getting to Iowa is suddenly so urgent that she has to make her announcement from a plane 30,000 feet over St. Louis? Hardly.

In 2008, Clinton announced via video, too — a 90-second clip in which she declared, “I’m not just starting a campaign. I’m starting a conversation — with you, with America.” Because nothing says “dialogue” like a pre-recorded video with only one person in the room.

Eight years later, the Clinton team is doing the same thing. Why? Because for someone who has spent her life in public, Hillary Clinton is very bad in public. And her team knows it. …

After contemplating HRC as president, we need some comic relief and Andrew Malcolm is just in time with late night humor.

SNL: Despite Hillary Clinton’s claims that she used her personal email while Secretary of State to avoid carrying more than one device, a new report shows that she emailed with her iPad in addition to her BlackBerry. Even more alarming, her email signature was, “sent from my Benghazi cover-up device.”

SNL: ABC is denying reports that Barbara Walters wants to replace Rosie O’Donnell with Monica Lewinsky on “The View.” Said an ABC spokesman, “We have not had contractual relations with that woman.”

Great News! Bacon can prolong your life. 

Bacon may have the ability to prolong your life, according to a recent study by researchers from ETH Zurich. Well, kind of.

The pork product is apparently full of niacin – also known as Vitamin B3 – which has been linked to a longer life span. Researchers tested the theory by feeding a selection of roundworms a good dose of niacin and their life lasted one-tenth longer.

You can also find the vitamin in paprika, sun-dried tomatoes, peanuts, and marmite (which is apparently yeast extract). But who cares? You can find niacin in bacon, which is all that really matters. So eat up! It’s good for you.

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Victor Davis Hanson, whose day job is California farmer, writes on the “Engineered Drought” in his state.

California governor Jerry Brown had little choice but to issue a belated, state-wide mandate to reduce water usage by 25 percent. How such restrictions will affect Californians remains to be seen, given the GoldenState’s wide diversity in geography, climate, water supply, and demography.

We do know two things. First, Brown and other Democratic leaders will never concede that their own opposition in the 1970s (when California had about half its present population) to the completion of state and federal water projects, along with their more recent allowance of massive water diversions for fish and river enhancement, left no margin for error in a state now home to 40 million people. Second, the mandated restrictions will bring home another truth as lawns die, pools empty, and boutique gardens shrivel in the coastal corridor from La Jolla to Berkeley: the very idea of a 20-million-person corridor along the narrow, scenic Pacific Ocean and adjoining foothills is just as unnatural as “big” agriculture’s Westside farming. The weather, climate, lifestyle, views, and culture of coastal living may all be spectacular, but the arid Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay-area megalopolises must rely on massive water transfers from the Sierra Nevada, Northern California, or out-of-state sources to support their unnatural ecosystems. …

Megan McArdle posts on the subject.

… California has to do something — many of its reservoirs are half-empty, and the Sierra Nevada snowpack, which provides much of California’s water, is far below normal levels. But that doesn’t mean it should do this particular thing. California’s proposal is far too heavy on top-down regulatory management, and far too light on pricing.

I’ve seen a lot of apocalyptic writing about California only having a year of water left (not true),  and I’ve heard some idle talk about whether California can continue to grow. But California’s problem is not that it doesn’t have enough water to support its population. Rather, the problem is that its population uses more water than it has to. And the reason people do this is that water in California is seriously underpriced, as Marginal Revolution’s Alex Tabarrok notes. While the new emergency rules do include provisions for local utilities to raise rates, that would still leave water in the state ludicrously mispriced. According to Tabarrok, the average household in San Diego pays less than 80 cents a day for the 150 gallons of water it uses. This is less than my two-person household pays for considerably less water usage, in an area where rainfall is so plentiful that the neighborhood next door to me has a recurrent flooding problem. …

Mr. Hanson has more on the general drift in California.

The proverbial thin veneer of civilization has never been thinner in California, as if nature has conspired to create even greater chaos than what man here has already wrought. What follows below was a fairly typical seven-day period in the land of the highest sales, fuel, and income taxes that have led to the nearly worst freeways, schools, and general infrastructure in the nation.

I recently came home from an out-of-state trip. Something was wrong: I noticed off in the distance a strange geyser at the top of the hill. Vandals had apparently earlier taken sledgehammers to the pump’s four-inch plastic fittings — all to scavenge two brass valves (recycle value of about $20).

The fools did not know the pump was even on. When they smashed open the plastic pipes the spurting water apparently drenched them, and so they left their self-created mess. (No, criminals here do not know how to turn off a pump.) The ensuing deluge of several hours had ripped a three-foot-deep gully for about 20 yards.

I’ve lost count of how many pumps have been vandalized over the last decade. Some people play golf after work and weekends, but out here the pastime is to drive out to the countryside to wreck things for a few dollars of copper and bronze. It reminds me of the Ottomans in Greece, who pried off the lead seals over the iron clamps that had held together the marble blocks of ancient Greek temples and walls. The Turks, who could make little but scavenge a lot, got their few ounces of lead for bullets. In the exchange, the exposed iron marble clamps rusted and fell apart, ruining the antiquities that had theretofore survived 2,000 years of natural wear and tear. One civilization builds and invests, quite a different one destroys and consumes. …

… Does anyone realize that the entire California experiment — having 75% of the people live in a Mediterranean climate where 25% of the state’s rain and snow fall — is unnatural and depends on each generation’s ingenuity and industriousness to ensure water, an educated populace, safe freeways, and basic safety and security for the citizenry?

The enervated middle class of California struggles under high taxes, high housing costs, high-cost energy, terrible schools, and high crime. Increasingly it is considering leaving paradise. In our pyramidal state, there is a vast underclass (22% of the state lives below the poverty line, schools are rated 46th in the nation, and one out of three hospital admittances over 35 suffers from diabetes, etc., a disease for whose prevention California rates near last in expenditures). The base of the pyramid is growing, and now represents one in six of all American welfare recipients. …

… What nature’s deadly four-year drought is teaching California is that even the liberal aristocracy eventually has a rendezvous with what they created.

All the capital, income, and influence in the state cannot guarantee exemption from their own self-induced chaos. Climbing atop the smokestacks of the sinking Titanic is of little use after you have deprecated the idea of more lifeboats.

John Fund deals with Harry Reid’s lack of regret for his lies about Romney.

It was just over 60 years ago that the tactics of Senator Joseph McCarthy were repudiated when he was censured by the Senate in December 1954. Ever since then, McCarthyism — the reckless hurling of accusations at adversaries so as to destroy their reputations — has been considered one of the lowest forms of political behavior and one liberals love to crusade against.

But McCarthyism isn’t limited to one party or ideology. And if liberals have any sense of self-awareness they will recognize the tactic has returned and is growing in their back yard.

Harry Reid, the top Democrat in the Senate, was asked by CNN’s Dana Bash this week if he regretted his 2012 accusation on the Senate floor that GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney “hasn’t paid taxes for ten years.” Reid presented no evidence at the time and claimed he didn’t need any: “I don’t think the burden should be on me. The burden should be on him. He’s the one I’ve alleged has not paid any taxes.”

Reid’s response in the interview was fascinating. When asked by Bash if his tactic was McCarthyite he visibly shrugged on camera, smiled, and said “Well, they can call it whatever they want. Romney didn’t win, did he?” White House spokesman Josh Earnest refused to criticize Reid for his comment because it “was three years old,” when in reality Reid’s televised reveling in it was only three days old. …

More on the Left’s lies from Naomi Schaefer Riley.

The verdict’s in on Rolling Stone. According to no less an authority than the Columbia Journalism Review, the magazine’s last year story of a University of Virginia gang rape was a “journalistic failure [that] encompassed reporting, editing, editorial supervision and fact-checking.”

But as with many other stories that don’t fit into the right narrative, the media will continue to draw the wrong lessons.

As an AP article noted, “Despite its flaws, the article heightened scrutiny of campus sexual assaults amid a campaign by President Barack Obama.”

Despite its flaws? You mean despite the fact that as far as anyone can tell, the story was made up out of whole cloth?

Even once the police investigated the claims of the alleged victim, The New York Times reported: “Some saw a more complex picture, saying that the uproar over the story and the steps that the university had taken since in an effort to change its culture had, in the end, raised awareness and probably done the school, and the nation, some good.”

How has the university benefited from the fact that a fraternity has been falsely accused of a horrific crime? And how has the nation benefited from the false but now widespread belief that violent rape, even gang rape, is raging on US campuses? …

The writer who first called bullshit on the Rolling Stone rape story has posted a reaction to the Columbia Journalism School’s review of the disaster. In his blog Shots In The Dark, Richard Bradley has gone long. We include it here since this is the last post for a few days so there’ll be time to go back to it. Bradley’s first post dated November 24, 2014 started the ball rolling for a more critical look at the story. You can find it in Pickings December 4, 2014.

… I want to go through a few specific things that I jotted down as I read the CJS report, and then I’d like to conclude with where I think it does fail in one very important way.

1) In Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s public statement, she makes no apology to the fraternity she defamed. I imagine she feared, or was told, that doing so might have legal implications. I doubt that that would be the case; whether that was her intention or not, she obviously harmed the fraternity. There can be no doubt about that. So it is particularly galling that instead of apologizing to people on whom she inflicted tangible harm, she apologizes to ” any victims of sexual assault who may feel fearful as a result of my article.” What about people whom she falsely accused of rape?

Rubin Erdely owes Phi Psi and its members—probably all fraternity members, frankly—an apology. That she refuses to acknowledge her obligation says something about her character.

It also suggests that, despite everything, she still believes, whether Jackie’s story is true or not—it obviously isn’t—some larger truth about rape culture and the predilections of fraternity members. Seen in this light, her refusal to apologize actually strengthens the fraternity’s lawsuit; it reinforces the idea that Sabrina Rubin Erdely really, really doesn’t like fraternities—and was determined to portray their members as rapists.

2) The Columbia report notes that Rolling Stone refused to waive its attorney client privilege and give Coll access to their lawyers. The tautological reason Rolling Stone gave: That to do so would be waiving attorney-client privilege. (Get it? They wouldn’t waive attorney-client privilege because that would mean waiving attorney-client privilege.)

The magazine’s lack of transparency casts doubt on virtually all of what Rolling Stone has to say in its own defense.

Here’s why: With a story this sensitive, good libel lawyers—and I assume Rolling Stone has very good lawyers—are, or should be, very much in the mix. On sensitive stories, they become something akin to editors with a law degree. You simply could not publish such an accusatory article without having it very heavily lawyered; there is, or ought to be, a lot of discussion between the editor-in-chief and the magazine’s libel lawyer(s). That Rolling Stone won’t disclose their lawyers’ advice suggests that the magazine did not take it, or did the least amount possible to satisfy legal concerns. After all, if the lawyers argued that the magazine had done excellent work and was on safe ground publishing the story, disclosing that information would likely have discouraged any potential lawsuits—like the one Phi Psi is now pursuing against the magazine.

In other words: It’s highly likely that Rolling Stone had a prepublication warning that this story had significant problems—and published the story anyway. Because they knew it was a sexy story, and they were willing to take the risk. …

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John Hinderaker of Power Line calls our attention to a piece by Daniel Pipes on the administration’s serial foreign policy failures.

Daniel Pipes reviews the wreckage of Barack Obama’s foreign policies:

“Count the mistakes: Helping overthrow Muammar Qaddafi in Libya, leading to anarchy and civil war. Pressuring Husni Mubarak of Egypt to resign, then backing the Muslim Brotherhood, leading now-president Sisi to turn toward Moscow. Alienating Washington’s most stalwart ally in the region, the Government of Israel. Dismissing ISIS as “junior varsity” just before it seized major cities. Hailing Yemen as a counterterrorism success just before its government was overthrown. Alarming the Saudi authorities to the point that they put together a military alliance against Iran. Coddling Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey, encouraging his dictatorial tendencies. Leaving Iraq and Afghanistan prematurely, dooming the vast American investment in those two countries.

And, most of all: Making dangerously flawed deals with the nuclear-ambitious mullahs of Iran.”

As always, the question is: is Obama failing, or succeeding? As Glenn Reynolds keeps pointing out, that depends on what he is trying to achieve. Pipes continues:

“Is this a random series of errors by an incompetent leadership or does some grand, if misconceived, idea stand behind the pattern? To an extent, it’s ineptitude, as when Obama bowed to the Saudi king, threatened Syria’s government over chemical weapons before changing his mind, and now sends the U.S. military to aid Tehran in Iraq and fight it in Yemen.

But there also is a grand idea and it calls for explanation. As a man of the left, Obama sees the United States historically having exerted a malign influence on the outside world. Greedy corporations, an overly-powerful military-industrial complex, a yahoo nationalism, engrained racism, and cultural imperialism combined to render America, on balance, a force for evil.

Being a student of community organizer Saul Alinsky, Obama did not overtly proclaim this view but passed himself off as a patriot, …”

Caroline Glick, writing in the Jerusalem Post says the Middle East in now on the “diplomatic path to war.”

… No one trusts Obama to follow through on his declared commitment to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power.

No one trusts Washington when Obama claims that he is committed to the security of Israel and the US’s Sunni allies in the region.

And so we are now facing the unfolding disaster that Obama has wrought. The disaster is that deal or no deal, the US has just given the Iranians a green light to behave as if they have already built their nuclear umbrella. And they are in fact behaving in this manner.

They may not have a functional arsenal, but they act as though they do, and rightly so, because the US and its partners have just removed all significant obstacles from their path to nuclear capabilities. The Iranians know it. Their proxies know it. Their enemies know it.

As a consequence, all the regional implications of a nuclear armed Iran are already being played out. The surrounding Arab states led by Saudi Arabia are pursuing nuclear weapons. The path to a Middle East where every major and some minor actors have nuclear arsenals is before us.

Iran is working to expand its regional presence as if it were a nuclear state already. It is brazenly using its Yemeni Houthi proxy to gain maritime control over the Bab al-Mandab, which together with Iran’s control over the Straits of Hormuz completes its maritime control over shipping throughout the Middle East.

Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Eritrea, and their global trading partners will be faced with the fact that their primary maritime shipping route to Asia is controlled by Iran.

With its regional aggression now enjoying the indirect support of its nuclear negotiating partners led by the US, Iran has little to fear from the pan-Arab attempt to dislodge the Houthis from Aden and the Bab al-Mandab. If the Arabs succeed, Iran can regroup and launch a new offensive knowing it will face no repercussions for its aggression and imperialist endeavors. …

Roger Simon asks, “Munich, anyone?”

When Barack Obama told us on dozens of occasions that we could keep our previous health plan and doctor under the Affordable Care Act, he was doing it for one of two reasons.  Either he was ignorant of his own legislation (unlikely) or he was deliberately lying to get it passed. He knew best what was good for us and if he had to prevaricate, so be it.

The so-called  framework agreement on Iranian nuclear activities is almost exactly the same.  Obama again believes it is best for us, but if we are to believe Amir Taheri (and I do), this “agreement” (that the Iranians are calling merely a press release) is understood completely differently by both parties.  We have been told another series of lies in order to get something passed — or in this case not to oppose it. 

Only there is one huge difference. Obamacare is reversible.  Nuclear armageddon is not. …

And Jonah Goldberg says the Iran deal is no deal at all. 

The first thing one needs to know about the nuclear deal with Iran is that it is not, in fact, a deal. You might be confused about this point, given that so many news outlets refers to a “deal” that doesn’t exist.

In fairness, many do so simply for expediency’s sake. The various parties to the talks did come away with an agreement, but it was an agreement to haggle more about what a deal might look like. We don’t have a good word for such things, so people use “deal” as a placeholder.

But in any other realm of life, if you left a negotiation where things stand in Lausanne, Switzerland, you wouldn’t think you had a deal. The known disagreements are profound and the room for further disagreements vast.

When you have a deal with a car salesman, money changes hands and papers are signed. But if you left a car dealership with this kind of understanding, you might never get a car at all, or you might expect that the salesman will ultimately sell you a new Porsche while the dealer is equally confident you’ll come down to the lot next weekend to pick your used Zamboni. …

Kevin Williamson says 1970′s scandals seem almost tame in comparison to today’s.

… Richard Nixon was a snake who understood himself as such but had sufficient vestigial conscience to be ashamed of his snakery. When Tricky Dick wanted to spread a nasty rumor about a political rival, he insisted on a few degrees of separation between the deed and himself; when Harry Reid wants to spread lies about someone, he does so from the Senate floor and then laughs about it. In Nixon’s time, the political misuse of the IRS was considered a serious crime; today, it happens quite in the open without consequence. When Nixon insisted that his attorney general violate his official responsibilities for political reasons, Elliott Richardson understood what duty required, and resigned; Eric Holder, by way of comparison — suffice it to say that he understands his duty somewhat differently. …

… If the other side is evil, then anything is permissible. Of course Harry Reid doesn’t feel guilty about lying about Mitt Romney: “He didn’t get elected, did he?” Of course so-called progressives are willing to lock up nonconformist bakers or merrily cheer on those who promise to set their businesses on fire. Of course the Obama administration will try to sign us up for a phony nuclear deal with Tehran that undermines our national security — and that of our allies — in the service of its own political interests. …

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Matthew Continetti has doubts about the Iran agreement since the president and his minions have shown themselves to be serial liars.

President Obama strode to the lectern in the Rose Garden Thursday to announce a “historic” agreement between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran. The preliminary deal made in Lausanne, Switzerland, the president said, “cuts off every pathway Iran could take to develop a nuclear weapon.” I hope he’s right.

But I’m not counting on it. The president has a terrible record of initial public pronouncements on national security. He has a habit of confidently stating things that turn out not to be true. Three times in the last four years he has appeared in the Rose Garden and made assertions that were later proven to be false. He and his national security team have again and again described a world that does not correspond to reality. No reason to assume these concessions to Iran will be any different.

The U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, was attacked on September 11, 2012. Four Americans were killed, including our ambassador. Obama delivered remarks on the attack in the Rose Garden the following day. “No acts of terror will ever shake the resolve of this great nation,” he said. What he didn’t say was that the killings in Benghazi specifically were a “terrorist attack” or “terrorism.” On 60 Minutes, when asked if he believed Benghazi was a “terrorist attack,” the president replied, “It’s too early to know how this came about.” On September 14, neither the president nor Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called what had happened a terrorist attack. On September 15, Obama referred to Benghazi as a “tragic attack.” On September 16, Susan Rice, then U.N. ambassador, called it a “spontaneous attack.”

By September 24, when Obama recorded a campaign interview with The View, he again refused to say Benghazi was an attack by terrorists. “We’re still doing an investigation,” he told Joy Behar. It was not until two days later that administration officials began referring to Benghazi as a terrorist attack—something the Libyan government had been saying since September 13.

The story originally put out by the White House, that Benghazi was the result of spontaneous anger at an Internet video offensive to Muslim extremists, fell apart in a matter of days. Yet the White House persisted in its false description of reality, declining to confirm what was widely accepted as a premeditated terrorist assault on a U.S. compound, and chose to ascribe responsibility for the events in question to anti-Islamic bias. The evidence continues to mount that Ansar al-Sharia, the Qaeda affiliate in lawless Libya, was behind the events of September 11, 2012, not the stupid video. …

David Harsanyi writes on the false choice presented to the country.

“It’s either this or war.”

War?! Well, jeez, if those are our choices everyone better get on board, pronto.

According to Politico, this false choice is the central political argument the White House plans to use to convince members of Congress, voters, and allies that capitulation to Iran is the best course of action. It’s not surprising since that’s been the standard rhetorical ammo used by Left since Iranian negotiations began. If you’re not as anxious as others to help an apocalyptic, terror-funded, destabilizing regime reach the threshold of nuclear weapons, you, my friend, are the warmonger.

So what happens if the “framework for an understanding of a potential agreement” falls apart? The Iranians are, after all, notoriously unreliable in negotiations, with a long history of lying about their intentions and breaking agreements. How soon will Obama, who can barely get himself to say an unkind word about the Iranian regime, deploy ground troops to take care of business? Maybe someone will ask him.

As a political matter, this Obama standby–my economic plan or ruin, my climate plan or Armageddon, my health-care plan or death–makes the very act of coming to any “deal” palatable because the alternative is unfathomable.  It’s also an easy way smear the enemies of peace–Israel and Congress, in this case–and dismiss any legitimate concerns they have regarding security as inconsequential because no matter how bad this deal looks, the imaginary consequences of not doing it are far worse.

“This is very complicated. A lot of this is hard to talk about to the American people,” one senior administration told Politico. “This is tough stuff to put your mind around.” So they will simplify it for you. …

Judith Miller penned an interesting WSJ OpEd on the Iraq War and “stubborn myths.”

I took America to war in Iraq. It was all me.

OK, I had some help from a duplicitous vice president, Dick Cheney. Then there was George W. Bush, a gullible president who could barely locate Iraq on a map and who wanted to avenge his father and enrich his friends in the oil business. And don’t forget the neoconservatives in the White House and the Pentagon who fed cherry-picked intelligence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, or WMD, to reporters like me.

None of these assertions happens to be true, though all were published and continue to have believers. This is not how wars come about, and it is surely not how the war in Iraq occurred. Nor is it what I did as a reporter for the New York Times. These false narratives deserve, at last, to be retired.

There was no shortage of mistakes about Iraq, and I made my share of them. The newsworthy claims of some of my prewar WMD stories were wrong. But so is the enduring, pernicious accusation that the Bush administration fabricated WMD intelligence to take the country to war. Before the 2003 invasion, President Bush and other senior officials cited the intelligence community’s incorrect conclusions about Saddam’s WMD capabilities and, on occasion, went beyond them. But relying on the mistakes of others and errors of judgment are not the same as lying.

I have never met George W. Bush. I never discussed the war with Dick Cheney until the winter of 2012, years after he had left office and I had left the Times. I wish I could have interviewed senior officials before the war about the role that WMDs played in the decision to invade Iraq. The White House’s passion for secrecy and aversion to the media made that unlikely. Less senior officials were of help as sources, but they didn’t make the decisions.

No senior official spoon-fed me a line about WMD. That would have been so much easier than uncovering classified information that officials can be jailed for disclosing. My sources were the same counterterrorism, arms-control and Middle East analysts on whom I had relied for my stories about Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda’s growing threat to America—a series published eight months before 9/11 for which the Times staff, including me, won a Pulitzer. …

Paul Campos, law prof from Boulder, writes on the real reason college tuition is so high.

ONCE upon a time in America, baby boomers paid for college with the money they made from their summer jobs. Then, over the course of the next few decades, public funding for higher education was slashed. These radical cuts forced universities to raise tuition year after year, which in turn forced the millennial generation to take on crushing educational debt loads, and everyone lived unhappily ever after.

This is the story college administrators like to tell when they’re asked to explain why, over the past 35 years, college tuition at public universities has nearly quadrupled, to $9,139 in 2014 dollars. It is a fairy tale in the worst sense, in that it is not merely false, but rather almost the inverse of the truth.

The conventional wisdom was reflected in a recent National Public Radio series on the cost of college. “So it’s not that colleges are spending more money to educate students,” Sandy Baum of the Urban Institute told NPR. “It’s that they have to get that money from someplace to replace their lost state funding — and that’s from tuition and fees from students and families.”

In fact, public investment in higher education in America is vastly larger today, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than it was during the supposed golden age of public funding in the 1960s. Such spending has increased at a much faster rate than government spending in general. For example, the military’s budget is about 1.8 times higher today than it was in 1960, while legislative appropriations to higher education are more than 10 times higher. …

… By contrast, a major factor driving increasing costs is the constant expansion of university administration. According to the Department of Education data, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, which Bloomberg reported was 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions.

Even more strikingly, an analysis by a professor at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, found that, while the total number of full-time faculty members in the C.S.U. system grew from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183 — a 221 percent increase. …

NY Post OpEd on the “Kennedy Whitewash.”

… On the occasion of the opening of an “Edward M. Kennedy Institute” in Boston, “CBS Evening News” anchor Scott Pelley oozed, “Another New England superstar was honored today.

Politics was his game, and we’ll have his story next.” There was not one discouraging word — not even the word “liberal” — applied to arguably the single most left-wing senator of all time.

This is not a bipartisan practice. When President George W. Bush dedicated his library on April 25, 2013, CBS reporter Jim Axelrod insisted that “this library is an intellectual fortress defending one of the most controversial modern presidents, whose time in office saw the [9/11] attack on the US, two wars and the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.”

The whitewash was so complete that even “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace barked up the carnival: “Up next, our Power Player of the Week: Vicki Kennedy, on her husband’s vision to inspire new generations about the US Senate.”

Wallace noted that Teddy was fiercely partisan, and the second Mrs. Kennedy replied, “He was the proudest Democrat that there was, but the great thing about Teddy was that he always listened to the other side and worked so well with the other side.”

Except he didn’t.

Let us recall his vicious “Robert Bork’s America” speech in 1987, when he stated, “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government.” …

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Here’s an item from the Washington Post that portrays the country in a favorable light. Turns out there are more museums in the country than there are Starbucks and McDonald’s combined.

There are roughly 11,000 Starbucks locations in the United States, and about 14,000 McDonald’s restaurants. But combined, the two chains don’t come close to the number of museums in the U.S., which stands at a whopping 35,000.

So says the latest data release from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, an independent government agency that tallies the number and type of museums in this country. By their count the 35,000 active museums represent a doubling from the number estimated in the 1990s.

While most of us think of massive institutions like the Smithsonian and the Guggenheim when we think of museums, one lesson of the new data is that the majority of U.S. museums are small, nearly mom-and-pop affairs. Of the roughly 25,000 museums with income data in the file, 15,000 of them  reported an annual income of less than $10,000 on their latest IRS returns.

And these museums are literally everywhere. Below, I mapped the total number of museums per county in the U.S., in both raw number and per-capita terms.

One shocker? The nation’s cultural capital, at least as measured by number of museums, isn’t New York, but rather Los Angeles — a city known more for Hollywood and the Hiltons than for Holbein and history. L.A.County has 681 museums compared to New YorkCounty’s 414. Chicago (CookCounty), San Diego and D.C. round out the rest of the top five. …

The above is a good illustration of some of the things Alexis de Tocqueville found when he studied the United States almost 200 years ago. The Learning To Give blog has a post on de Tocqueville’s writings on American “associations.” The complete post is not here because of length. Follow the link if you wish to read it all.

… Tocqueville does not use the word “philanthropy ” which means literally, “the love of people.” But he writes extensively about the American phenomenon of forming ” associations ” of all types including professional, social, civil, and political. It is in this discussion of associations that the modern student may understand how Tocqueville’s observations relate to philanthropy—now understood to mean the contribution of financial support and volunteer resources to the not-for-profit, non-governmental organizations which aim to serve the public good and improve the quality of human lives.

Tocqueville’s description of associations is an enduring impact of Democracy in America . Tocqueville’s extensive analysis of the role associations play in strengthening and moderating democracy are widely cited, and highly influential on the structure of American philanthropy. Tocqueville viewed the proliferation of associations as a unique response that was not only critical to the success of the experiment of democratic government, but also served to provide for the well-being of all of its citizens in accordance with a sense of equality that was previously unknown (Tocqueville 1840).

“In the United States, as soon as several inhabitants have taken an opinion or an idea they wish to promote in society, they seek each other out and unite together once they have made contact. From that moment, they are no longer isolated but have become a power seen from afar whose activities serve as an example and whose words are heeded” (Tocqueville 1840, 599). …

A NY Times report shows how sheer chance plays a role in who comes down with cancer. 

Unlike Ebola, flu or polio, cancer is a disease that arises from within — a consequence of the mutations that inevitably occur when one of our 50 trillion cells divides and copies its DNA.

Some of these genetic misprints are caused by outside agents, chemical or biological, especially in parts of the body — the skin, the lungs and the digestive tract — most exposed to the ravages of the world. But millions every second occur purely by chance — random, spontaneous glitches that may be the most pervasive carcinogen of all.

It’s a truth that grates against our deepest nature. That was clear earlier this month when a paper in Science on the prominent role of “bad luck” and cancer caused an outbreak of despair, outrage and, ultimately, disbelief.

The most intemperate of this backlash — mini-screeds on Twitter and hit-and-run comments on the web — suggested that the authors, Cristian Tomasetti and Bert Vogelstein of JohnsHopkinsUniversity, must be apologists for chemical companies or the processed food industry. In fact, their study was underwritten by nonprofit cancer foundations and grants from the National Institutes of Health. In some people’s minds, those were just part of the plot.

What psychologists call apophenia — the human tendency to see connections and patterns that are not really there — gives rise to conspiracy theories. It is also at work, though usually in a milder form, in our perceptions about cancer and our revulsion to randomness. …

Science Magazine suggests the white skin of Europeans is a relatively new development.

Most of us think of Europe as the ancestral home of white people. But a new study shows that pale skin, as well as other traits such as tallness and the ability to digest milk as adults, arrived in most of the continent relatively recently. The work, presented here last week at the 84th annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, offers dramatic evidence of recent evolution in Europe and shows that most modern Europeans don’t look much like those of 8000 years ago. …

An article in the Christian Science Monitor says the conviction of Atlanta educators in a widespread cheating scandal is just the tip of the iceberg.

A jury convicted 11 educators of racketeering Wednesday for their role in the Atlanta cheating scandal. But nationally, there’s a strong split between those who see their actions as an aberration and those who would convict right alongside them the accountability systems that have attached increasingly high stakes to standardized tests in recent decades.

The teachers and administrators face potentially harsh sentences for a conspiracy to manipulate test scores – which investigators said involved more than 44 schools and about 180 educators. Eleven out of 12 who went to trial were convicted, and they were sent immediately to jail to await sentencing (with the exception of one who is pregnant).

For opponents of such high-stakes testing, there’s likely to be more sympathy for the educators because of undue pressures being placed on teachers by an overemphasis on test scores. But for proponents of accountability, it’s just as easy to hold up these educators as an example of why strong objective systems are needed to oversee and measure educators’ performance.

The pressured atmosphere doesn’t justify cheating, but it’s one indication of a much larger problem, say critics of how testing has been used.

Especially as the federal government has pushed states to tie teacher evaluation policies to standardized-test gains, the testing regimen “creates a climate in school where you have to boost scores by hook or by crook,” says Robert Schaeffer, a spokesman for the NationalCenter for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest).

Atlanta offered up extreme examples such as test-cheating “parties.” But “Atlanta is the tip of the test-cheating iceberg,” Mr. Schaeffer says, with other cases surfacing in about 39 states, including a dozen or more that showed widespread cheating. …

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It is surprising to learn 99% of transocean data and voice traffic is carried in undersea cables. Scientific American reports on a visit to a cablesystem’s maintainence operation.

Today, 99 percent of our transoceanic data traffic—including phone calls, text and e-mail messages, Web sites, digital images and video, and even some television—travels across the oceans via undersea cables. These cable systems, as opposed to satellites, carry most of the intercontinental Internet traffic. In her new book, The Undersea Network, New York University assistant professor of media, culture and communication Nicole Starosielski tracks submarine systems as they thread together small islands and major urban hubs, conflicts at coastal landing points, and Cold-War–era cable stations.
 
In this excerpt Starosielski visits the network operations centers where global cable systems are monitored and maintained by a small group of elite engineers.

Entering the network operations center of a globe-spanning undersea cable system, I find what you might expect: a room dominated by computer screens, endless information feeds of network activity, and men carefully monitoring the links that carry Internet traffic in and out of the country. At first glance, it seems to be a place of mere supervision, where the humans sit around and watch machines do the work of international connection, waiting only for a moment of crisis, such as when a local fishing boat drops an anchor on the cable or a tsunami sweeps the system down into a trench.
 
This vision of autonomous networks is shaped more by Hollywood cinema than by actual cable operations. In reality, our global cable network is always in a sort of crisis and, at the same time, highly dependent on humans to power the steady flow of information transmissions. …

The Economist reports on a study that indicates animals may be able to sense impending earthquakes.

SEISMOLOGISTS tend to greet the idea that some animals know when an earthquake is coming with a sizeable degree of scepticism. Though reports of odd animal behaviour before a quake date back at least as far as ancient Greece, the data are all anecdotal. They are also subject to vagaries of the human psyche: “confirmation bias” ensures that strange behaviour not followed by earthquakes gets forgotten, and “flashbulb memory” can, should an earthquake strike, imbue quotidian animal antics with great import after the fact. The US Geological Survey—arguably the world’s authority on earthquakes—undertook studies in the 1970s to find out if animals really did predict them, but came up empty-handed. However, the latest data, just published in Physics and Chemistry of the Earth, are not just anecdotal.

Friedemann Freund of San JoseStateUniversity, in California, and his colleagues considered the earthquake of magnitude seven that hit north-eastern Peru in August 2011. They found that, by coincidence, the nearby YanachagaNational Park had in the month running up to the quake been using nine so-called camera traps. These are employed to track the movements of rare or skittish animals, silently snapping pictures (for example, that above, of a paca) when motion sensors are triggered. …

Remember when Sweet and Low was said to cause cancer. Turns out according to Futurity, it may fight cancer.

Labeled as a cancer-causing chemical for decades and declared safe about 15 years ago, saccharin may actually inhibit the growth of cancer cells, according to new research.

The artificial sweetener shows considerable promise for its ability to block an enzyme upregulated in many cancers that helps tumor cells survive and metastasize, researchers say.

After testing its effectiveness on cancer cells, scientists believe saccharin could eventually lead to the development of drugs that treat highly aggressive cancers affecting the breast, liver, prostate, kidney, and pancreas, says Robert McKenna, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at University of Florida. …

Smithsonian Magazine reports on the male bonding rituals of elephants. It does not say they sit around and burp.

I spoke with O’Connell about elephant bonding and getting to know the Mushara posse. (The following has been edited for length.)

Why did you choose to focus your new book on male elephants?

Most people don’t realize that male elephants are very social animals. Having company is important to them. They form close bonds and have overtly ritual relationships. When a dominant male arrives on the scene, for example, you have the second-, third-, fourth-ranking bulls back up and let him into the best position at the water hole. The younger bulls will stand in line and wait to be able to place their trunks in his mouth. They are waiting with anticipation to be able to do this. In time, all of the bulls will come and greet the dominant male in the same way. It is extremely organized, like lining up to kiss the ring of a pope or a Mafioso don.

The big, older bulls are targets of poaching. People think of lone bulls out there, and they might think, “What is it going to hurt a population if you cull a few of those elephants?” But these old males are similar to matriarchs. They are repositories of knowledge, and they teach the next generation. …

Bonding is also important if you’re thinking of having a stroke. The Economist says stroke victims with companions get faster treatment.

… Stroke victims arriving with someone were more than twice as likely to be correctly diagnosed by the triage nurse, and had their CT scans performed earlier. Patients eligible for clot-busting medication also received it much faster if accompanied, although their numbers were too few for the researchers to be sure it was because they had company. The differences were far from trivial. Patients with one companion had CT scans an average of 15 minutes sooner than those unaccompanied. A second companion shaved a further 20 minutes off the wait, although three or more companions did not confer any additional benefit.

Dr Ifergane did not record who the companions were, however, or how they were able to reduce delays. He believes that it is probably a combination of focusing the attention of clinical staff on their loved ones, and providing basic care such as helping to move patients into bed. …

NY Times reports on a Finish study that says old folks gotta exercise and get some vitamin D.

Exercise and vitamin D supplements may help prevent injurious falls in older adults, a randomized trial found.

Finnish researchers recruited 409 women ages 70 to 80 who were living at home. They randomly assigned them to one of four groups: a placebo without exercise, daily vitamin D supplements without exercise, placebo with exercise, and vitamin D supplements with exercise. The exercises, done regularly over two years, concentrated on balance, weight bearing, strength and agility. The study is online at JAMA Internal Medicine.

Neither vitamin D supplements nor exercise reduced the number of falls. But compared with the placebo without exercise group, those who took vitamin D alone were 16 percent less likely to be injured in a fall; the placebo and exercise group were 54 percent less likely to be injured; and those who exercised and took supplements were 62 percent less likely to be hurt.

The authors suggest that physical conditioning and vitamin D increase bone density, which could help prevent injury.

“It’s important to develop muscle power, because without muscle power, you can’t have good balance,” said the lead author, Kirsti Uusi-Rasi, a senior researcher at the UKK Institute for Health Promotion Research. As for vitamin D supplements, she said, “If you have low levels, supplements are important, but if you have sufficient levels, more is not better.”