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For important stuff we turn to a NY Times story on one of Louisville Slugger’s bat makers.

Danny Luckett did some woodworking in high school. Other than that, his main qualification for a job that would help many major league hitters was simply saying yes to the man at the employment office.

“He said, ‘How do you feel about making baseball bats for a living?’ ” Luckett said last week. “I said, ‘Well, I need a job, so that sounds good to me.’ I’ve been here ever since.”

Luckett’s 46-year tenure as the longest-serving bat maker for Louisville Slugger came to an end on Friday, when he retired. Few had as much direct impact on producing the tools of the game.

Luckett is believed to have made more than two million bats for Louisville Slugger, which was bought by Wilson Sporting Goods in March but will retain its name and continue to manufacture bats in Louisville, Ky. Luckett said he was retiring not because of the sale but because, with his 68th birthday approaching, it was time.

He takes decades of highlights with him, including Oct. 11, 1972. With the best-of-five National League Championship Series between Pittsburgh and Cincinnati tied, two games apiece, Luckett went to work for the Reds’ star catcher.

“Johnny Bench hit a home run in the bottom of the ninth to tie the game with a bat I had turned that morning,” Luckett said. “Our representative took it to Cincinnati in the afternoon and he used it in the game.” …

The Washington Post Science section tells us how smart crows are. Pickerhead knew that, because crows are black, and not one of them was dumb enough to vote for obama.

… the greatest intellectual rival to the brainy apes may be a noisy scavenger with a sharp beak, bright eyes and a brain about the size of a walnut: the crow and its corvid relatives.

Crows and ravens are clever problem-solvers, expert toolmakers and adept social movers, but scientists haven’t reached a consensus about how corvid minds handle abstract thinking or how closely their mental processes resemble those of humans.

Researchers from the University of Iowa and LomonosovMoscowStateUniversity in Russiareported early this year that crows can use analogies to match pairs of objects. To reach that conclusion, the scientists trained crows to recognize whether two objects were identical or different, which the birds indicated by pressing one button when shown pictures of objects that matched and a different button when the objects didn’t match. Once all the birds were good at matching objects, researchers showed the crows images of pairs of objects. Some images depicted matched pairs, while others depicted two mismatched objects with different shapes or colors. In response, crows could press buttons to choose between a matched pair or a mismatched pair.

The researchers wanted to see if crows could figure out the relationship between pairs of objects and then choose a pair with the same relationship: matched or mismatched. For instance, a crow looking at a mismatched pair would then select the mismatched pair from their response choices. Nearly 78 percent of the time, the birds succeeded. According to the researchers, the birds recognized that the relationship between the two pairs of objects was the same. In other words, they were making analogies. …

… Corvids seem to understand that other birds have minds like theirs, and their decisions often take into account what others might know, want or intend, according to several studies of crows, ravens and jays. Psychologists call this a theory of mind, and it’s a fairly sophisticated cognitive ability. Humans don’t develop it until late in childhood. Crows and their fellow corvids are social animals, much like primates, so theory of mind probably offers significant evolutionary advantages.

For one thing, it may help prevent food theft. Crows and ravens often hide food in caches and retrieve it later. “You can actually see them watching both the other birds that they are with and the humans, and if they sense that they have been seen, they will take that food and they’ll go and hide it somewhere else,” Innes said of the Maryland Zoo’s ravens. The birds appear to realize that watchers will know where they’ve hidden the food and might use that knowledge to steal it later.

Studies of several corvid species have documented this re-caching, as it is called. …

National Geographic says North Carolina is having a perfect storm of conditions that could lead to shark attacks.

An unusual combination of factors has led to an increase in bites.

There have been six shark attacks in North Carolina this year, all of them in June.

This is already more than last year, when the state saw four attacks. In the previous decade, there were only 25 shark attacks in North Carolina. And there have been just 55 documented shark attacks in the state between 1905 and 2014.

So what’s going on this year?

“It’s kind of a perfect storm,” says George H. Burgess, the director of the International Shark Attack File at the Florida Museum of Natural History. Burgess says across the United States overall, shark attacks are on pace with an average year, and the chance of getting bit is still very low—an estimated one in 11.5 million for an ocean bather. But, he adds, “clearly, something is going on in North Carolina right now.”

Here’s why: …

Mental Floss reports 10 confessions of car salesmen. 

It may look like a world of balloons and bad tweed. But making a living on the lot is anything but a Sunday drive.

1. They read you like a book.

“I don’t care what anybody says, verbally,” says Prentiss Smith, the general manager at a Toyota dealership in Brookhaven, Mississippi. “If they pull up on our lot, they might say they’re not ready to buy, but that’s not true.” Salespeople watch for subtle signs to read your mind. “If it’s a trade-in and I’m doing an appraisal, I see how much gas is in there,” says Daniel Wheeler, an Oregon-based Hyundai salesman. “If it’s a quarter of a tank or below, it’s usually a fairly good sign [a customer is] ready to purchase.” David Teves, a California-based salesman who writes the blog Confessions of a Car Man, says he can determine a customer’s mood by the parking spot they choose. “There’s a place at the end of our lot we call ‘Laydown Lane’ because the people who park there are too timid to park out front. They’re either total ‘laydowns’—which means they buy whatever you want for whatever price—or they have extremely bad credit.”

2. They are speaking in code to each other. (Yes, about you.) …

Popular Science says “sugar highs” in children is something in parent’s minds.

… Milich and Hoover concluded that the link between sugar and behavior might be based on parents’ expectations, not on the sweetener itself.

There might also be other factors at play when sugared-up kids go nuts. Candy and cake, for example, are staples on Halloween and at birthday parties—events rife with kid drama. Or there might be other substances in the mix. Chocolate, for instance, is packed with stimulants, such as caffeine and theobromine.

Still, for many parents, sugar remains the go-to scapegoat, even if proof is lacking. “We’re always looking to explain our behavior,” Milich says. “We don’t like to be in a vacuum where something happens and we don’t know why.”

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The country’s second worst president wrote a book telling us how wonderful he was. David Harsanyi brings some facts.

Jimmy Carter’s new book, “A Full Life: Reflections at 90” is a breezy and predictable reminiscence of the 39th president’s life, from his rural Georgia upbringing to his post-presidential charitable work. You should take it out of the library. I can’t admit to reading every word, but I did have a particular interest in the parts focusing on Carter’s perception of his own presidency. And, as you might have guessed, according to Jimmy Carter Jimmy Carter is one of the dynamic and indispensable leaders this country has ever known.

One chapter that might catch the attention of a curious reader is titled “Issues Mostly Resolved.” So what issues were solved during the Jimmy Carter years? Well, “Human Rights and Latin America,” “The Hostage Crisis, and the Final Year,” “Hungarian Crown,” “China,” and yes, “Middle East Peace.” Good to know that he put that one to bed. …

… Carter expediently skips one historic event that puts his handwritten notes into some perspective.

In 1977, during an interview with CBS, Sadat mentioned that if he were ever presented with a proper invitation from Jerusalem he would visit without any preconditions. This was, in the context of history,  a courageous thing to do. At a time when no Arab country had diplomatic ties with Israel much less recognized its existence. Begin—who Carter’s paints as a warmonger—immediately presented Sadat with a formal invitation to address the Knesset through the American Embassy in Cairo. The Knesset—with only a handful of opposition votes—overwhelmingly approved the invitation. The Carter Administration had nothing to do with it.

Here is what The Washington Post had to say at the time:

“In Washington, the Carter administration, which until today had played no role in helping arrange what had been an almost unthinkable meeting, appeared to be dramatically revising upward its opinion of the event’s importance.”

The peace deal fell into Jimmy Carter’s lap. …

Always ungracious, Carter has started running down the worst president’s record. Pickerhead thinks that’s like taking coals to Newcastle. Free Beacon has the story.

President Obama was criticized last week by the president he is often compared to, Jimmy Carter.

Carter told an Aspen Institute audience that Obama’s accomplishments on foreign policy “have been minimal” and that the United States’ influence is “lower than it was six or seven years ago.”

After proclaiming John Kerry “one of the best secretaries of state we’ve ever had,” Carter dumped cold water on Obama’s record abroad.

“On the world stage, I think [Obama’s accomplishments] have been minimal,” Carter said. “I think he has done some good things domestically, like health reform and so forth. But on the world stage, just to be objective about it, I can’t think of many nations in the world where we have a better relationship now than when he took over.” …

Jonah Goldberg writes on race identity as practiced by the left.

… Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal announced this week that he’s running for president. In anticipation of his announcement, the Washington Post assigned two white writers to declare, in effect, that Jindal — the son of Indian immigrants — isn’t a real Indian. The Post promoted the story on Twitter with a quote from a college professor proclaiming, “There’s not much Indian left in Bobby Jindal.”

The liberal New Republic followed suit with an attack on Jindal, as well as on South Carolina governor Nikki Haley and conservative writer Dinesh D’Souza (Haley is the daughter of immigrants, D’Souza an immigrant himself), as, essentially Uncle Tom Indians who had to shamefully scrub their Indian identities for their political careers.

In the Post’s unsubtle telling, Jindal’s sin is loving America too much. As a young child, he changed his name from Piyush to Bobby (after Bobby from The Brady Bunch). “My parents put a strong emphasis on education, hard work, an unshakable faith,” Jindal told the Post. “It doesn’t matter who you are or what your last name is. You can be anything in America.” As a teenager he became a Christian.

“He said recently that he wants to be known simply as an American,” the Post informed us, “not an Indian American.”

The horror. Twitter erupted with hashtags like “Jindian” and “BobbyJindalIsSoWhite,” in which liberals flung every variant of Uncle Tom jokes you could think of, and many I hope you couldn’t. …

Bret Stephens says Michael Oren has made the right enemies.

Michael Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to the United States, has written the smartest and juiciest diplomatic memoir that I’ve read in years, and I’ve read my share. The book, called “Ally,” has the added virtues of being politically relevant and historically important. This has the Obama administration—which doesn’t come out looking too good in Mr. Oren’s account—in an epic snit.

The tantrum began two weeks ago, when Mr. Oren penned an op-ed in this newspaper undiplomatically titled “How Obama Abandoned Israel.” The article did not acquit Israel of making mistakes in its relations with the White House, but pointed out that most of those mistakes were bungles of execution. The administration’s slights toward Israel were usually premeditated.

Like, for instance, keeping Jerusalem in the dark about Washington’s back-channel negotiations with Tehran, which is why Israel appears to be spying on the nuclear talks in Switzerland. Or leaking news of secret Israeli military operations against Hezbollah in Syria.

Mr. Oren’s op-ed prompted Dan Shapiro, U.S. ambassador in Tel Aviv, to call Mr. Netanyahu and demand he publicly denounce the op-ed. The prime minister demurred on grounds that Mr. Oren, now a member of the Knesset, no longer works for him. The former ambassador, also one of Israel’s most celebrated historians, isn’t even a member of Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party, which makes him hard to typecast as a right-wing apparatchik. …

 

… His (Oren’s) memoir is the best contribution yet to a growing literature—from Vali Nasr’s “Dispensable Nation” to Leon Panetta’s “Worthy Fights”—describing how foreign policy is made in the Age of Obama: lofty in its pronouncements and rich in its self-regard, but incompetent in its execution and dismal in its results. Good for Mr. Oren for providing such comprehensive evidence of the facts as he lived them.

We opened today kicking Carter and close with John Hinderaker pointing out the latest bit of hypocrisy from the NY Times.

This is from yesterday’s Twitchy, but, assuming that most of our readers don’t haunt Twitter, it bears repeating here. Following the Charlie Hebdo murders, the New York Times covered the terrorist attack, but declined to print any of Charlie Hebdo’s mocking images of Muhammad. The paper self-righteously declared a policy against showing religious images that may be deemed offensive:

‘ “Out of respect to our readers we have avoided those we felt were offensive,” New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet told The Huffington Post on Monday night….’

But that was then and this is now. Or, put another way, no one is afraid of being slaughtered by Catholics. So yesterday’s ArtsBeat section featured this portrait of Pope Benedict XVI made from 17,000 condoms: