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Craig Pirrong reacts to a WSJ article suggesting Turkey used supposed attacks on ISIS as cover for their continuing campaign against the Kurds.

Apparently the administration is shocked! Shocked! that Turkey took advantage of its deal with the US to hammer its real enemy (the Kurds) while leaving its frenemy (ISIS) virtually untouched:

Turkey has launched a series of aggressive airstrikes against Kurdish militants but has yet to turn its firepower on Islamic State in Syria as expected, increasing concerns in Washington about the Ankara government’s intentions.

. . . .

But some U.S. officials suspect Turkey is using its recent agreement with the U.S. to fight Islamic State as cover for a new offensive against Kurdish separatist group PKK.

A senior U.S. official said Turkey gave American officials assurances last week that it planned to wrap up attacks on the Kurds in short order, but it has kept up the bombardments focused on the group’s bases in northern Iraq near the Turkish border.

“It’s clear that ISIL was a hook,” said a senior U.S. military official, referring to Islamic State. “Turkey wanted to move against the PKK, but it needed a hook.”

Who knew? This was evident within minutes of the deal being announced, and should have been eminently foreseeable. The US got conned. Played. Pantsed. Obama and Kerry were chumps. Suckers. Patsies. Marks. So yes, the answer is (e)!

But by all means, after seeing them getting totally taken by a duplicitous Middle Eastern autocrat, we should totally trust their assurances that they have this Iran thing completely under control. With such an abysmal record of diplomatic failures, of which this is just the latest, Obama’s superciliousness towards the numerous critics of the Iran deal (supercilious, when he isn’t accusing them of warmongering and treason) is an amazing thing to behold.

In the Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick says American Jews need to oppose the Iran agreement.

American Jewry is being tested today as never before. The future of the community is tied up in the results of the test.

If the Jews of America are able to mount a successful, forceful and sustained opposition to President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, which allows the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism to become a nuclear-armed state and provides it with $150 billion up front, then the community will survive politically to fight another day.

If the communal leadership and its members fail to fight, American Jews will find themselves communally disenfranchised. …

 

… By singling out and demonizing Jewish American opponents of the deal as corrupt, treacherous warmongers, Obama is setting the conditions for treating them as disloyal citizens can expected to be treated.

In other words, at best, Jewish opponents can expect to find themselves treated like other Obama opponents – such as Tea Party groups that were hounded and harassed by the IRS and other governmental organs.

AIPAC can expect to be subjected to humiliating, public and prejudicial probes. Jewish institutions and groups can expect to be picketed, vandalized and sued. Jewish activists can expect to be audited by the IRS.

In that meeting with American Jewish leaders, Obama seemed to present them with a choice. He reportedly told AIPAC’s representatives, “If you guys would back down [from their opposition to the deal], I would back down from some of the things I’m doing.”

Actually, he gave them no real options. Obama effectively told the leaders of the American Jewish community that as far as he is concerned, Jews have no right to advance their collective concerns as Jews. If they do, he will attack them. If they give up that right under duress, then he will leave them alone. So remain free and be hounded, or give up your rights and be left alone.

Some commentators have characterized the fight over the deal as a fight for the soul of the Democratic Party. This may be the case. But first and foremost, it is a fight over whether or not Jews in America have the same rights as all other Americans.

To be sure, Israel will be harmed greatly if Congress fails to vote down this deal. But Israel has other means of defending itself. If this deal goes through, the greatest loser will be American Jewry.

Debra Saunders says sanctuary cities are havens for criminals. 

“I am not remiss to say that from Washington, D.C., to Sacramento, there is a blood trail to Marilyn Pharis’ bedroom,” Santa Maria, California, police Chief Ralph Martin charged last week. On July 24, two burglars allegedly broke in to Pharis’ home as she slept. They sexually assaulted and beat her. Pharis, 64, a U.S. Air Force veteran, died in the hospital Aug. 1. It turns out that one of the two men charged for the crime, Victor Aureliano Martinez Ramirez, 29, is an undocumented immigrant against whom Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued a detainer in 2014. Ramirez has pleaded not guilty.

The case seems like Kate Steinle all over again. On July 1, Steinle was strolling on Pier 14 in San Francisco with her father, when a bullet pierced her heart. Authorities charged Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, a seven-time convicted felon and undocumented immigrant who had been deported five times, with murder. He pleaded not guilty. If the San Francisco sheriff had honored an ICE detainer, Lopez-Sanchez would not have been in San Francisco on July 1.

I always thought there was a covenant with those who come to this country, legally or illegally. They’re supposed to be on their best behavior as a condition of staying. I thought President Barack Obama understood that when he promised to focus on deporting “felons, not families, criminals, not children, gang members, not a mom who’s working hard to provide for her kids.” But the administration has overly narrowed its view of criminal behavior, such that ICE targets only felons and undocumented immigrants convicted of three or more serious misdemeanors. …

John Fund says it’s Bill and Hill against the little people.

The late real estate magnate Leona Helmsley sealed her reputation as the “queen of mean” when she told a housekeeper, “We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.”

Hillary Clinton is under new scrutiny after the revelation that some of the e-mails on her now-infamous private server included information then classified as “top secret.” Her flat denial in March that classified information ever passed through the server was laughable at the time, and it’s been proven false now. But no one expects the Obama administration to punish Hillary the way it has so many “little people” who have mishandled classified data in the course of their government service.

Take former State Department analyst Stephen Kim. He’s now serving a 13-month sentence in a federal prison for leaking classified data on North Korea to Fox News reporter James Rosen, who in turn had his e-mail records searched by the Obama Justice Department without his knowledge. Journalist Peter Maass has made a compelling case that the North Korean material wasn’t sensitive: “According to court documents, one State Department official described the intelligence assessment as ‘a nothing burger,’ while another official said Rosen’s story had disclosed ‘nothing extraordinary.’” But Kim sits in prison nonetheless, a victim of the Obama Administration’s crackdown on the abuse of classified material. …

… But the rules on many matters were in Bill Clinton’s eyes only to be applied to “little people.” In 1996, Clinton had the nerve to argue in a Supreme Court filing that he was on “active duty” in the military, and thus immune from Paula Jones’s sexual harassment suit under the 1940 Soldiers and Sailors Act. (He later quietly dropped that absurd claim.) But soldiers under Clinton’s command were routinely punished for the same kind of misbehavior. Kelly Flinn, a female Air Force bomber pilot, resigned rather than face a court martial for lying about adultery to superiors. In 1998, the same year as the Lewinsky scandal, Sergeant major Gene McKinney was tried for sexual misconduct similar to that alleged against the president by Kathleen Willey. McKinney was acquitted of the misconduct charges, but convicted of obstruction of justice. …

Ron Fournier lambasts Jennifer Palmieri, Clinton spokesperson for her deflections, deceptions, and untruths. Here’s his close. The heavy type is Palmieri.

… “Hillary has remained absolutely committed to cooperating.”

This line would be laughable if it wasn’t so pathetic. From the start, Clinton has been committed to defying—not cooperating. 

“The server will remain private,” she vowed in March. Her attorney told Congress there was “no basis” to support a third-party examination of the server. Besides, he said, the server had been scrubbed. “There are no hdr22@clintonemail.com emails from Secretary of State Clinton’s tenure on the server for any review, even if such a review were appropriate or legally authorized,” attorney David Kendall wrote Congress. 

“This kind of nonsense comes with the territory of running for president.” 

No, it doesn’t. 

This kind of nonsense come with the territory of a Clinton running for president. 

The original sin is her decision to seize control of public documents. Clinton owns every ugly twist and turn, including harsh media coverage and GOP overreach.

“We’re committed to getting the real story out there.”

No, you’re not.

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From the NY Times, we learn part of the Lost Colony of Roanoke Island, NC might have been found.

MERRY HILL, N.C. — Under a blistering sun, Nicholas M. Luccketti swatted at mosquitoes as he watched his archaeology team at work in a shallow pit on a hillside above the shimmering waters of Albemarle Sound. On a table in the shade, a pile of plastic bags filled with artifacts was growing. Fragments of earthenware and pottery. A mashed metal rivet. A piece of a hand-wrought nail.

They call the spot Site X. Down a dusty road winding through soybean fields, the clearing lies between two cypress swamps teeming with venomous snakes. It is a suitably mysterious name for a location that may shed light on an enigma at the heart of America’s founding: the fate of the “lost colonists” who vanished from a sandy outpost on Roanoke Island, about 60 miles east, in the late 16th century.

On and off for three years, Mr. Luccketti and colleagues with the First Colony Foundation have been excavating parts of the hillside, hoping to find traces of the colonists. As if clues in a latter-day treasure hunt, hidden markings on a 16th-century map led them to the spot on the sound’s western shore, which Mr. Luccketti had previously surveyed.

Mr. Luccketti, 66, chose his words carefully as he described the fruits of their latest work. “I’m trying to make sure that I say this correctly,” he said. “We have evidence from this site that strongly indicates that there were Roanoke colonists here.” …

… The story of the Lost Colony of Roanoke has long lent a spooky note to grade schoolers’ study of American history. In 1587, an intrepid Englishman named John White took more than 100 settlers to Roanoke Island, which lies inside the chain of barrier islands that is today called the Outer Banks. It was Sir Walter Raleigh’s second attempt to colonize North Carolina, but the first to include civilians and families. White’s granddaughter, Virginia Dare, was the first child born in the New World to English parents, just a few weeks after their arrival.

A resupply trip sent White back to England, but a naval war with Spain delayed his return. When he finally came back, three years after he left, the settlers had vanished, but they had left behind cryptic clues: …

… The fact that the property was undisturbed was something of a miracle. Tucked into economically depressed and largely rural Bertie County, the land had been slated for development into more than 2,000 luxury condominiums, restaurants and a marina, but the plan collapsed after the financial crisis of 2008.

North Carolina law requires archaeological surveys before large coastal developments can proceed. By coincidence, the developers had hired Mr. Luccketti’s outfit, the James River Institute for Archaeology, to survey the site in 2007. …

The Guardian, UK reports on another mystery that might be solved. What happened to Neanderthals?

Dogs are humanity’s oldest friends, renowned for their loyalty and abilities to guard, hunt and chase. But modern humans may owe even more to them than we previously realised. We may have to thank them for helping us eradicate our caveman rivals, the Neanderthals.

According to a leading US anthropologist, early dogs, bred from wolves, played a critical role in the modern human’s takeover of Europe 40,000 years ago when we vanquished the Neanderthal locals.

“At that time, modern humans, Neanderthals and wolves were all top predators and competed to kill mammoths and other huge herbivores,” says Professor Pat Shipman, of Pennsylvania State University. “But then we formed an alliance with the wolf and that would have been the end for the Neanderthal.”

If Shipman is right, she will have solved one of evolution’s most intriguing mysteries. Modern humans are known to have evolved in Africa. They began to emigrate around 70,000 years ago, reaching Europe 25,000 years later. The continent was then dominated by our evolutionary cousins, the Neanderthals, who had lived there for more than 200,000 years. However, within a few thousand years of our arrival, they disappeared. …

From Futurity we learn sleeping on our sides is good for our brains.

Sleeping on your side—rather than your back or stomach—may be the best way to rid your brain of waste. It may even help reduce the chances of developing Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other neurological diseases.

Researchers used dynamic contrast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to image the brain’s glymphatic pathway, a complex system that clears wastes and other harmful chemical solutes from the brain.

A lateral sleeping position is the best position to most efficiently remove waste from the brain. It’s also the most common way to sleep for humans and many other animals. The buildup of brain waste chemicals may contribute to the development of Alzheimer’s disease and other neurological conditions, researchers say. …

And Forbes says there’s more evidence coffee is good for your brain. 

I know by now news on coffee research is a little hard to swallow, considering how often new studies come out with contradictory conclusions. But don’t give up on coffee science just yet — a theme has emerged from the more credible studies, and the latest study in the dogpile is a worthy example.

So let’s get right to the point: according to the latest study, drinking a consistent, moderate amount of coffee each day significantly reduces the risk of developing mild cognitive impairment (MCI), a precursor to dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. …

The Koreans (Southern ones. The ones in the north are imprisoned by a type of ape posing as friends of the people.) continue to amaze with their production of high quality consumer goods. Samsung is a good example. Hyundai cars are another. WSJ-Rumble Seat reviewed Hyundai’s Genesis all wheel drive luxury sedan.  

TO ME, THE HYUNDAI BRAND will forever seem like a major-league expansion team. It wasn’t in the league when I was growing up—the Colorado Rockies? What kind of name is that, anyway?—so it will never own the full legitimacy of history no matter how many pennants it brings home.

And that’s OK. We already have a Ford. Hyundai’s role in the global passenger-car market is as an insurgent and disruptive force, shaking up the old franchises. No romance, no poetry, just a relentless, morally neutral march of commodity-car building across the globe. By unit sales, Hyundai is now the world’s fifth largest auto maker. Hyundai’s footprint in America includes California-based design studios, technical centers in Michigan and Arizona and vast assembly halls in Alabama, which disgorge daily fleets of crossovers and family haulers to driveways all over the northern continent. …

AWD (All Wheel Drive) availability has helped boost Genesis sales 60% in the past seven months, a pace which suggests pent-up demand. And then comes a raft, a slew, just a shopping list of stuff, some optional but a lot just kicked in, in the interests of invidious comparison. And whenever you talk about high-end Hyundais, you have to keep in mind all the optional equipment in the world doesn’t add up to a luxury car. Here, the cabin is kind of joyless and a bit dated, design-wise. The Genesis’ shared DNA with the Equus has imbued the smaller car with the big car’s remoteness, in a segment where at least a few will still drive for the fun of it.

But it’s got some gear. Of most consequence is the Automatic Emergency Braking system, which acts on data from the lane-departure and smart cruise-control sensors. It could also be called the Inattentive Driver Assist system. If you happen to be changing the radio station or digging through your purse for the toll transponder and fail to slow for stopped traffic ahead, it will do its level utmost to brake the car to avoid or at a minimum mitigate impact. Every car should, and I predict, will soon have this function.

Oh but we are just getting started, Batman. There’s the suite of Lane Change Assist, Blind-Spot Detection and Rear Cross-Traffic Alert systems that rely on rear-facing sensors to keep drivers apprised of what’s coming up behind. Watching out front is the Lane Keeping Assist System (LKAS), which puts an electronic hand on the tiller if the driver begins to wander. …

… Hyundai has also put a lot of equity into high-strength steel, as compared with aluminum construction; and the numbers look good. Hyundai claims the Genesis chassis torsional and bending stiffness now exceeds that of a BMW 5-series. The curb weight for the V6 AWD model is 4,295 pounds.

Meanwhile, the Genesis is one whole dress size bigger than its premium segment rivals: 123 cubic feet of interior space, according to Hyundai, handily outsizing an Mercedes E-class (113.1 cubic feet), whose numbers Hyundai was happy to provide.

Big, powerful, with an overqualified equipment list, the Genesis sedan makes a strong case for itself. And it is even, actually, handsome, with the masculine, single-frame grille up front and lovely strakes of chrome at the rocker panels. …

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Craig Pirrong with a Hillary update.

A few weeks ago I wrote the first in what I anticipated would be a running series of posts on Hillary Clinton. If the US is still a country of laws, not men (or women, in this instance), or if Hillary Clinton is an honorable individual, this would be a short-lived serial indeed. For today the State Department Inspector General determined that Clinton’s private email server contained a least two emails classified at extremely high levels. This despite her adamant (though utterly risible) denials that she ever discussed classified matters via her personal email. (I say risible because what Secretary of State would never discuss classified information in writing? If you believe she never did, I have a bridge spanning boroughs to sell to you cheap.)

Pair this story with another story that has been in the news and you know how bad it is. Namely, the story that the Chinese have penetrated the private emails of virtually all high ranking national security officials since at least 2010. And you know the Russians have done the same. And the Iranians. And maybe even the Tongans.

This is a felony. It appears to be open and shut. Hillary Clinton has no business holding any office or trust in the United States government, let alone the presidency. If this is a country of laws, she will be prosecuted and convicted, like David Petraeus. If she were a woman of honor, she would terminate her candidacy. But I have serious doubts on both scores-especially the last. Expect a barrage of vicious attacks on her critics (protect the queen! kill the messenger!), combined wit a campaign of obfuscation and denial. It’s the Clinton way. I can hope, but seriously I think this episode will be yet another demonstration of the low state to which this nation has descended.

Pending the outcome of this despicable affair, I will add to the Hillary Chronicles by writing about her New College Compact. I read it, so you don’t have to. Suffice it to say that it proves that Hillary only excels her dishonesty with her economic retardation. This document is triple distilled economic stupidity. 199 Proof. …

Roger Simon says he knows why Hillary is supporting the Iran deal.

… Nevertheless, Hillary has no choice but to support it for two reasons. One: Bernie Sanders is backing it and he is getting all the popular attention on the Democratic side.  But that’s minor and perhaps transitory.  The major reason is clear and deserves a separate paragraph.

Hillary Clinton is in such deep legal trouble over her emails that she needs the backing of Obama to survive.  [itals. mine] He controls the attorney general’s office and therefore he controls Hillary (and her freedom) as long as he is president. Everything she says and does in the presidential campaign must be viewed against this reality.  This is further enhanced by her need to hold together Obama’s electoral coalition.  But that’s the least of it compared to having erased 32,000 emails, most of which were undoubtedly government property, and done who-knows-what to the server, something that not even Nixon would ever have dreamed of.

Meanwhile,  Hillary’s — and other Democrats’ — support for the Iran deal has now basically been reduced to this: It may not be a terrific, but we’re stuck with it and it would be a huge embarrassment to vote it down now.  Moreover, the sanctions could never be reinstated, so what’s the point?  Oh, and by the way, if you don’t agree, you’re a warmonger. …

Noah Rothman posts on Hillary’s “slow motion implosion.”

“It is very likely,” Secretary of State John Kerry confirmed when asked by a CBS reporter if he believed the Russians and the Chinese were reading his emails. “I certainly write things with that awareness.” The Democratic Party’s elder statesman and former presidential nominee might have known that he was twisting the knife. While it was perhaps unintentional, his comments reflect an accurate assessment bubbling up from the liberal subconscious that Hillary Clinton has been irreparably damaged by the revelations regarding her scandalous conduct as Kerry’s predecessor at Foggy Bottom.

Hillary Clinton could have surrendered her “homebrew” email server, on which she conducted the affairs of state in violation of both State Department and White House guidelines, to a third party at any time. Indeed, that was the request of the Republican members of the House Select Committee on Benghazi. If she were so inclined, she could have rid herself of the suspicion that she had something to hide. Clinton might not have found exculpation in a third party investigation of the system that once held over 30,000 deleted emails that Clinton assured Americans were of no interest to them, she would have at least created the impression that she had belatedly embraced transparency. Instead, she dug in, closed ranks, and bristled with indignation at anyone who dared question her integrity. In the process, Clinton repeatedly misled the public and the press on matters both substantial and paltry.

Hillary Clinton could have done many things to mitigate the damage wrought to her political image by the steady stream of information about her behavior at State. Instead, in deference to the sense of entitlement her enablers have cultivated over a quarter-century, she did nothing. …

Jennifer Rubin calls it Hillary Clinton’s Al Capone moment. 

Al Capone famously never got put away for murder or mob activity. It was tax evasion that snared the iconic mobster. Hillary Clinton has yet to be charged with anything but the irony that she may have stumbled over a “technical” security rule is palpable.

The Post reports, “Hillary Rodham Clinton’s attorney has agreed to provide the FBI with the private server that housed her e-mail during her four years as secretary of state, Clinton’s presidential campaign said Tuesday. Her attorney also has agreed to give agents a thumb drive containing copies of thousands of e-mails that Clinton had previously turned over to the State Department.” According to ex-law enforcement officials and criminal law attorneys experienced with investigations of high-profile individuals with whom we have spoken, this is a nice way of saying: The FBI allowed her to hand over the material instead of suffering the embarrassment of a subpoena. …

We’ll let the liberal Ron Fournier finish off Hillary.

For once, Hillary Rodham Clinton seemed to be a decent candidate. Taking aim at weak spots in the GOP lines, she attacked Jeb Bush on women’s health, Marco Rubio on abortion, Scott Walker on college costs, and Donald Trump on sexism.

Then the stone wall crumbled around the Queen of Paradox: Hillary Clinton, both a political colossus and a catastrophe. We learned Tuesday night: 

—She will give the FBI a private, illicit server that housed her official email during her four years as secretary of State, including thousands that she covertly deleted. 

—Her attorney will give agents a thumb drive containing copies of the self-selected emails she returned to the State Department after discovery of the rogue server. 

—A top intelligence official reviewing just a handful of those emails told Congress that top-secret information had been contained in two emails that passed across the server.

Where do I start? How about with the Clinton campaign’s ridiculous suggestion that coughing up the server and email were voluntary acts. We know that’s bunk—because Clinton herself said she wouldn’t surrender the people’s records without a fight.

Andy Malcolm has late night humor.  

Conan: Donald Trump says he wanted to be “very civil” in Thursday’s debate. Instead of referring to all Hispanics as “criminals,” he called them “Criminal-Americans.”

Meyers: Donald Trump is still leading the Republican polls. Of course, it’s only a matter of time before Trump slips up and says something completely sane.

Conan: There is a rumor that the CEO of Starbucks might run for president. In fact, he opened up his first campaign headquarters and another one right across the street.

There was an unprecedented event in Major League Baseball last night – all 15 home teams won. Daily News has the story. 

Home sweep home.

When the Seattle Mariners beat Baltimore 6-5 in 10 innings Tuesday night, it marked the first time in baseball history all 15 home teams won on the same day.

Viewing every game as a 50-50 proposition independent of all others, STATS figured the odds of a home sweep on a night with a full major league schedule at 1 in 32,768.

Now that’s home cookin’!

STATS said previously the best performance by hosts had been 11-0, accomplished six times — three in the 1800s. The most recent occasion was Sept. 16, 1989. …

Lots of good Hillary cartoons today.

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Peter Whoriskey of WaPo who was last in Pickings June 1st when he reported on new research on salt, is back again popping bubbles. Turns out what the government nutritionists were telling us about the critical importance of breakfast is bogus. Fancy that, the government got something wrong! 

Researchers at a New York City hospital several years ago conducted a test of the widely accepted notion that skipping breakfast can make you fat.

For some nutritionists, this idea is an article of faith. Indeed, it is enshrined in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, the federal government’s advice book, which recommends having breakfast every day because “not eating breakfast has been associated with excess body weight.”

As with many nutrition tips, though, including some offered by the Dietary Guidelines, the tidbit about skipping breakfast is based on scientific speculation, not certainty, and indeed, it may be completely unfounded, as the experiment in New York indicated.

At 8:30 in the morning for four weeks, one group of subjects got oatmeal, another got frosted corn flakes and a third got nothing. And the only group to lose weight was … the group that skipped breakfast. Other trials, too, have similarly contradicted the federal advice, showing that skipping breakfast led to lower weight or no change at all.

“In overweight individuals, skipping breakfast daily for 4 weeks leads to a reduction in body weight,” the researchers from ColumbiaUniversity concluded in a paper published last year.

A closer look at the way that government nutritionists adopted the breakfast warning for the Dietary Guidelines shows how loose scientific guesses — possibly right, possibly wrong — can be elevated into hard-and-fast federal nutrition rules that are broadcast throughout the United States. …

WSJ Editors write on more government incompetence; this time the EPA.

‘Ghostbusters” has been playing again on cable, so we are reminded that the villain of that movie classic was a bully from the Environmental Protection Agency. He broke the ghost-containment grid and all hell broke loose. So who you gonna call today when the E-men dump three million gallons of toxic slurry down the rivers of the West?

Last week an EPA hazmat team hoped to inspect an abandoned Gold Rush-era mine near Durango, Colorado, and the backhoe digging out the collapsed cave entrance breached a retaining wall. The blowout spilled the contaminated sludge that had accumulated for nearly a century in the mine’s tunnels into a creek that is a tributary of the AnimasRiver, flowing at a rate of 740 gallons a minute.

The plume of lead, arsenic, mercury, copper, cadmium and other heavy metals turned the water a memorable shade of yellow-orange chrome. …

… Naturally, the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act of 1980, known as the Superfund law, gives EPA clean-up crews immunity from the trial bar when they are negligent. Yet the Durango blowout was entirely avoidable.

In an Aug. 8 “incident report,” the EPA notes that “the intent of the investigation was to create access to the mine, assess on-going water releases from the mine to treat mine water, and assess the feasibility of further mine remediation.” In other words, the mine was plugged, and the EPA was excavating in search of some notional make-work problem to solve. …

Jon Gabriel writes one for the “normal” guy. That would be our fav – Scott Walker.

Despite what The Donald and Jeb! and Carly said in last week’s debate, Scott Walker’s closing statement tackled an even larger elephant in the room: “I’m a guy with a wife, two kids, and a Harley. One article called me ‘aggressively normal.’” The Wisconsin Governor’s detractors aren’t as euphemistic. Let’s face it: Scott Walker is B-O-R-I-N-G.

He brags about the bargain rack at Kohl’s. He spends his Sunday mornings at church and his Sunday afternoons watching the Packers. He live-tweets his haircuts and getting the oil changed in his Saturn. His only unhealthy obsession seems to be an addiction to hot ham and rolls after church. (He really loves hot ham.)

In a news cycle filled with burning cities, beheaded Christians, and transgendered Kardashians, how does a dull Midwesterner stand out? He showed how Thursday night. To paraphrase a reporter talking about Barry Goldwater’s presidential strategy, “my God, Walker is running as Walker!”

This isn’t the first time a politician listed “aggressively normal” as a selling point. In 1920, America’s political climate was in even greater tumult than today’s. President Wilson had fundamentally transformed the federal government into an oppressive entity that regularly jailed detractors, instituted a then-unimaginable level of regulation, and created the first income tax. Our battered soldiers returned from the charnel houses of Europe to find an executive branch pushing for an even more robust internationalism. By the time the president was incapacitated by stroke (a fact hidden for months), most Americans had had enough. …

Walter Russell Mead writes on Trump. He closes with a few ‘graphs on the farce we endure during the election season.

… Trump is a sham, of course, but for many Americans in 2015 the whole political process is a sham. Trump, however, is an entertaining sham, and some voters think that if the establishment is going to screw you no matter what you do, you might as well vote for the funny one.

So it doesn’t matter that Trump’s positions (insofar as he has taken any) are unpopular, or that he is so obviously and outrageously a member of the economic elite that has so many Americans riled up this year—indeed, it may help him. Donald Trump is living large, which is how many Americans wish they could live.

In part, also, Trump’s popularity is the result of harmless good fun; our two-year presidential electoral cycle is a ridiculous spectacle and the reporters and pundits who discuss the horse race in such diligent detail are chasing will o’ the wisps and wasting time. Many of the people who answer the polls that get analyzed to death in long, thumb sucker pieces aren’t thinking seriously about how they will vote more than a year from now. You can also tell a pollster that you plan to vote for Trump simply, as George Wallace used to put it back in 1968, to “send them a message.” Trump offers average Americans the chance to pull the Establishment’s chain, and then watch the wonks and the pundits jerk and squeal. This is a lot of fun for the tens of millions of people out there who think the whole political class consists of high-minded incompetents and unprincipled parasites.

Nihilistic populism, that is, can also be a powerful phenomenon.

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Physics Central-Buzz Blog runs a Fermi Problem answer to the question of whether going inside in a thunderstorm is necessary.

It’s easy enough to find the statistics for lightning strike injuries and deaths in the U.S., but since this is Fermi Problem Friday, I’d like to do it as I imagine Enrico Fermi would.

You have to start somewhere, of course, so I’ll begin with the stat from Wikipedia that for most of the U.S. there are an average of about twenty lightning strikes that make it to the ground in every square kilometer of area each year. (There are many more between clouds, of course, and the number varies dramatically from place to place in the country, but hey – Fermi problem.)

The country has a population of 350 million people or so, last I heard, and a total area of 10 million square kilometers, so there are 35 people per square kilometer on average.

It seems reasonable to assume that being within ten meters of a lightning strike is seriously dangerous, so lets imagine that every square kilometer is broken up into ten-by-ten meter sections (100 square meter areas).  If you happen to be in one of those sections when lightning hits it’s likely you will be injured or killed.

So what are the odds of someone being struck by lightning in any random square kilometer in the U.S.? Well, there are 100 x 100 = 10,000 sections that are ten meters on a side in each square kilometer. If there are 35 people per square kilometer and 20 strikes per year then the chances are

(20/10,000) x(35/10,000) = 700/100,000,000 or roughly one in 150,000 that someone will be hit in any given square kilometer in one year.

If you multiply that by the number of square kilometers in the U.S. (10 million), you end up with an estimate of about 66 deaths from lightning strikes per year in the entire country.

In fact, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration reports 40 to 50 deaths due to lightning each year, so Fermi is spot on in this case. …

Time for a look at Jon Stewart. In a NY Times OpEd, a poly sci prof at UVA calls him the patron saint of liberal smugness.

It shows how gifted Jon Stewart is that his best moment happened on someone else’s show. He appeared in 2004 on “Crossfire,” a CNN yelling program, and asked the hosts to take seriously their responsibility to public understanding by having useful conversations instead of shouting matches.

It was Mr. Stewart’s finest hour. He made an earnest pitch for civility in a place where there really was none. Which makes it too bad that in his 16 years of hosting “The Daily Show,” he never lived up to his own responsibility. His prodigious talents — he was smart and funny, and even more of both when he was mad — perfectly positioned him to purge a particular smugness from our discourse. Instead, he embodied it. I loved watching him, and hated it too.

Many liberals, but not conservatives, believe there is an important asymmetry in American politics. These liberals believe that people on opposite sides of the ideological spectrum are fundamentally different. Specifically, they believe that liberals are much more open to change than conservatives, more tolerant of differences, more motivated by the public good and, maybe most of all, smarter and better informed.

The evidence for these beliefs is not good. Liberals turn out to be just as prone to their own forms of intolerance, ignorance and bias. But the beliefs are comforting to many. They give their bearers a sense of intellectual and even moral superiority. And they affect behavior. They inform the condescension and self-righteousness with which liberals often treat conservatives. …

Jonathan Tobin posts on Jon Stewart and the politics of contempt.

… Obama has been transformed from the post-partisan visionary that enraptured a nation with promises of hope and change into something very different. He is now a man who was unashamed to conduct a serious foreign policy debate employing bitter hyper-partisan rhetoric that seemed straight of Richard Nixon’s playbook. But unlike Nixon, Obama didn’t merely make an enemies list. He demonized his enemies employing humor. The fact that his nasty lines about Republican critics of the Iran nuclear deal being the equivalent of Iranians chanting “Death to America” got laughs from his campus audience at the AmericanUniversity was no accident.

There is a long and honorable tradition of political humor and satire in the Western canon dating back to Jonathan Swift. But though Stewart’s routines were often undeniably funny, his show deserved to be remembered more for deceptive editing of interviews of those whose views he sought to skewer and the softballs he tossed at liberals and Democrats. Though he pretended at times to be above mere partisanship and took shots at easy though non-controversial Democratic targets, he was in a real sense the poet laureate of the Democratic Party in the last decade. The cheap shots in Obama’s speech the day before Stewart exited stage left is a symbol but a telling one since it illustrates the way the comedian’s style has infected mainstream politics. Whereas in an earlier era it would have been unthinkable for a commander-in-chief to stoop to speak of mainstream political opponents as the moral equivalent of an Iranian mob, this kind of incendiary reference is stereotypical Stewart.

The point about his style is not that it was both funny and unfair, but the way it conveys a sort of not-so-secret handshake among the young and the fashionably liberal. In this world, differing views don’t have to be engaged with, let alone disputed. They can, instead, be dismissed with a vicious swipe aimed at conveying the message that anyone who dissents from liberal orthodoxy is beyond contempt. …

And The Federalist thinks he became the left’s Donald Trump.

… “The Daily Show” did not become a staple of the zeitgeist’s diet until election day 2004, when Stewart bawled at his desk because voters re-elected George W. Bush. It soon became apparent that Stewart regretted running the video of John Kerry zig-zagging downhill with a voiceover noting the Democratic nominee’s flip-flops: “I was for the Iraq War, now I’m against the Iraq War,” Stewart said. Yes, it was funny, just as funny as his diatribes against Donald Rumsfeld and Bush, but it was too effective. By 2005, Stewart seemed to be pulling his punches, although he still criticized Democrats for their foolishness. Dick Durbin’s comparison of Bush and Hitler inspired a masterful takedown of Godwin’s Law.

“Please stop calling people Hitler when you disagree with them. It demeans you. It demeans your opponent. And, to be honest, it demeans Hitler. He worked too many years, too hard to be that evil to have every Tom, Dick, and Harry come along and say ‘Yeah, you’re being Hitler.’ No. You know who was Hitler—Hitler,” he said.

Election day 2006 marked the turning point. Upon seeing his effectiveness at swinging voters and driving youth turnout, he made a conscious decision to adopt the inverse of Ronald Reagan’s Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not criticize a Democrat. Never again did he speak truth to power. He catered to it, slamming the powerful for not exercising more power. The withering monologues were replaced with mere sighs at the stupidity of those who didn’t agree with Barack Obama.

Jon Stewart’s Dishonest Editing

If this was commentary, it was WWE commentary complete with fabricated storylines and DEVASTATING PULVERIZATION of straw men. The mask came off when guests began publicizing Stewart’s tactics for tickling the liberal ego. First came Jonah Goldberg’s infamous segment, in which the heroic “Daily Show” editing crew condensed 20 minutes of Stewart getting embarrassed for not bothering to read the book that left him reflexively offended into six minutes of Goldberg shouting. …

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We have had a nice few days without contemplating the detritus of the current occupant. Events intrude though, and we need to pay attention to his calumnies that those who oppose his agreement with Iran are those who want war, and they are allied with hard-liners in Iran who shout, “death to America.” John Hinderaker of Power Line posts on the president’s “lowest moment yet.”

Today President Obama gave a speech at AmericanUniversity, urging acceptance of his nuclear deal with Iran. It was the usual exercise in deception and demagoguery, and he skated up to the edge of accusing opponents of the deal–a majority of Americans, apparently–of treason.

After some initial reminiscence about the Cold War, Obama leaped right into misrepresenting the agreement’s terms:

“After two years of negotiations, we have achieved a detailed arrangement that permanently prohibits Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.”

The “prohibition” consists of a pious declaration by Iran which it can repudiate at any time. The agreement contains no provisions that will permanently impede Iran’s ability to acquire nuclear weapons. The provisions that (if adhered to) would materially impede Iran’s nuclear weapons program expire in no more than 15 years.

Next, the president offered up a revisionist history of the war in Iraq–a topic of dubious relevance at best:

[M]any of the same people who argued for the war in Iraq are now making the case against the Iran nuclear deal.

Whereas others who argued for the war in Iraq are now making the case in favor of the Iran deal–Joe Biden, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, for example. So what? Next comes a breathtaking series of lies:

“I said that America didn’t just have to end that war — we had to end the mindset that got us there in the first place. It was a mindset characterized by a preference for military action over diplomacy; a mindset that put a premium on unilateral U.S. action over the painstaking work of building international consensus; a mindset that exaggerated threats beyond what the intelligence supported.”

No American administration has ever preferred war to diplomacy. The war in Iraq was anything but unilateral, as more than 20 countries participated in the U.S.-led coalition. And the intelligence on Iraq’s WMDs was not exaggerated, as we know from the now-public October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate. (Nor, as we now know, was that intelligence entirely wrong.) …

… If Obama had said that the Republican caucus is making common cause with Iran’s hardliners, it would have been an unambiguous accusation of treason. By phrasing it the other way around–the hardliners are making common cause with Republicans–Obama gives himself a slight margin of deniability. But either way, it is a disgusting slander.

It is also delusional. Iran’s hardliners are the regime in power. The mullahs are not aligning themselves with Republicans; on the contrary, they are trumpeting the fact that they got everything they wanted in their negotiations with John Kerry and Barack Obama. But Obama can’t, and won’t, confront that reality. He will just go on slandering his political opponents and lying to the American people.

Barack Obama is a terrible president, but he is a worse man.

Charles Krauthammer devoted his weekly column to the controversy.

… It is only because so many Democrats are defecting that Obama gave the AU speech in the first place. And why he tried so mightily to turn the argument into a partisan issue — those warmongering Republicans attacking a president offering peace in our time. Obama stooped low, accusing the Republican caucus of making “common cause” with the Iranian “hard-liners” who shout “Death to America.”

Forget the gutter ad hominem. This is delusional. Does Obama really believe the Death-to-America hard-liners are some kind of KKK fringe? They are the government, for God’s sake — the entire state apparatus of the Islamic Republic from the Revolutionary Guards to the supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei who for decades have propagated, encouraged and applauded those very same “Death to America” chants.

Common cause with the Iranian hard-liners? Who more than Obama? For years, they conduct a rogue nuclear weapons program in defiance of multiple Security Council declarations of its illegality backed by sanctions and embargoes. Obama rewards them with a treaty that legitimates their entire nuclear program, lifts the embargo on conventional weapons and ballistic missiles and revives an economy — described by Iran’s president as headed back to “the Stone Age” under sanctions — with an injection of up to $150 billion in unfrozen assets, permission for the unlimited selling of oil and full access to the international financial system.

With this agreement, this repressive, intolerant, aggressive, supremely anti-American regime — the chief exporter of terror in the world — is stronger and more entrenched than it has ever been.

Common cause, indeed.

Even David Brooks sees the agreement’s problems.

… Many members of Congress will be tempted to accept the terms of our partial surrender as the least bad option in the wake of our defeat. I get that. But in voting for this deal they may be affixing their names to an arrangement that will increase the chance of more comprehensive war further down the road.

Iran is a fanatical, hegemonic, hate-filled regime. If you think its radicalism is going to be softened by a few global trade opportunities, you really haven’t been paying attention to the Middle East over the past four decades.

Iran will use its $150 billion windfall to spread terror around the region and exert its power. It will incrementally but dangerously cheat on the accord. Armed with money, ballistic weapons and an eventual nuclear breakout, it will become more aggressive. As the end of the nuclear delay comes into view, the 45th or 46th president will decide that action must be taken.

Economic and political defeats can be as bad as military ones. Sometimes when you surrender to a tyranny you lay the groundwork for a more cataclysmic conflict to come.

Andrew Malcolm calls him the very good talker. Paul Greenberg wonders why this great glib talker has nothing to say about the videos of Planned Parenthood selling parts. All we hear is crickets.  

Silence comes in many varieties. It can be golden. Or just silence. Like the white space between the words on this page.

There is the silence that sounds like a confession, even if it isn’t. (“On counsel’s advice, I invoke my right under the Fifth Amendment not to answer, on the grounds I may incriminate myself.”)

There is the silence of the perjurer as he weighs every word in an attempt to devise an escape clause. “To the best of my recollection…” as Alger Hiss used to say before trying to refute Whittaker Chambers’ irrefutable testimony about Soviet espionage in the State Department.

There is the silence of prudence personified by Silent Cal (Coolidge), who never uttered an unnecessary word. As opposed to the witness who chooses to brazen it out (“I did not have sexual relations with that woman”) but only digs himself into a deeper hole. And then has to take refuge in semantic games. (“It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”)

Then there is the silence of an ordinarily glib politician who suddenly has nothing to say about an event in the news. As when the Hon. Barack Obama has no comment about those revealing videos featuring doctors with Planned Parenthood, who are caught talking about the fetal parts they’re selling. The rest of the country may be repelled by those tapes, but our president remains … silent. …

Jason Riley writes on how the president has created racial discord. 

One great irony of the current presidency is that Barack Obama won the support of so many seasoned political journalists—not to mention otherwise-skeptical voters—who thought that a black president would improve racial unity. David Remnick of the New Yorker called him “the bridge.” Time magazine’s Joe Klein assured readers that Mr. Obama, who “transcends the racial divide so effortlessly,” would help America turn the page on race. But six years in, that hasn’t happened.

According to a CBS News/New York Times poll in July, nearly 60% of Americans, including large majorities of both blacks and whites, say race relations “are generally bad.” Almost 40% say they are getting worse. Other surveys back those findings. CNN pollsters reported in March that the share of people who think race relations have improved on Mr. Obama’s watch had fallen to 15% this year from 32% in 2009, while the share who think relations have worsened grew to 39% from 6%. A Gallup survey in January reported that 62% of respondents are “somewhat dissatisfied” or “very dissatisfied” with the state of race relations in the country, versus 40% in 2008.

The press has dutifully reported this racial retrogression but is reluctant to lay any blame on Mr. Obama. The president obviously isn’t responsible for the racially charged incidents that have occurred on his watch, from Ferguson, Mo., to Baltimore, to Charleston, S.C. Still, he ought to be held accountable for the racial impact of his reactions, his polices and his political bedfellows.

Mr. Obama campaigned as a racial conciliator, someone who believed, as he said in a speech to the Democratic National Convention in 2004, that “there is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America. There’s the United States of America.”

But that is not how he has governed. As president, he has repeatedly—and often prematurely—taken sides in local police matters involving black suspects. …

Victor Davis Hanson asks if Israel will “do the unthinkable to prevent the unimaginable.”

The Obama administration seems peeved that almost everyone in Israel, left and right, has no use for the present Iranian–American deal to thwart Iran’s efforts to get the bomb.

Indeed, at times John Kerry has hinted darkly that Israel’s opposition to the pact might incur American wrath should the deal be tabled — even though Kerry knows that the polls show a clear majority of Americans being against the proposed agreement while remaining quite supportive of the Jewish state. President Obama, from time to time, suggests that his agreement is being sabotaged by nefarious lobbying groups, big-time check writers, and neoconservative supporters of the Iraq war — all shorthand, apparently, for pushy Jewish groups.

Obama and his negotiators seem surprised that Israelis take quite seriously Iranian leaders’ taunts over the past 35 years that they would like to liquidate the Jewish state and everyone in it. The Israelis, for some reason, remember that well before Hitler came to power, he had bragged about the idea of killing Jews en masse in his sloppily composed autobiographical Mein Kampf. Few in Germany or abroad had taken the raving young Hitler too seriously. Even in the late 1930s, when German Jews were being rounded up and haphazardly killed on German streets by state-sanctioned thugs, most observers considered such activities merely periodic excesses or outbursts from non-governmental Black- and Brownshirts. …

… The Israelis have taken to heart lots of lessons over the last 70 years. They have concluded that often the world quietly wants Israel to deal with existential threats emanating from the Middle East while loudly damning it when it does. They have learned from the experience of the Holocaust that, for good or evil, Jews are on their own and can never again trust in the world’s professed humanity to prevent another Holocaust. And they are convinced that they can also never again err on the side of the probability that national leaders, with deadly weapons in their grasp, do not really mean all the unhinged things they shout and scream about killing Jews.

Given all that, we should conclude that any deal that leads, now or in the near future, to an Iranian bomb is unacceptable to Israel — a nation that will likely soon have no choice but to consider the unthinkable in order to prevent the unimaginable.

Good selection of cartoons today.

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If you travel to remote places, the services of Global Rescue or a similar firm, may have critical value. Wired Magazine profiles the firm as it reacts to the earthquake in Nepal last April.

… Global Rescue, which positions itself as a nimble eject button for those who frequently find themselves in tough spots, has in the past decade established a lucrative client base of large corporations, government organizations, hunters, and adventure travelers. The company has offices in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Pakistan, and Thailand and a staff that might make some countries’ armies blush. Its roster of 200-odd employees includes wilderness paramedics and former military personnel, some of them ex-Special Forces and Navy SEALs. The company’s Nepal posting is a busy one. Every spring, climbers and trekkers, many of them Global Rescue clients, come to test their mettle in the Himalayas. In 2013 and 2014, the company evacuated 28 clients and repatriated the remains of three more who perished in the mountains. …

… And then news of the disaster broke on television in Bang­kok. Then Kathmandu’s cellular network went down, over­loaded by the volume of calls, and Line stopped working. On cue, Global Rescue’s phones lit up. Uber, a corporate client, had three employees in Kathmandu. Another corporate client, Condé Nast, WIRED’s parent company, called: A climber was on assignment for Glamour. Another call came from VirginiaCommonwealthUniversity in Qatar, which had staff in Nepal. Two Global Rescue analysts began sifting through Twitter feeds from Everest climbers they’d been following. But there was precious little to report. Wi-Fi was down in Kathmandu, cell phone service was sporadic, and satellite phones went in and out. …

… The company’s founder and CEO, a former Wall Street executive named Dan Richards, awoke on Saturday morning to many voicemails. He was on vacation in Los Angeles; back in Boston and New Hampshire, his team was awake and scrambling. Analysts eventually determined that at least 100 clients were in Nepal. Their specific locations, though, were less clear. Climbers on Everest were moving slowly up the mountain, spread between Base Camp, at 17,600 feet; Camp 1, at 19,800 feet; and Camp 2, some 2,000 feet higher. Early Saturday morning in the US, the first reports had emerged of a massive and deadly avalanche of rock and ice at Base Camp. Richards had no idea if his clients were among the deceased. He contacted his associate director for security operations, Scott Hume, who then instructed Drew Pache, a security operations manager for Global Rescue and former US Army Special Forces operative, to leave the New Hamp­shire office and get on a plane for Kathmandu. …

… In an age when travelers can land in Paris or Jakarta and book a ride with Uber before the plane reaches the gate, Global Rescue’s existence hardly seems remarkable. Why shouldn’t we be able to hire private armies to ensure our safe return home from vacation? Fast convenience has never been so valued, and Global Rescue represents a logical extension in the app era: security guaranteed with the click of a sat phone. That’s what the company sells, anyway—absolute control in situations that are by definition uncon­trollable. The truth is slightly more complicated. “It’s a bit like a swan in the water,” Fraser told me. “It looks graceful on the surface, but underneath, the legs are going crazy.”

The fact that well-heeled travelers can summon Green Berets and wilderness paramedics almost instantaneously can present an ethical conundrum. The places where Global Rescue operates are often poor and short on resources; the company’s business model is predicated on delivering goods and services to its clients first. It makes an effort to help locals when possible, but as Richards puts it, “We are not the Red Cross. We don’t have the ability to just deploy our services to people who haven’t paid a member­ship fee.”

A graduate of Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, Rich­ards founded Global Rescue in 2004 following a successful career as a private equity adviser at Thomas Weisel Capital Partners. He saw a niche that needed filling. …

Speaking of high altitudes, National Geographic reports on studies to determine how snow leopards get enough oxygen.

Despite living at elevations of more than 16,400 feet (5,000 meters), these spotted big cats breathe in the same way as other feline species that live at sea level—notably your pet kitty.

Anyone who has ever tried to run even a short distance on a mountain has felt the effects of high elevation. The difficulties people and other animals have breathing isn’t due to lower oxygen, but rather low air pressure at high altitudes. Each breath takes in less oxygen and fewer air molecules overall.

Without adequate oxygen, mammals can’t stay warm, run to chase prey, or escape predators. To get around this, other high-dwelling animals have evolved coping strategies—in particular, many of them have more efficient hemoglobin, an oxygen-carrying protein in the blood.

Scientists wondered if snow leopards had the same adaptation. But the new research, published August 5 in the Journal of Experimental Biology, reveals they don’t. …

Speaking of big cats, (Notice our series of deft segues?), a Zimbabwean, studying in the US, tries to point out the foolishness of Cecilmania.

Winston-Salem, N.C. — MY mind was absorbed by the biochemistry of gene editing when the text messages and Facebook posts distracted me.

So sorry about Cecil.

Did Cecil live near your place in Zimbabwe?

Cecil who? I wondered. When I turned on the news and discovered that the messages were about a lion killed by an American dentist, the village boy inside me instinctively cheered: One lion fewer to menace families like mine.

My excitement was doused when I realized that the lion killer was being painted as the villain. I faced the starkest cultural contradiction I’d experienced during my five years studying in the United States.

Did all those Americans signing petitions understand that lions actually kill people? That all the talk about Cecil being “beloved” or a “local favorite” was media hype? Did Jimmy Kimmel choke up because Cecil was murdered or because he confused him with Simba from “The Lion King”?

In my village in Zimbabwe, surrounded by wildlife conservation areas, no lion has ever been beloved, or granted an affectionate nickname. They are objects of terror. …

Normally Craig Pirrong doesn’t show up on science days, but he has pointed thoughts about nuclear fission.

Today is the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. In commemoration, we are being bombarded with moralizing criticisms of the US’s actions. Japan is playing the victim card for all it is worth, and it is getting considerable support in the predictable quarters of the US and Europe.

These criticisms only survive in a vacuum in which history begins on 6 August, 1945.  Put into proper historical context, Truman’s decision to drop the bomb is readily understood and easily defended.  Real decisions require an understanding of the choices at hand, and Truman’s choices were grim.

The alternative to the bomb was a continued relentless air assault on Japan with conventional weapons, likely culminating with a series of invasions of the home islands, combined with a Soviet assault in Manchuria and then into China. The human toll of this alternative would have far exceeded that of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, especially in Japanese lives.  Curtis LeMay’s firebombing campaign inflicted horrific casualties: the firebombing of Tokyo on 8/9 March, 1945 alone killed over 100,000 Japanese civilians. The collective toll of the conventional bombing campaign was over 300,000 from November 1944-August 1945, and its continuation would have killed more Japanese than the atomic bombs did. …

… Some weeks ago, Obama said “ideologies are not defeated with guns but better ideas.” There is at least one instance where that is true. In August, 1945, the violent ideology of Bushido was defeated by an idea. The better idea was nuclear fission.

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John Hawkins at Townhall celebrates the 103rd birthday of Milton Friedman.

Yesterday would have been the 103rd birthday of Milton Friedman, who was one of the most brilliant economists of the last century. In honor of Friedman, here are his 20 best quotes.

20) “A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.”

19) “Because we live in a largely free society, we tend to forget how limited is the span of time and the part of the globe for which there has ever been anything like political freedom: the typical state of mankind is tyranny, servitude, and misery. The nineteenth century and early twentieth century in the Western world stand out as striking exceptions to the general trend of historical development. Political freedom in this instance clearly came along with the free market and the development of capitalist institutions. So also did political freedom in the golden age of Greece and in the early days of the Roman era.”

18) “It is one thing to have free immigration to jobs. It is another thing to have free immigration to welfare. And you cannot have both. If you have a welfare state, if you have a state in which every resident is promised a certain minimal level of income, or a minimum level of subsistence, regardless of whether he works or not, produces it or not. Then it really is an impossible thing.”  …

Another great man died a few days ago – Robert Conquest. Here’s the Wall Street Journal.

Robert Conquest, an Anglo-American historian whose works on the terror and privation under Joseph Stalin made him the pre-eminent Western chronicler of the horrors of Soviet rule, died Monday in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 98 years old.

Mr. Conquest’s master work, “The Great Terror,” was the first detailed account of the Stalinist purges from 1937 to 1939. He estimated that under Stalin, 20 million people perished from famines, Soviet labor camps and executions—a toll that eclipsed that of the Holocaust. Writing at the height of the Cold War in 1968, when sources about the Soviet Union were scarce, Mr. Conquest was vilified by leftists who said he exaggerated the number of victims. When the Cold War ended and archives in Moscow were thrown open, his estimates proved high but more accurate than those of his critics.

Mr. Conquest also was a much-decorated writer of light verse and a figure in the “Movement” poetry of 1950s England. He continued to publish into his 90s, applying an unyielding zest to poetry and prose alike. …

… The 1937-1939 Stalinist show trials, in which Stalin’s political rivals all admitted to serious crimes and were shot, shocked many left-leaning intellectuals in the West. The lurid trials set off mass defections from Communist parties in Europe and the U.S. and helped inspire anti-Communist tracts such as George Orwell’s “1984” and Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon.”

But the wider slaughter of Soviet citizens had largely gone undocumented until Mr. Conquest’s narrative. Citing sources made public during the thaw under Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev as well as émigré accounts, the Soviet census and snippets of information in the Soviet press, Mr. Conquest portrayed the trials as a mere sideshow to the systematic murder carried out by the Kremlin, which routinely ordered regional quotas for thousands of arbitrary arrests and shootings at burial pits and execution cellars. The latest data show that during a 16-month stretch in 1937 and 1938, more than 800,000 people were shot by the Soviet secret police.

These executions came on top of millions of earlier deaths amid the forced famines and collectivization of Soviet agriculture, which Mr. Conquest detailed in a later book, “The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine.” Mr. Conquest wrote that Stalin summarily executed millions of people by cutting off food to entire regions, particularly Ukraine. …

… “Penultimata,” a critically acclaimed collection of Mr. Conquest’s poetry, was published in mid-2009 by the Waywiser Press. He was also an enthusiastic crafter of limericks, a form in which his irreverence and flair for language flourished. One version of an often-quoted one reads:

“There was a great Marxist named Lenin

Who did two or three million men in.

—That’s a lot to have done in,

But where he did one in

That grand Marxist Stalin did ten in.”

A good example of Conquest’s humor was a letter to the editor of New York Review of Books.

To the Editors:

In a footnote to John Banville’s review of Martin Amis’s House of Meetings [“Executioner Songs,” NYR, March 1] I am quoted as having suggested, for a title for a new edition of The Great Terror, “How About I Told You So, You Fucking Fools?” A few weeks earlier, in a TLS review of Zachary Leader’s The Life of Kingsley Amis (February 2), Clive James called me “unfailingly polite in controversy.”

Hard to reconcile the two views—except that the “I told you so, etc.” comment was actually made, and attributed to me, by the ever-inventive Kingsley.

This also gives me an excuse to join in the welcome to Martin Amis’s moving new book. I am particularly glad to read in his acknowledgments the tribute to Tibor Szamuely, who understood Stalinism better than I did. I remember saying to him that I could see why Stalin had Marshal Tukhachevski shot, but why did he do the same to his old friend Marshal Yegorev? Tibor’s answer was “Why not?”

Robert Conquest

Stanford, California

Here’s the obit from UK’s Telegraph. 

Robert Conquest, the writer on Soviet Russia who has died aged 98, was a polemicist and a serious, published poet; but above all he was an historian, one of the outstanding scholars of his time, whose books did as much as any other man’s to alter our view of the communist experience.

Conquest personified the truth that there was no anti-communist so dedicated as an ex-communist. His career illustrated also what the Italian writer Ignazio Silone, another former communist, meant when he said to the communist leader Palmiro Togliatti that “the final battle” of the 20th century would have to be fought between the two sides they represented.

An ardent Bolshevik as a young man, Conquest became a bitter foe of Soviet “Socialism”. He had first visited Russia in 1937 as a youthful devotee of the great experiment. It was a half century before he returned in 1989, having spent his life between chronicling the horrors the country had endured, and emerging, in the view of the Oxford historian Mark Almond, as “one of the few Western heroes of the collapse of Soviet Communism”. “He was Solzhenitsyn before Solzhenitsyn,” said Timothy Garton Ash.

Of his many works on the subject, perhaps the most important was The Great Terror, published in 1968 and detailing the full enormity of what Stalin had done to the Russian people in the 1930s and 1940s. The Mexican writer Octavio Paz paid the most succinct tribute to this book when he said in 1972 that The Great Terror had “closed the debate” about Stalinism. …

And to start off our weekend, late night humor from Andrew Malcolm.

Meyers: The White House opened a Twitter account to answer questions about Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. Finally using Twitter for what it was designed to do: Explain complex, international nuclear agreements involving several nations.

Fallon: You know that Minnesota dentist who shot a famous lion named Cecil. He’s so evil Donald Trump is considering him as a running mate.

Conan: The Trump International Golf Course in Puerto Rico has filed for bankruptcy. This may be because of Trump’s rule, “No Puerto Ricans on my Puerto Rican golf course.”

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Craig Pirrong at Streetwise Professor posts on EPA’s new CO2 rules.

Acting under the aegis of its most malign agency, the EPA, in its unbending effort to hamstring the US economy, the Obama administration today released its long dreaded CO2 rule. The Rule mandates a 32 percent decrease in CO2 emissions by 2030. This outcome will be achieved by a dramatic reduction in the use of coal powered generation, and its replacement by renewables.

The administration touts its generosity by pointing out that compliance with the Rule has been extended by 2 years.

Great. We get screwed in 7 years, instead of just 5. Gee. Thanks. How thoughtful. You really shouldn’t have.

The Rule is tarted up with a cost-benefit analysis which purports to show massive benefits and modest costs. The benefit is in the form of improved health, in particular through the reduction in respiratory ailments.

But every step of this analysis is literally incredible. Consider the steps. First is an estimate of how the regulation affects climate. The second is an estimate of how climate affects health. The third is an estimate of the value of these health benefits. None of these calculations is remotely plausible, or even is it plausible that they can be made realistically, given the incredible complexity of climate and health.

And note the bait and switch here. The Rule is touted as a solution to the Phenomenon Once Known As Global Warming. But the Rule itself admits that the effect on temperature will be point zero one eight degrees centigrade by 2100. This is effectively zero, meaning that the “Climate Change” benefit of the Rule is zero.

The health benefits come from reductions in particulates from coal generating plants. So why not regulate particulates specifically?

This all points out that cost benefit analysis for large federal rules is basically Kabuki theater. …

… This new Rule is a piece with the last 6 plus years of grotesquely inefficient legislation and regulations. Frankendodd. Obamacare. Net Neutrality. Each of these add huge amounts of new weight that the Atlas of the American economy must bear. An economy subjected to such burdens will survive, but it will not thrive. The EPA’s new Rule will provide no meaningful benefit, and any benefits that it does generate will be gained at excessive cost. But that is the Obama way. That is the leftist way.

Betsy McCaughey  calls it “climate hubris.”

This week President Obama is hailing his Clean Power Plan as “the single most important step America has ever taken in the fight against global climate change.” Obama is posing as the environment’s savior, just as he did in 2008, when he promised his presidency would mark “the moment when … the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” Seven years later, that messianic legacy is in doubt. Obama’s Clean Power Plan has never had legislative support, even when his own party controlled both houses of Congress. Now he’s trying to impose it without Congress, an audacious ploy his old Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe condemns as “burning the Constitution.”

As his presidency wanes, Obama is desperately burnishing his eco-credentials with environmental zealots like Pope Francis and the leftists at the U.N. and in the European Union. But here at home, his plan would be a disaster economically, which explains its failure in Congress. Hillary Clinton is pledging to support the plan, while Republicans vying for their party’s presidential nomination are vowing to oppose it. The Clean Power Plan will be a fiercely debated issue in coal-consuming swing states like Ohio, Illinois, and Pennsylvania — where the race for the White House is usually decided. …

WSJ Editors call it a ”Climate-Change Putsch” and says it’s up to the states to push back.  

… When the EPA rule does arrive before the Justices, maybe they’ll rethink their doctrine of “Chevron deference,” in which the judiciary hands the bureaucracy broad leeway to interpret ambiguous laws. An agency using a 38-year-old provision as pretext for the cap-and-tax plan that a Democratic Congress rejected in 2010 and couldn’t get 50 Senate votes now is the all-time nadir of administrative “interpretation.”

Meantime, states can help the resistance by refusing to participate. The Clean Air Act is a creature of cooperative federalism, and Governors have no obligation to craft a compliance plan. The feds will try to enforce a fallback, but they can’t commandeer the states, and they lack the money, personnel and bandwidth to overcome a broad boycott. Let’s see how much “clean power” the EPA really has.

The states have good reason to avoid collaborating in a scheme that will result in higher prices for consumers and business as the EPA mandates are passed down the energy chain. The plan also endangers electric reliability, and the strains to the grid could lead to brownouts or worse. The EPA added a reliability “safety valve” in the final rule as a concession that these risks are real, but this offers little protection in practice.

This plan is essentially a tax on the livelihood of every American, which makes it all the more extraordinary that it is essentially one man’s order. Mr. Obama’s argument is that climate change is too important to abide by relics like the rule of law or self-government. It is an important test of the American political system to prove that he is wrong.

According to Investor Business Daily’s editors the costs for new EPA regs will fall heavily on GOP states.

When candidate Barack Obama boasted back in 2008 that his radical climate change policies would “bankrupt” coal-fired power plants, he was for once telling the wretched truth.

On Monday Mr. Obama accelerated the timetable in his war on coal, with new EPA regulations to reduce carbon emissions from power plants by 32% below 2005 levels by 2030. The White House openly admits that the goal is to use much less coal and force utilities to consume far costlier and less reliable “renewable” electric power.

Whether these feel-good regulations imposed on America’s domestic industries will impact global carbon emissions and climate change appears highly doubtful, given the massive increase in the use of coal and other fossil fuels in nations like China and India.

Yet the costs of these new rules for highly suspect benefits are gigantic. The Heritage Foundation, for example, estimates about 500,000 lost jobs, close to $100 billion a year in lost output (about half a percentage point of GDP), and more than $1,000 a year in higher costs to families. In other words, all pain, no gain.

But the dirty little secret here is that these costs aren’t uniform across the country. Not even close.

It turns out coal-using and producing states are predominantly Republican red states. Meanwhile, the more Democratic a state is, the less the cost of the new coal rules to local rate payers and taxpayers.

The top seven states — those getting at least 70% of electric power from coal — are all solidly red states. But states ruled by Democrats — Rhode Island, Vermont, Oregon, California, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut — get away practically unfazed. …

And the cartoonists continue to enjoy Donald Trump.

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A loyal reader asked for some good news. Discovery.com has the first piece. Seems one disgusting American swamp filled with pestilence, is sinking and someday will disappear. We allude to Washington, DC. 

Twelve feet of sea-level rise — right in the middle of several forecasts that report Antarctic glaciers are starting to collapse — would push water up to the steps of the Jefferson Memorial. A new study finds the region will also sink 6 inches, due to natural forces, in the next 100 years.

Washington has its fair share of problems. Summer humidity can be intolerable. The traffic is maddening. And it’s just crawling with mosquitoes and politicians. Now we can add “it’s sinking” to this unfortunate list. …

More good news, this time from Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit. In his USA Today column this week he compliments the administration for the stance they have taken on occupational licensing.

Last week, I wrote in these pages about how politicians use regulation and licensing to protect their supporters from competition at the expense of the public welfare.

A few days later, the White House essentially endorsed this point with a new report on how occupational licensing hurts the economy, and in particular the working poor. This isn’t a new point, of course. Libertarians (like me) have been making it for decades, and the Institute For Justice, a libertarian public-interest law firm, has been suing on behalf of licensing’s victims for many years. But it’s one thing for libertarian economists and lawyers to argue for a position, and it’s another for it to be endorsed by a Democratic White House.

The White House report, entitled Occupational Licensing: A Framework for Policymakers, raises some important points. First, “more than one-quarter of U.S. workers now require a license to do their jobs, with most of these workers licensed by the states. The share of workers licensed at the state level has risen fivefold since the 1950s.” Where a license used to be required only for unusual jobs, now licensing requirements take up a major part of the employment sphere — and not just for physicians, but also for florists or funeral attendants. …

NY Times brings more good news with a well reasoned and written article on “The Myth of Big Bad Gluten.”

AS many as one in three Americans tries to avoid gluten, a protein found in wheat, barley and rye. Gluten-free menus, gluten-free labels and gluten-free guests at summer dinners have proliferated.

Some of the anti-glutenists argue that we haven’t eaten wheat for long enough to adapt to it as a species. Agriculture began just 12,000 years ago, not enough time for our bodies, which evolved over millions of years, primarily in Africa, to adjust. According to this theory, we’re intrinsically hunter-gatherers, not bread-eaters. If exposed to gluten, some of us will develop celiac disease or gluten intolerance, or we’ll simply feel lousy.

Most of these assertions, however, are contradicted by significant evidence, and distract us from our actual problem: an immune system that has become overly sensitive.

Wheat was first domesticated in southeastern Anatolia perhaps 11,000 years ago. (An archaeological site in Israel, called Ohalo II, indicates that people have eaten wild grains, like barley and wheat, for much longer — about 23,000 years.)

Is this enough time to adapt? To answer that question, consider how some populations have adapted to milk consumption. We can digest lactose, a sugar in milk, as infants, but many stop producing the enzyme that breaks it down — called lactase — in adulthood. For these “lactose intolerant” people, drinking milk can cause bloating and diarrhea. To cope, milk-drinking populations have evolved a trait called “lactase persistence”: the lactase gene stays active into adulthood, allowing them to digest milk.

Milk-producing animals were first domesticated about the same time as wheat in the Middle East. As the custom of dairying spread, so did lactase persistence. What surprises scientists today, though, is just how recently, and how completely, that trait has spread in some populations. Few Scandinavian hunter-gatherers living 5,400 years ago had lactase persistence genes, for example. Today, most Scandinavians do.

Here’s the lesson: Adaptation to a new food stuff can occur quickly — in a few millenniums in this case. So if it happened with milk, why not with wheat? …

If you’ve been wondering how it is a dentist can spend $54,000 to bag a lion, Washington Post has answers.

At $54,000, the reported price of the trip that an American dentist took to Zimbabwe is nearly as shocking as the death of Cecil, the widely known and universally beloved lion he killed while he was there.

The neighborhood dentist seems far removed from the upper echelons of medicine, someone who comes in for a few minutes at the end of a cleaning to check your teeth and ask about your kids, occasionally doing a filling or root canal. No doubt these services are critical to patients and our overall health, but some might be surprised to learn that a dentist could afford to spend $50,000 on a hunting expedition.

It turns out, however, that dentists are quite well paid. According to official government statistics, the median dentist in the U.S. in 2012 earned $149,310 per year. But that median figure obscures variation around the country and among dentists with different specialties. In some high-priced cities, dentists make a lot of money with non-medical, cosmetic procedures from teeth whitening to botox. And according to the American Dental Association, the average dental specialist earned $283,900 in 2013.

Dentists in some places are so well compensated that they earn more than the average doctor. According to a 2012 report in The Journal of the American Medical Association, the average hourly wage of a dentist in America is $69.60 vs. $67.30 for a physician. As recently as 1996, dentists were making less than doctors. Meanwhile, the average general dental practitioner took in $181,000 in 2013, according to the dental association, compared to $175,000 for a family doctor, according to WebMD Medscape’s annual compensation report. …

And if you’ve been wondering how the Mexican Sinaloa cartel digs mile long tunnels, The New Yorker has answers.

At 8:52 P.M. on July 11th, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the drug kingpin known as El Chapo, sat on the bed of his cell in Altiplano, Mexico’s only super-maximum-security prison. Surveillance footage appears to show a small screen glowing on a table nearby—inmates are not allowed cell phones, but this rule is not always enforced. Guzmán changed his shoes, walked to a shower area in the corner of the cell, and knelt behind a waist-high concrete partition, out of view of security cameras. Six seconds later, he was gone.

A rough-edged opening, about twenty inches square, had been cut into the floor. According to Mexico’s national-security commissioner, Guzmán climbed into the hole and down a ladder, entering a 4,921-foot-long tunnel. Fluorescent lights hung from a ceiling-mounted PVC pipe, which also brought fresh air into the passageway. Metal tracks had been bolted to the ground, allowing an ad-hoc vehicle—a railcar rigged to the frame of a small motorcycle—to be driven from one end of the tunnel to the other. The gray stone walls, about thirty inches apart, were scored with jagged marks made by electric spades; Guzmán’s shoulders probably brushed the walls as he passed.

The tunnel ended beneath a small cinder-block house in an open field. As Guzmán climbed a wooden ladder toward ground level, he passed the evidence of what seemed to be a months-long engineering project: a generator, which had powered the tools that workmen used to build the tunnel; a heavy-duty electric winch, to lower machinery into the pit; gallons of hydraulic fluid; coils of steel mesh.

Guzmán’s method of escape should have surprised no one. Last year, in Culiacán, he evaded Mexican marines by disappearing into a network of subterranean passageways connecting seven houses. He did not invent smuggling tunnels—bank robbers, rumrunners, and guerrillas had used them for decades—but his criminal enterprise, the Sinaloa drug cartel, built the first cross-border narcotúnel, in 1989. Since then, Sinaloa has refined the art of underground construction and has used tunnels more effectively than any criminal group in history.

In the past quarter century, officials have discovered a hundred and eighty-one illicit passages under the U.S.-Mexico border. Most have been short, narrow “gopher holes” just big enough for a person to crawl through. Sinaloa specializes instead in infrastructural marvels that federal agents call supertunnels. Agents estimate that a single supertunnel takes several months and more than a million dollars to build. Many include elevators, electric lights, ventilation ducts, and cleverly disguised entry and exit shafts. They can reach as deep as seventy feet, and they tend to be tall enough for an adult to walk or ride through. …