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Turning our attention back to the problems caused by liberal Democrat government in Baltimore. Kevin Williamson says one weird trick can make a city more prosperous. He takes us to Philadelphia to show the trick.

I have never understood why West Philadelphia became a slum. There’s certainly nothing wrong with the real estate: Right in the middle of West Philadelphia is an Ivy League university; go eight-tenths of a mile east from the University of Pennsylvania down Walnut Street and you’re in one of the nicest city centers in the Northeast; go four miles northwest down Lancaster Avenue and you’re in Lower Merion, the fifth-highest-income municipality in the country (sandwiched between San Ramon, Calif., and Brookline, Mass.), where you can catch a polo match or a steeplechase race. There is terrific residential architecture, from the Victorian rowhouses on Spruce Street to the stately 19th-century homes spread out on broad lawns as you approach the city limit.

But in between is a lot of blight and some very bad blocks, though less blight and fewer bad blocks than there were 30 years ago. …

… There are many variables in the success and failure of cities, but one stands out. It isn’t race — Philadelphia is a minority-majority city, as is New York. And it isn’t affluence, either: Rank U.S. metros by income and Los Angeles barely cracks the top 50. But each of those cities has enjoyed a measure of success in recent decades by improving the material conditions in poor neighborhoods through the sort of commercial development bitterly denounced as gentrification. The streets of West Philadelphia are not nearly so mean as they used to be. New York City’s transformation in the Giuliani years was dramatic not only for the well-off precincts of Manhattan but in the rest of the city, too, with development even in places such as the South Bronx, once written off as a total urban loss. Los Angeles, which experienced a much worse version of the Freddie Gray riots in 1992, is a different city today. Economic policy is of course a piece of that, though not so big a piece as the economic-policy wonks like to think — does anybody remember what Rudy Giuliani’s tax plan was?

These cities are now safe — that’s the difference. New York City may be backsliding under its new Sandinista regime, but there’s still not much of the old menace there. …

… The real issue is moving people, businesses, and resources into poor neighborhoods — which is not going to happen when the locals are assaulting people, burning down businesses, and destroying resources. Lawlessness and violence convert assets into liabilities — all those boarded-up houses that once were homes are attractive nuisances on a massive scale. Somebody, somewhere, wants to sell things in those abandoned Baltimore storefronts, but no one can, because it is not safe.

And that’s the horrible irony here. If Baltimore wants to get its economic act together, it has to get something else right first: policing.

So far, neither the police department nor the people of Baltimore have shown any particular capacity for keeping the peace.

The UK.s Guardian says Baltimore is going back to its old ways.

Nine shootings were reported in a 24-hour period in Baltimore on Thursday, including at least two that were fatal.

The city has seen roughly three to four shootings a day over the past 10 days. In contrast, throughout the protests in West Baltimore following the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray and the riots on 27 April, there were no casualties. From 28 April to 3 May, 18 shootings were reported in the city. …

Ron Christie says that after Baltimore’s mess, America is heading “blackwards.”

I’m worried about my country today. I’m worried because a fear I’ve spoken of for several years now is coming to fruition in a way that threatens to rip apart the fabric of our American society.

In 2012 I published Blackwards: How Black Leadership Is Returning America to the Days of Separate But Equal, in which I warned that our country was headed on a dangerous course marked by race and ethnic identification at the expense of the positive attributes we ascribe as being American citizens. In short I wrote: ”I believe this phenomenon is most pervasive in the black, dare I say African American, community. I believe that calls of racism and unequal treatment in the era of Obama has helped create a toxic climate that will spread unless we stop the stain that is spreading through our schools, offices, communities of worship and political discourse.”

The essence of heading blackwards has manifested itself in the events that have unfolded in Baltimore over the past few weeks. We still don’t know what happened to Freddie Gray while in police custody or the tragic events that led to the young man’s death. We’ve been told over and over again on television and on the radio that racism is the culprit at play for Gray’s death. Unfortunately facts no longer matter in our society today—slogans and efforts by those seeking “justice” for wrongs real or imagined are more important than a clearheaded and dispassionate search for the truth.

Consider the statement given by the Baltimore State’s Attorney late last week in charging six police officers with Gray’s death. Rather than disclose facts and assure the people of Baltimore she would proceed with prosecution based on solid evidence, Marilyn Mosby instead offered: “To the people of Baltimore and the demonstrators across America, I heard your call for ‘No justice, no peace,’” she said. “Your peace is seriously needed as I seek to deliver justice to this young man.” “No Justice, No Peace” is a political statement to be used at a rally, not a comment that ought to be made by someone heading an impartial search for evidence to provide the basis for a conviction in a court of law. …

More from Andrew McCarthy who was a federal prosecutor in New York city. 

An incompetent prosecutor — or worse, a politically driven prosecutor who also happens to be incompetent — can do worse things than blow an important case. The more one scrutinizes the case against six Baltimore police officers said to be implicated in the death of Freddie Gray, the more one worries that the prosecution will cost lives.

I’ve recently explored the incoherent and patently politicized set of charges filed last Friday by Marilyn Mosby, the social-justice activist who doubles as the Maryland state’s attorney for Baltimore City. The prosecutor has alleged a second-degree “depraved heart” murder offense and other homicide charges that contradict her “depraved heart” theory. The complex case was rashly lodged before investigators had come close to completing their witness interviews and other reports. Ms. Mosby admitted, with clueless pride, that she’d filed a murder case because she heard “the call of ‘no justice, no peace’” from demonstrators across the country.

The homicide charges are of immediate danger to the police officers named in them. By contrast, everyone in Baltimore is endangered by Ms. Mosby’s decision to charge police with false imprisonment. …

… If police are now to conclude that they cannot, without fear of being prosecuted, take routine investigative steps based on reasonable suspicion, communities cannot be protected. There can be no security and no commerce. Innocent people will be preyed upon and killed.

The unlawful-imprisonment charges filed by prosecutor Marilyn Mosby are not even social justice, much less justice. They are a death sentence for Baltimore.

Jack Kelly in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is last today on Baltimore.

… Half a century ago, when black poverty was greater, there was much less violent crime in black communities, notes economist Thomas Sowell, who is black. Half a century ago, Baltimore was prosperous.

Black poverty is a symptom — not a cause — of urban decay. White racism isn’t to blame for it. What’s killing cities are the leftism, corruption and ineptitude of city “leaders.”

Baltimore is fast becoming the next Detroit because its “leaders” — most of whom are black, all of whom are Democrats — kowtow to thugs.

“You cannot take any people, of any color, and exempt them from the requirements of civilization — including work, behavioral standards, personal responsibility and all the other basic things that the clever intelligentsia disdain — without ruinous consequences to them and to society at large,” Mr. Sowell wrote.

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The death of David Goldberg perhaps caused by an accident on a treadmill or, the use of a phone while on a treadmill, calls attention to the risks of the machines. And calls attention to the risks of exercise. WaPo tells us about the dangers of treadmills.

… Today, treadmills are the nation’s most popular type of exercise equipment. More than 50 million Americans now use them, CBS reported. The exercise industry grew by 3.5 percent in 2014 to a total of $84.3 billion, and “treadmills continue to be the largest selling exercise equipment category by a large margin,” according to the Sports & Fitness Industry Association.

But exercise equipment — and treadmills in particular — can also be dangerous.

“Almost 460,000 people were sent to the hospital in 2012 for injuries related to exercise equipment,” according to USA Today. “The vast majority — nearly 428,000 were treated and released for their injuries — but about 32,000 were hospitalized or were dead on arrival.”

Treadmills account for the majority of such exercise equipment injuries, Graves told The Washington Post in a phone interview. In a study of 1,782 injury reports from 2007 to 2011, she found that “treadmill machines comprise 66% of injuries but constitute approximately only one-fourth the market share of such equipment.”

“Mechanical belt-driven equipment may present disproportionate injury risk in mechanical home exercise equipment,” she wrote in her study. “While we do not have data on the use of these machines, our study suggests the need to consider the hazards associated with in-home mechanical exercise equipment in the context of exercise recommendations.”

Graves says she was shocked not only by the proportion of injuries caused by treadmills but also by the victims. “We were surprised by the number of pediatric injuries that we saw,” she says. “There was a pretty high incidence among kids, especially 0 to 4 years old, also 5 to 9 years old.” In many cases, kids turned on their parents’ treadmills, only to burn their hands on the fast-moving tracks or, worse, get their fingers caught in the powerful machines. …

The Post followed up with an item about using treadmills safely.

It’s a pretty straightforward piece of equipment and you’ve been walking and running for how many years now? I mean, how difficult can it be to try a treadmill for the first time?

As my colleague Michael E. Miller points out in this excellent post, more than 460,000 people found out about the dangers the hard way when they suffered injuries related to exercise equipment, according to data for 2012. About 32,000 people were hospitalized or dead on arrival after those accidents and, according to one study, 66 percent of gym injuries involve treadmills. The tragic death of Dave Goldberg, CEO of SurveyMonkey and husband of Facebook exec Sheryl Sandberg, is the exclamation point at the end of this warning.

So if you’re on vacation, as Goldberg was, and get a hankering to jump on the treadmill, or you’re a novice starting an exercise program, here are some great tips on how to use the treadmill safely. They come from exercise physiologist Mike Bracko of Calgary, Alberta, who wrote the American College of Sports Medicine’s guide on treadmills. (The guide covers home treadmills but the lessons apply in the gym as well.)

• No phones! Or as Bracko put it: “Don’t look at your friggin’ phone, man. You’ve got to [set] your priorities. If it’s exercise, it’s exercise.” Many people don’t realize at first that the running or walking gait you use on a treadmill is different from the one you use in real life. Until you’re accustomed to that, and even once you are, looking at your phone is a major distraction that can cause you to trip.

“If you trip, you’re going to go down and it’s not going to be pretty,” Bracko said.

But what if your music is in your phone (for those of you comfortable enough to listen on the treadmill)? Set it to airplane mode, Bracko said, so you won’t be tempted to respond to each ping or vibration as e-mails and texts arrive. And set your playlist so you won’t have to fiddle with a phone or iPod while you’re running. …

Fox News reports low levels of vitamin D lead to increased risk of pancreatic cancer.

While it’s clear that too much sun can increase the risk for skin cancer, a new study has found that too little vitamin D can increase the risk of pancreatic cancer. The study is the first to link vitamin D deficiency with pancreatic cancer, Medical Daily reported.

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine gathered data from 107 countries and found that those with the least amount of sunlight also had the highest rates of pancreatic cancer. …

 

Continuing with the health theme, Huffington Post lists 10 things you can do to live to 100. Pickerhead’s favorite is #6.

6. Laugh a lot.
In a 2012 study published in the journal Aging, Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Yeshiva University researchers identified what personality characteristics that a group of 243 centenarians had in common. Among them? They all found a reason to laugh a lot. “They considered laughter an important part of life,” the lead researcher said.

7. Learn to drink tea the healthy way.
Both green and black teas contain a concentrated dose of catechins, substances that relax blood vessels and protect your heart. In a Japanese study of more than 40,500 men and women, those who consumed green tea had a lower risk of dying from heart disease. Other studies involving black tea showed similar results.

Ready-to-drink teas don’t count because the catechins degrade once water is added. And some studies suggest that adding milk diminishes tea’s protective effects on the cardiovascular system; stick to lemon or honey.

8. Be a giver, not a taker.
Generous people give of themselves in many ways. They do favors, pay compliments, go out of their way to help others. And what they get in return for it is, among other things, a longer life. Researchers from the University of Buffalo found a link between giving and having a lower risk of early death. “Our conclusion is that helping others reduced mortality specifically by buffering the association between stress and mortality,” study researcher Michael J. Poulin, Ph.D., an assistant professor of psychology at the University at Buffalo, told PsychCentral. …

Salon with a piece attacking fad diets (gluten-free, paleo, etc.). This is long so we included just the start of it. Follow the link if you want to read more.

The numbers are hard to pin down, but roughly 1.1 million Americans keep kosher in their homes. Around 15 million are vegetarian. Meanwhile, according to a 2013 survey, more than 100 million Americans are trying to cut down on gluten, and (as of 2014) more than 10 million households are gluten-free. Simply put, gluten avoidance is the reigning dietary restriction of our time.

It’s harder to pin down why gluten-free diets should have conquered the culture so quickly. Few people have the kinds of serious medical conditions, such as celiac disease, that necessitate the elimination of gluten from the diet. Billions of people thrive on gluten-rich foods, all around the world.

Yet somewhere in our collective search for health, security, and purity, gluten transformed into a mainstream taboo. Scientific-sounding language (and savvy marketers) have driven this transformation, though one suspects that mass gluten avoidance has more in common with religious food restrictions than it does with anything premised on actual medical data.

Fittingly, Alan Levinovitz is a religion professor at JamesMadisonUniversity and a chronicler of our peculiar dietary culture. In his new book, The Gluten Lie, Levinovitz digs into the fear and moralizing that surrounds dietary fads, including gluten avoidance and the MSG scare.

Reached by Skype, Levinovitz spoke with The Cubit about paleo dieters, grain-free monks, and why Fitbit represents a cultural descent into profound moral vacuity.

Late night humor from A. Malcolm.

Fallon: The Kentucky Derby is that special time of year when people use a two-minute event as an excuse to drink for 12 hours.

Meyers: A new survey finds people in Ireland tell an average of four white lies per day. And three of them are, “I’m fine to drive home.”

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We think ideas and thoughts expressed by people in the commentariat should be passed along without any reference to the race of the authors. However we will change that for today to point out we are starting with three black Americans with Baltimore comments. Readers will not be surprised to see Thomas Sowell first.

… The “legacy of slavery” argument is not just an excuse for inexcusable behavior in the ghettos. In a larger sense, it is an evasion of responsibility for the disastrous consequences of the prevailing social vision of our times, and the political policies based on that vision, over the past half century.

Anyone who is serious about evidence need only compare black communities as they evolved in the first 100 years after slavery with black communities as they evolved in the first 50 years after the explosive growth of the welfare state, beginning in the 1960s.

You would be hard-pressed to find as many ghetto riots prior to the 1960s as we have seen just in the past year, much less in the 50 years since a wave of such riots swept across the country in 1965.

We are told that such riots are a result of black poverty and white racism. But in fact — for those who still have some respect for facts — black poverty was far worse, and white racism was far worse, prior to 1960. But violent crime within black ghettos was far less.

Murder rates among black males were going down — repeat, DOWN — during the much lamented 1950s, while it went up after the much celebrated 1960s, reaching levels more than double what they had been before. Most black children were raised in two-parent families prior to the 1960s. But today the great majority of black children are raised in one-parent families.

Such trends are not unique to blacks, nor even to the United States. The welfare state has led to remarkably similar trends among the white underclass in England over the same period. Just read “Life at the Bottom,” by Theodore Dalrymple, a British physician who worked in a hospital in a white slum neighborhood.

You cannot take any people, of any color, and exempt them from the requirements of civilization — including work, behavioral standards, personal responsibility and all the other basic things that the clever intelligentsia disdain — without ruinous consequences to them and to society at large. …

Jason Riley who is on the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal is next. 

The racial makeup of city leaders, the police department and other municipal workers in Ferguson, Mo., played a central role in the media coverage and analysis of Michael Brown’s death, which is worth remembering as history repeats itself in Baltimore.

The Justice Department’s Ferguson report noted that although the city’s population was 67% black, just four of its 54 police officers fit that description. Moreover, “the Municipal Judge, Court Clerk, Prosecuting Attorney, and all assistant court clerks are white,” said the report. “While a diverse police department does not guarantee a constitutional one, it is nonetheless critically important for law enforcement agencies, and the Ferguson Police Department in particular, to strive for broad diversity among officers and civilian staff.”

Broad diversity is not a problem in Baltimore, where 63% of residents and 40% of police officers are black. The current police commissioner is also black, and he isn’t the first one. The mayor is black, as was her predecessor and as is a majority of the city council. Yet none of this “critically important” diversity seems to have mattered after 25-year-old Freddie Gray died earlier this month in police custody under circumstances that are still being investigated. …

Walter Williams former George Mason econ prof is the last.

… Criminal activity is a major problem in many black communities. That means many black citizens will have some kind of contact with police officers, either as victims of crime or as criminals. One of the true tragedies is that black politicians, preachers and civil rights advocates give massive support to criminals such as Brown, Garner and Scott. How much support do we see for the overwhelmingly law-abiding members of the black community preyed upon by criminals?

The average American has no idea of the day-to-day threats and fears encountered by the law-abiding majority in black neighborhoods on account of thugs. In addition to giving threats and instilling fears, criminals have turned many black communities into economic wastelands where there is a lack of services that most Americans take for granted, such as supermarkets, other shops and even home delivery. Black residents must bear the expense of having to go out of their neighborhoods to shop or shop at high-cost mom and pop stores.

The protest chant that black lives matter appears to mean that black lives matter only if they are taken at the hands of white police officers.

Now we turn to one of our favorite topics over the past few weeks – Hillary Clinton’s campaign. First up is Chris Cillizza from the Washington Post. He says Bill Clinton still doesn’t get it. 

Bill Clinton is the best politician of his generation and one of the all-time greats.  No serious person can dispute that fact.

And yet, in an interview with NBC News over the weekend, Bill showed, yet again, the blind spot that he and, to a lesser extent, his wife, have when it comes to their relationships with donors and how they talk about their own personal finances.

Two Clinton quotes really stood out to me.

1. ”People should draw their own conclusions. I’m not in politics. All I’m saying is the idea that there’s one set of rules for us and another set for everybody else is true.”

Um, okay. First of all, the “I’m not in politics” line is absolutely amazing.  The world has rarely created someone as political (and as good at being political) as Bill Clinton. He will always be “in politics”; it’s, literally, who he is.

The second sentence is more eye-opening.  This is Bill Clinton in self-pitying mode; people treat us so unfairly and we do so much good and so on and so forth. Feeling bad for yourself is never an attractive look for a politician but especially in this case. …

Ruth Marcus, another liberal from WaPo has more on Bill.

Oh, Bill. There you go again. We knew you were going to pop off, but did it have to be so soon — and so tone-deaf?

The Clinton deal is “two for the price of one,” as Bill Clinton famously promised in 1992. But 23 years later, that bargain comes with different baggage attached.

Then it was the intimations of Hillary Clinton as co-president, Machiavelli in a pantsuit. Now — and let us pause to appreciate the role reversal and the country’s journey on issues of gender — it is the awkward reality of running not only while married to an ex-president but also as a name partner in the sprawling entity of Clinton Inc.

Into this treacherous swamp strolls Bill Clinton, on an annual Clinton Foundation trip to Africa. His interview with NBC News’s Cynthia McFadden was vintage Clinton, with its air of injured dismissiveness about concerns over his assiduous fundraising and lucrative speechifying.

Will you continue to give speeches, McFadden asked? “Oh yeah,” Clinton responded, as if the notion of calling a halt during his wife’s presidential campaign were absurd. “I gotta pay our bills.”

Oh. My. God.

As if the first $500,000 speech, or the 11th, were not enough. As if the former president had not raked in more than $100 million on the speaking circuit since leaving office. As if stopping would leave the Clintons huddled around the kitchen table, worrying over which bills to pay. …

And Ron Fournier says the stonewall might work for the Clintons, but it should be about more than winning. Presidents, he says, need to have some moral authority to govern.

… Whether the next survey cuts for or against Clinton doesn’t change what we know about her actions, what we still must find out about her actions, and how those actions might be predictive of her presidency.

What we know so far is that she violated White House ethics rules on government email and foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation. She deleted emails, disabled her rogue email server, and allowed the brazen comingling of government business and the family business. 

Integrity. Transparency. Accountability. These are attributes that people, particularly younger Americans, expect to see from leaders in an era of radical connectivity, social change, and institutional decline. So far, they’re not seeing such qualities in Candidate Clinton.

I think she needs to come clean to win the public’s trust: Allow an independent review of the email and return foreign donations, because anything less fails to recognize how much media and information has been democratized since the 1990s, when the tactics she’s now using were effective. But I may be wrong. …

Today is the big vote in Great Britain. A Contentions post says it is very close and putting together a coalition might be as difficult as what just happened in Israel. 

Britain is currently in the grips of one of the most closely fought elections in decades. Of course, the same could have been said five years ago at the last election. In a rare occurrence for Britain the 2010 election saw no outright winner, a hung parliament. That time the Conservatives managed to pull together a coalition with the country’s third party, the Liberal Democrats. But as Britain’s formerly solid two party system has further disintegrated it is not only once again looking unlikely that any party will have an outright majority but worse, current polls foretell of a parliament in which it is difficult to see either the Conservatives or the Labor opposition being able to form a workable coalition.

The fact that sitting Prime Minister David Cameron looks unable to secure a majority is itself cause for comment. Yes, it is usual for incumbents to see their mandate reduced if re-elected. But it is also far from impossible for the opposite to happen. In 1983 Margaret Thatcher significantly increased the Conservative vote from what she polled in 1979. To be sure, Cameron is no Thatcher. But what his government has done in turning around the British economy from the mess bequeathed by the last Labor government ought to have been enough to have won the votes for a majority.

Britain had after all been hit particularly hard by the global recession. Unemployment spiraled and the Labor government engaged in a bout of Greek style borrowing. It was unsurprising then that the Conservatives came out of the 2010 election as the largest party, but what should concern Britain’s center-right is the fact that even then Cameron failed to actually win the election outright. In fact, even with Labor having presided over one of the longest and deepest declines in GDP since the Second World War, it was still the left that essentially won that election. Combined, Labour and the Liberal Democrats took the most votes and the most parliamentary seats. …

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Kevin Williamson says we got lucky at the jihadi shootout in Garland, Texas.

Of course he was a convict.

Elton Simpson was the first figure identified in the latest eruption from the Religion of Peace — an attempted massacre at an exhibition of anti-Islamist cartoons in suburban Garland, Texas, which ended in the shooting of Simpson and his coconspirator, because Texas is where terrorists go to get out-gunned at an art show. Simpson and his pal are as dead as a tuna casserole — in Texas, we shoot back.

We got lucky when luck wasn’t what we needed.

Simpson was, like the overwhelming majority of murderers and most of those who commit serious violent crimes, already known to the authorities. He had been investigated by the FBI on the suspicion that he was attempting to travel to Somalia to engage in jihad. He was convicted of lying to the FBI in that episode, and sentenced to . . . probation. The average sentence for a tax-related crime in these United States is 31 months in a federal penitentiary, but for attempting to join up with a gang of savages who are merrily beheading, torturing, enslaving, and raping their way around the world? Probation, and damned little subsequent oversight, apparently.

The federal government will always tell you what it really cares about, if you are paying attention. Trim a bureaucrat’s paycheck by 1 percent and you’ll see mighty Leviathan roused from his dreaming slumber. …

… For Pete’s sake, the guy seems to have been on Twitter talking up “#texasattack” before the . . . Texas attack. Where was the FBI? No doubt still on the hunt for those angry Christian right-wing militia extremists who keep not attacking anything other than unlucky squirrels in rural Idaho. …

… Federal authorities weren’t doing their job on 9/11. They weren’t doing their job before the attack in Garland, either. No, nobody can stop every crime or detect every criminal, much less every jihadist. But this one had a great big flashing neon sign over his head reading “terrorist.”

If nobody saw, nobody was looking.

Walter Jacobson of Legal Insurrection says another attack on Scott Walker boomerangs.

… It seems that attacks on Scott Walker seem to boomerang and simply add to his political persona of being a regular guy.

Did you hear the one about how Scott Walker never graduated college? #Fail.

The latest attack on Walker is that he has “up to” $50,000 in credit card debt to — wait for it — Sears.  

We don’t know exactly how much because financial disclosures only are made in broad ranges, so it could be as little as $10,000.

Regardless, it’s SEARS! …

… I don’t see how any of this hurts Walker.

The Boston Globe article linked by The Daily Beast was titled, Baggage of Wealth Burdens Presidential Candidates.

Walker doesn’t have that baggage.

You know what the biggest surprise in Walker’s financial status is? SEARS still exists!

Paul Mirengoff calls Marilyn Mosby, Baltimore prosecutor a grandstanding hypocritical ideologue.

Alan Dershowitz, the famous defense lawyer, has called the case against the six Baltimore officers involved in the death of Freddie Gray “a show trial.” The actions of prosecutor Marilyn Mosby “had nothing to do with justice,” but instead amounted to “crowd control,” Dershowitz said in remarks reported by the Daily Caller.

With regard to the second-degree murder charges against Caesar Goodson, Dershowitz stated that “there’s no plausible, hypothetical, conceivable case for murder under the facts as we now know them.” At most, there may be a case for involuntary manslaughter.

Dershowitz believes that, having overplayed its hand, the prosecution is unlikely to obtain any convictions. And if even if it does, there’s a good possibility the convictions will be reversed on appeal.

Dershowitz compared the case of the Baltimore six with that of George Zimmerman. In that case, Dershowitz accused the prosecutor of overcharging Zimmerman and argued that she should be disbarred for unethical behavior. As we all remember, Zimmerman was acquitted.

Speaking of the Zimmerman case, Chuck Ross reports that after Zimmerman’s acquittal, Marilyn Mosby denounced the verdict during a protest rally at the federal courthouse in Baltimore. Her husband, city council member Nick Mosby, went even further, calling for a boycott of Florida businesses.

Either the Mosbys don’t understand the concept of self defense or they are demagogues. Maybe both. …

Jonathan Tobin comments on the indictments and claims it’s no way to fix America’s cities.

… It goes without saying that the plight of those trapped in inner cities with failing schools and dysfunctional economies are right to want change. But no matter how Freddie Gray was killed, nothing in this case changes the fact that cities like Baltimore have been governed by the political left and often by minority politicians for decades. Racism is part of the reality of American history. But the collapse of these cities is the fruit of a failed liberal government project. Liberals and Democrats point to the Baltimore riots as the justification for a renewal of the same big spending policies that have already repeatedly failed. Nor will an attempt to shoehorn isolated incidents of police misbehavior into a general narrative of racism that makes it hard for law enforcement to work bring peace to neighborhoods. That’s especially true of those that badly need police to defend the safety and property of citizens beset more by crime than a notional oppression that has little connection to their lives.

The danger here is not just that justice is always sacrificed when mobs exercise influence over politicians who fear to anger them (such as Baltimore’s mayor who called earlier this week for giving thugs “space to destroy). It’s that a productive dialogue about how to expand economic opportunity and improve education — the only factors that can heal broken cities — is being drowned in a sea of misleading rhetoric about race and police violence.

Editors of the Chicago Tribune have similar thoughts.  

No one could accuse Baltimore state’s attorney Marilyn Mosby of dragging her feet on the decision to file charges over the death of Freddie Gray, who suffered a fatal spinal injury in police custody on April 12.

Mosby got the report from an internal police department investigation on Thursday and the results of an autopsy on Friday morning. Within hours, she was standing on the courthouse steps, announcing charges against six police officers. Four of the officers are charged with homicide counts, ranging from involuntary manslaughter to second-degree murder.

Mosby bypassed a grand jury, declaring unflinchingly that she had found probable cause to file the charges herself. She batted away a call for her to step aside and let a special prosecutor handle the case because her husband is a Baltimore city councilman. …

… In last year’s election, Mosby, 35, unseated the incumbent state’s attorney by promising to hold police accountable. She said unabashedly that her goal was to “reform the criminal justice system.”

Four months into the job, Mosby the prosecutor is under considerable pressure to deliver on the promise made by Mosby the politician.

The officers are innocent unless proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. It’s a very high bar. How will Baltimore — or America — react if prosecutors come up short? What if the officers are not guilty?

This case needs to be about what happened between Freddie Gray and the six police officers who interacted with him on April 12, not about righting the entire criminal justice system. The stakes are high enough already.

Victor Davis Hanson writes on CA’s preventable drought.

The present four-year California drought is not novel — even if President Barack Obama and California governor Jerry Brown have blamed it on man-made climate change.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, California droughts are both age-old and common. Predictable California dry spells — like those of 1929–34, 1976–77, and 1987–92 — are more likely result from poorly understood but temporary changes in atmospheric pressures and ocean temperatures.

What is new is that the state has never had 40 million residents during a drought — well over 10 million more than during the last dry spell in the early 1990s. Much of the growth is due to massive and recent immigration.

A record one in four current Californians was not born in the United States, according to the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California. Whatever one’s view on immigration, it is ironic to encourage millions of newcomers to settle in the state without first making commensurately liberal investments for them in water supplies and infrastructure.

Sharp rises in population still would not have mattered much had state authorities just followed their forbearers’ advice to continually increase water storage. …

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Today is one of the great days with no items about DC miscreants.

And we have late night humor from Andy Malcolm.

BBC arms us with a piece on the subtle science of selling. 

If I told you this is the most important article you’ll read this week, you probably wouldn’t believe me. But what if I could say that 75% of your friends agreed? Or if I could pull out the fact that nine out of 10 people of your age, education and income judged the article as relevant to them?* Then, perhaps, you might be more likely to read on.

Many of us are probably aware that salespeople often use psychological tricks to persuade us to buy their products, even if they themselves aren’t aware of how these techniques mess with our mind. We might even like to think we are immune to that sort of manipulation. But the scientific evidence strongly suggests we aren’t. So why are the following hidden sales tricks so effective?

Take, for starters, the techniques of used car sales. In the name of research, Robert Levine, a professor of social psychology at California State University, Fresno, masqueraded as a salesman at a used car dealership in the early 2000s. As he recounts in his book, The Power of Persuasion: How We’re Bought and Sold, he was worried that he would fail to shift many cars because he wouldn’t be able to remember all the stats about the various models on the lot. Levine quickly learned, however, that plenty of used car salespeople don’t carry this information around in their heads either – to sell a car, they only really needed to memorise a few basic facts that applied to all the models on the lot. What mattered more was showing the cars in a strategic order.

In doing so, the salespeople are making use of the concept of the “base rate fallacy”. When a shopper isn’t aware of the intrinsic value of a product – and the value of used cars can be difficult to judge without some homework – a base rate can be established and then used to emphasise the exceptional value of another product by comparison.

“If a bunch of $200 espresso machines are sitting next to one overpriced $400 espresso machine that does basically the same thing, the $200 machines suddenly look like an obvious good deal,” Levine explains. “This is especially true if you have a skilled salesperson who divulges that the $400 machine isn’t really any better than the others. But the reality is, most of us probably have no idea how much an espresso machine should cost.” …

And Authority Nutrition says coffee makes you live longer.

Coffee is one of the healthiest beverages on the planet.

It is more than just dark-colored liquid with caffeine… coffee actually contains hundreds of different compounds, some of which have important health benefits.

Several massive studies have now shown that the people who drink the most coffee live longer and have a reduced risk of diseases like Alzheimer’s and diabetes.

When hot water runs through the coffee grounds while brewing, the substances in the coffee beans mix with the water and become part of the drink.

Some of these substances are well known, including caffeine, but there are hundreds of other compounds in there as well, many of which science has yet to identify.

Many of these compounds are antioxidants that protect our bodies from oxidation, which involves free radicals that damage molecules in the body. …

Tesla introduces a “whole house battery.” Discovery has the story. 

Electric car pioneer Tesla unveiled a “home battery” Thursday that its founder Elon Musk said would help change the “entire energy infrastructure of the world.”

The Tesla Powerwall can store power from solar panels, from the electricity grid at night when it is typically cheaper, and provide a secure backup in the case of a power outage. 

In theory the device, which typically would fit on the wall of a garage or inside a house, could make solar-powered homes completely independent of the traditional energy grid.

“The goal is complete transformation of the entire energy infrastructure of the world, to completely sustainable zero carbon,” Musk told reporters shortly before unveiling the Powerwall in a stylish warehouse space outside Los Angeles. …

NY Times has an article about coping with arthritis. Says you have to find a way to keep moving.

… The big question now is how the growing millions of adults with arthritis will cope with a painful, disabling and as yet incurable disease. Although several commonly affected joints — hips, shoulders, ankles, wrists and elbows as well as knees — can be replaced by artificial ones, not everyone affected is a candidate for surgery, and the operation itself leaves some people with activity limitations.

According to Patricia A. Parmelee, a professor of psychology and the director of the Alabama Research Institute on Aging, arthritic pain and disability often force people to abandon activities they love. “Some stop moving altogether, brood over what they had to give up and become depressed,” she said in an interview.

“The depression is not necessarily severe, but low-level depressive symptoms can interfere with daily functioning,” Dr. Parmelee said. “People tell us ‘I’m not functioning as well as I could,’ ‘Life isn’t as good as it could be.’ ”

The trick to not losing quality of life “is to find a substitute for the activities limited by arthritis,” she said. “Can’t play golf? Can’t garden? What can you do? Walk, swim, walk in water — anything that gets you moving. The bottom line: As we get older, if we don’t get up and move around as much as we can, then we soon won’t be able to move at all.”

In a 10-year study of more than 2,000 men and women with arthritic knees, Jungwha Lee and her colleagues found that fewer than 10 percent met the national guidelines of doing 150 minutes a week of moderate physical activity. But if they improved their physical activity, “they functioned better and had less disability,” said Dr. Lee, a biostatistician at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. …

Popular Mechanics says tires, with proper care, can last up to 10 years.

Chances are, there’s some sourceless bit of knowledge rattling around in your head. You don’t know how it got there or where it came from, but you believe it. Maybe your convictions on tire life falls into that category. We’ve always held that that our favorite round rubber bits had a use life of about two years before age had a serious negative impact on performance. Turns out, we were wrong. Way wrong.

Woody Rodgers, a tire product information specialist, has been with Tire Rack for sixteen years, and he says that given proper storage and care, tires can last you up to a decade.

“I won’t say a tire has the shelf life of gravel,” Rodgers said, “but it’s close to that.”

When properly stored in a climate controlled warehouse, tires have an almost unlimited shelf life, and once they’re on the road, proper care can add many years to a tire’s life. …

We can make tires last 10 years, but how have Russians kept Lenin looking ready to lead a revolution? Scientific American reports.

For thousands of years humans have used embalming methods to preserve dead bodies. But nothing compares with Russia’s 90-year-old experiment to preserve the body of Vladimir Lenin, communist revolutionary and founder of the Soviet Union. Generations of Russian scientists have spent almost a century fine-tuning preservation techniques that have maintained the look, feel and flexibility of Lenin’s body. This year Russian officials closed the Lenin Mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square so that scientists could prepare the body for public display again in time for the Soviet leader’s 145th birthday anniversary today.

The job of maintaining Lenin’s corpse belongs to an institute known in post-Soviet times as the Center for Scientific Research and Teaching Methods in Biochemical Technologies in Moscow. A core group of five to six anatomists, biochemists and surgeons, known as the “Mausoleum group,” have primary responsibility for maintaining Lenin’s remains. (They also help maintain the preserved bodies of three other national leaders: the Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh and the North Korean father–son duo of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, respectively.) The Russian methods focus on preserving the body’s physical form—its look, shape, weight, color, limb flexibility and suppleness—but not necessarily its original biological matter. In the process they have created a “quasibiological” science that differs from other embalming methods. “They have to substitute occasional parts of skin and flesh with plastics and other materials, so in terms of the original biological matter the body is less and less of what it used to be,” says Alexei Yurchak, professor of social anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. “That makes it dramatically different from everything in the past, such as mummification, where the focus was on preserving the original matter while the form of the body changes,” he adds. …

Andrew Malcolm with late night humor. 

Meyers: George W. Bush is reluctant to talk about the 2016 election, fearing he might be unhelpful to his brother Jeb. Jeb Bush commented, “I don’t have a brother.”

Conan: Ford has recalled almost 600,000 vehicles for steering problems. Owners are being told to bring their cars in as close to the dealership as they can get.

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Ron Fournier, liberal journalist, is still after Clinton.

Hillary Clinton doesn’t play by the rules. 

That’s not a partisan attack. It’s not a talking point. It’s not a fantasy. It’s a fact—an agonizing truth to people like me who admire Clinton and her husband, who remember how Bill Clinton rose from a backwater governorship to the presidency on a simple promise: He would fight for people who “work hard and play by the rules.” 

The evidence is overwhelming and metastasizing: To co-opt a William Safire line, Hillary Clinton is a congenital rule-breaker.

In the three days since my last column on Clinton, the headlines are revealing:

“More than 180 Clinton Foundation donors lobbied her State Department.” “That’s not illegal,” writes Vox reporter Jonathan Allen, “but it is scandalous.” The coauthor of a fair-minded Clinton biography, Allen notes that while there’s no evidence of illegal corruption, “The size and scope of the symbiotic relationship between the Clintons and their donors is striking.” He adds, “The Clintons have shown they can’t police themselves.” 

“Clinton Foundation failed to disclose 1,100 foreign donations.” The cofounder of the Clinton Foundation’s Canadian affiliate revealed to Joshua Green of Bloomberg Politics that 1,100 donors to the foundation had never been disclosed. “The reason this is a politically explosive revelation is because the Clinton Foundation promised to disclose its donors as a condition of Hillary Clinton becoming secretary of State,” writes Green, a widely respected political reporter. 

“Clinton charity never provided foreign data.” A spokeswoman for the Clinton Health Access Initiative, which makes up nearly 60 percent of the Clinton charitable network, told The Boston Globe that CHAI never submitted information on foreign donations to State Department lawyers for review during Clinton’s tenure as secretary of State. The reviews were required as a condition of her joining President Obama’s Cabinet, the Globe reported. …

Jonathan Tobin asks if the Clinton Foundation is really a charity.

One of the mantras one must invoke when discussing the Clinton Cash controversy is to say that whatever one might think of the pay-to-play aspects of the former first family’s charitable endeavors, the Clinton Foundation does a lot of good work around the world. But now that more of the press is finally asking tough questions about the Clintons’ activities, it appears that their charity may not pass the basic question donors ask of any philanthropy: how much of the money raised is actually spent on the causes you are supposed to be aiding? Though the foundation has claimed that 88 percent of its expenditures are spent on good deeds, their own tax filings reveal that the real number is about ten percent. But far from being an unrelated, albeit embarrassing, sidebar to the allegations about influence peddling, this data is a reminder that the main point of the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation is to support its namesakes in a lavish fashion and to allow wealthy donors access to them.

Sean Davis highlighted the discrepancy between the 88 percent figure and the reality of the Clinton Foundation spending ten percent on charity in a recent Federalist article. He followed up with another, skewering a claim by the left-wing Punditfact site that this claim was “mostly false.” As he wrote, the only way to come to such a conclusion was to simply ignore facts, including, most importantly, the filings of the Clinton Foundation that made it clear that it spent very little of its money on good deeds. …

And Jennifer Rubin points out two more headaches for Clinton. 

At a time when she is reeling from multiple scandals, the foreign policy debacles she helped create and a political talent deficit, Hillary Clinton got two more pieces of bad news. Since she is firmly adhering to the White House, running for essentially a third Obama term, she will have to bear the burden of not only the president’s foreign policy but also his domestic track record.

The Post reports: “The U.S. economy ground nearly to a halt in the first three months of the year, according to government data released Wednesday morning, as exports plunged and severe winter weather helped keep consumers indoors. The gross domestic product grew between January and March at an annualized rate of 0.2 percent, the U.S. Commerce Department said, adding to the picture of an economy braking sharply after accelerating for much of last year. The pace fell well shy of the 1 percent mark anticipated by analysts and marked the weakest quarter in a year.” This is symptomatic of the puniest economic recovery in memory, one in which the economy has never truly taken off. Clinton has few ideas to juice economic growth because her view of the United States is so government-centric. President Obama has ladled on a host of regulations (including Environmental Protection Agency regulations, Obamacare and Dodd-Frank), is only now getting to a significant new free-trade deal (about which Clinton sounds unenthusiastic) and nixed tax reform that doesn’t include a tax hike. It is no wonder the economy is anemic.

The second data point today comes from Gallup poll: “Americans are considerably less likely now than they were in 2008 and years prior to identify themselves as middle class or upper-middle class, while the percentage putting themselves in the working or lower class has risen. …

Switching subjects from the proposed presidential disaster of Hillary, Karl Rove points out that barry’s present presidential disaster leaves behind problems in domestic policy as large as his serial goofs in foreign affairs.

… Regardless of what items Mr. Obama checks off, he will leave to his successor a staggering array of domestic problems, some he ignored and many he made worse.

Slow economic growth will be at the top of the list of problems. The pattern of American history has been that the more severe the recession, the stronger the recovery. Until now. In Mr. Obama’s recovery, average annual growth has been the slowest since the U.S. began compiling reliable economic statistics near the 20th century’s beginning—a feeble 2.9%. This year is off to an even slower start, with GDP growing 0.2% in the first three months.

The number of jobs also will be on that list. It took from June 2009 to April 2014—nearly five full years—to get back to having the same number of people working as when the recession began in December 2007. That’s a longer period of time to return to the starting point than in any recession in U.S. history. Meantime, roughly 14.7 million people came of age without a job available. The last time the job participation rate was this low was 1978. A third of Americans between 18 and 31 last year were living with their parents, the highest percentage in at least four decades.

The quality of jobs available will be another topic on that list. …

Erick Erickson of RedState wishes the president was not black. Then maybe he’d figure our why he is disliked.

Over the weekend, most of the worst people in the world gathered together in Washington, D.C. as a circle of jerks to sing each other’s praises. Sadly, there was no Samson to tear down the columns and collapse the roof on the Philistines of Washington. But there was a President of the United States willing to make jokes about the “F-word” and an Imperial Court to worship him.

Byron York notes that much of President Obama’s speech to the White House Correspondents Dinner centered around “black anger.” In other words, President Obama let loose over the weekend that he has concluded all the opposition to him is because he is black. …

… If only President Obama weren’t black, maybe he would realize that people don’t dislike him because he is black, they dislike him because he is a self-absorbed ass.

Kevin Williamson rode on Amtrak’s Acela with Joe (Man of the People) Biden. He calls Biden”Herr Gropenfuhrer” and that is why we read Kevin Williamson.

… And then came Herr Gropenführer himself. Biden’s biography alleges that he is six feet tall, and maybe he is, but he scurried into the train in a thoroughly rodential fashion, looking tiny and terrified, like a very old man who has wandered out of a dementia ward.

The entourage on the train wasn’t all of it, of course. At each station, the forward door of our train car was guarded on the platform by additional agents, whose job it was to prevent people from using the door the vice president used. Whatever additional unseen security was deployed beyond this I cannot guess. Drones circling overhead, I suppose, with agents in some underground black-site bunker intoning into headseats: “Creepy is on the move! Creepy is entering Sector 4!”

At Union Station, the sub-imperial entourage was met with yet more security, and the train’s passengers were prevented from exiting until the vice president had meandered to the end of the platform toward whatever it is he pretends to do all day.

One understands that security measures are necessary — there are more people who wish to do harm to the vice president of the United States than to Finland’s minister of education (who but a monster could wish harm to Krista Kiuru?). My neighborhood Starbucks apparently generates enough cash to justify a Brink’s pickup. We conservatives believe in nothing if not caution.

But in Biden’s case, all of this is done for the sake of theater — so that Joe Biden can continue doing his ordinary-guy shtick. Ordinary people have to be inconvenienced so that Joe Biden can pretend to be an ordinary guy. The serfs have to be forcibly reminded of their serfdom — no, you cannot just get off a train in our nation’s capital, willy-nilly and whenever you like, and here’s a man with a gun to make sure! — so that the lords can show us that they’re just like us. …

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Time to examine the trainwreck in Baltimore. Kevin Williamson starts us off saying liberal Democrats own the disaster in American cities.  

… St. Louis has not had a Republican mayor since the 1940s, and in its most recent elections for the board of aldermen there was no Republican in the majority of the contests; the city is overwhelmingly Democratic, effectively a single-party political monopoly from its schools to its police department. Baltimore has seen two Republicans sit in the mayor’s office since the 1920s — and none since the 1960s. Like St. Louis, it is effectively a single-party political monopoly from its schools to its police department. Philadelphia has not elected a Republican mayor since 1948. The last Republican to be elected mayor of Detroit was congratulated on his victory by President Eisenhower. Atlanta, a city so corrupt that its public schools are organized as a criminal conspiracy against its children, last had a Republican mayor in the 19th century. Its municipal elections are officially nonpartisan, but the last Republican to run in Atlanta’s 13th congressional district did not manage to secure even 30 percent of the vote; Atlanta is effectively a single-party political monopoly from its schools to its police department.  

American cities are by and large Democratic-party monopolies, monopolies generally dominated by the so-called progressive wing of the party. The results have been catastrophic, and not only in poor black cities such as Baltimore and Detroit. Money can paper over some of the defects of progressivism in rich, white cities such as Portland and San Francisco, but those are pretty awful places to be non-white and non-rich, too: Blacks make up barely 9 percent of the population in San Francisco, but they represent 40 percent of those arrested for murder, and they are arrested for drug offenses at ten times their share of the population. …

… The evidence suggests very strongly that the left-wing, Democratic claques that run a great many American cities — particularly the poor and black cities — are not capable of running a school system or a police department. They are incompetent, they are corrupt, and they are breathtakingly arrogant. Cleveland, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore — this is what Democrats do.

And the kids in the street screaming about “inequality”? Somebody should tell them that the locale in these United States with the least economic inequality is Utah, i.e. the state farthest away from the reach of the people who run Baltimore.

Keep voting for the same thing, keep getting the same thing.

But of course, the president says it’s all caused by the rascally republicans. Noah Rothman of Hot Air has the story.

… But the president conceded that he has no real plan to address the chronic hopelessness that bedevils cities like Baltimore when he claimed that what this moment truly called for is more infrastructure spending. And he would get it, too, if it weren’t for those darn Republicans.

“If we are serious about solving this problem, then we’re going to not only have to help the police, we’re going to have to think about what can we do, the rest of us, to make sure that we’re providing early education to these kids. To make sure that we’re reforming our criminal justice system so it’s not just a pipeline from schools to prisons. So that we’re not rendering men in these communities unemployable because of a felony record for a nonviolent drug offense. That we’re making investments so they can get the training they need to find jobs.

That’s hard. That requires more than just the occasional news report or task force, and there’s a bunch of my agenda that would make a difference right now in that. I’m under no illusion that under this Congress we’re going to get massive investments in urban communities. And so we’ll try to find areas where we can make a difference around school reform, and around job training, and around some investments in infrastructure in these communities trying to attract new businesses in.”

That might have made the president’s dispirited liberal base voters, many of whom reside in these hopeless urban environments, feel better, but this is about as naked an admission of powerlessness as you could get. And the president is correct to concede his impotence. The federal government has squandered much of its credibility among urban minorities. …

John Nolte of Breitbart has an answer to that. 

Contrary to the emotional blackmail some leftists are attempting to peddle, Baltimore is not America’s problem or shame. That failed city is solely and completely a Democrat problem. Like many failed cities, Detroit comes to mind, and every city besieged recently by rioting, Democrats and their union pals have had carte blanche to inflict their ideas and policies on Baltimore since 1967, the last time there was a Republican Mayor. 

In 2012, after four years of his own failed policies, President Obama won a whopping 87.4% of the Baltimore City vote. Democrats run the city of Baltimore, the unions, the schools, and, yes, the police force. Since 1969, there have been only two Republican governors of the State of Maryland.

Elijah Cummings has represented Baltimore in the U.S. Congress for more than thirty years. As I write this, despite his objectively disastrous reign, the Democrat-infested mainstream media is treating the Democrat like a local folk hero, not the obvious and glaring failure he really is.

Every single member of the Baltimore city council is a Democrat.

Liberalism and all the toxic government dependence and cronyism and union corruption and failed schools that comes along with it, has run amok in Baltimore for a half-century, and that is Baltimore’s problem. …

Daniel Henninger says it’s Al Sharpton’s Baltimore.

… When Al Sharpton popularized the chant, “No justice, no peace,” it was unmistakably clear that “no peace” was an implicit threat of civil unrest.

Not civil disobedience, as practiced by Martin Luther King Jr. Civil unrest.

Civil unrest can come in degrees. It might be a brief fight between protesters and the cops. It might be someone throwing rocks through store windows. Or it might be more than that.

Whenever groups gathered in large numbers to start the “no justice, no peace” demonstrations and listen to incitements against “the police,” we would hear mayors, politicians, college presidents and American presidents say they “understood the anger.” They all assumed that any civil unrest that resulted would be, as they so often say, “containable.” Meaning—acceptable.

In Ferguson, it was barely so following the Missouri grand jury’s decision in November not to indict a policeman for Michael Brown’s death. Businesses were demolished. As they were when street violence erupted in Berkeley, Calif. New York’s police stood aside while marchers intimidated much of the city and marauded through department stores.

But what the whole nation watched on television Monday for about nine hours in Baltimore was not “containable.” …

David Harsanyi says of course the democrats deserve blame for what’s happened in Baltimore.

… Where does the blame for the civil unrest lay? In plenty of places. Some of those places have absolutely nothing to do with politics and can’t be fixed by any Washington agenda — imagined, or otherwise. The tribulations plaguing cities like Baltimore are complex, having festered for years. But does that excuse the bungling of Democratic Party governance? Does it change the fact that massive amounts of spending have done little in the war on poverty?

And if Democrats claim they are uniquely empathetic towards the poor and weak, that welfare programs can never be reformed only expanded, that perpetually pumping “investments” into cities is the only way to alleviate the hardship faced by citizens, it’s more than fair to gauge the effectiveness – not to mention the competence – of those allocating and overseeing those policies. Because Republicans may be horrible, but they aren’t running Baltimore.

The above are all prose. Trust Roger Simon to write poetry.

After festering for half a century, we’re witnessing the endgame of LBJ’s Great Society.

Who wasn’t hugely depressed watching the non-stop coverage of the Baltimore riots Monday night?  So sad. How has it come to this?  We’re back in Watts, only it’s five decades later !

Well, it’s not exactly the same.  It was white businesses that were trashed in Watts — this time they were black ones.  And there was another, even more important, difference…

Commentators were repeatedly asking, where are the parents?   Ben Carson — the neurosurgeon, potential Republican presidential candidate and onetime Baltimore resident — urged the city’s parents “Please, take care of your children.”

Great idea, but here’s the problem.  They don’t have ‘em.  According to liberal CNN’s Don Lemon, 72 percent of African-American children are born out of wedlock. His stats were born out by the Centers for Disease Control.  One can only imagine what the stats would be broken down for those Baltimore neighborhoods that were rioting.  The presence of a father in the home would be a rarity indeed.  And a lot of the moms are probably holding their fatherless homes together for dear life, desperately trying to make a living when their kids are pouring out of school.  No one was home.

Of course, it wasn’t always that way.  The black family was the bulwark of that community.  So what happened?  I’ll be blunt, since I was once part of the problem and equally culpable — liberal racism.  Ever since the days of Lyndon Johnson, social welfare programs aimed at making the lives of “colored people” better actually made them worse. …

Just to show what Simon called ”liberal racism” is still running strong, Peter Wehner highlights a conversation between Jon Stewart and George Stephanopoulos.

… The argument Stewart and Stephanopoulos were throwing out–we’re dramatically under-investing in America’s cities–is liberal claptrap. To stay with the issue of education, the problem with American education in general, and large urban school districts in particular, isn’t lack of funding. It’s lack of accountability and transparency, lack of competition and choice, lack of results and high standards. We obsess on inputs and ignore outputs. What often happens, in fact, is the worst school districts often get the most money based on the flawed premise that the reason the schools are failing is lack of funding.

We’re spending an enormous amount of money on a system that isn’t producing, and it’s liberal interest groups (e.g., education unions) and the Democratic Party that are ferocious opponents of the kind of reforms that would improve American education. What exactly are the compelling public policy and moral arguments for opposing school choice for kids in the worst schools in America? There are none. The opposition is based on wanting to maintain and increase political power. If it’s the kids who suffer, so be it. Progressivism has an agenda to achieve, after all. …

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Ron Fournier is after H. Clinton again. That will kick off another day to examine her efforts. 

Let’s remember what this story is about. Hillary and Bill Clinton want it to be about a “conservative author” who catalogued their conflicts of interest. They want it to be about The New York Times, The Washington Post, and any other media outlets who dare to question the couple’s integrity. They want it to be about “Republican overreach.”

The media mostly wants it to be about Election Day 2016. We commission polls and hire pundits to parse the winners and losers of each news cycle. We shrug:”Real voters don’t care about this story.” As if it’s not our job to help them understand why these scandals matter. 

Hillary Clinton seized all emails pertaining to her job as secretary of State and deleted an unknown number of messages from her private server. Her family charity accepted foreign and corporate donations from people doing business with the State Department—people who hoped to curry favor. 

She violated government rules designed to protect against corruption and perceptions of corruption that erode the public’s trust in government. She has not apologized. She has not made amends: She withholds the email server and continues to accept foreign donations.

That’s what this is about. …

John Fund is asking if the Dems are worried. He ran many of them at the White House Correspondent’s dinner.

… But what was striking about last night’s dinner was that many people have come to the conclusion that Hillary Clinton’s campaign is in deep trouble and she is no longer as inevitable as people once thought. Working reporters who cover her and other Democratic politicians wouldn’t go on the record, but you heard the same thing from several of them:

“It’s not that she’s too old — she just can’t relate to younger generations.”

“A couple more scandals, and you’ll wonder if they will start to define her campaign.”

“Younger women know a female will become president in their lifetime; many of them don’t think it has to be or even should be Hillary.”

“How can she possibly distance herself from the Obama administration she served for four years, but whose policies increasingly alienate independent voters she needs?”

That last comment goes to the heart of her problem with Democratic insiders. Publicly, they praise Hillary as a candidate of exceptional experience in government and one who is likely to harvest bushels of votes from people eager to elect the first female president. Privately, they fret about a recent Quinnipiac poll in which 54 percent of Americans say Clinton is not honest or trustworthy. Among independents, that number hits 61 percent. “Candidates distrusted by that many people can win the White House, but it leaves no margin for error or another big scandal,” one Democratic former officeholder admitted to me. …

Chris Cillizza says she had the worst week in Washington.

… Like the semi-scandals of the 1990s and 2000s, none of the pieces was the sort of death blow that could end or even badly hamstring Clinton’s presidential candidacy. But taken together, they remind people — even people who are favorably inclined toward the Clinton family — of all the baggage that goes along with electing them to any office.

Remember that when it comes to Hillary Clinton, America already holds two contradictory ideas in its collective head. On the one hand, a majority (62 percent in a recent QuinnipiacUniversity poll) believe she would be a strong leader. On the other, more than half of the public (54 percent in that same poll) believes she is neither “honest” nor “trustworthy.”

Hillary Clinton, for playing to type long after you should have known better, you had the worst week in Washington. Congrats, or something.

Glenn Reynolds speculates on winners and losers in this Clinton mess.

… But who benefits from Clinton’s troubles now, and who suffers? A few thoughts:

First, this is a shot in the arm for her potential Democratic challengers, who have labored in obscurity. Probably the biggest beneficiary is former Virginia senator James Webb, whose military background and more centrist views could help bring in the white working-class voters that the Democrats are realizing they have alienated during the Obama era. Also helped is Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, though her close resemblance to Clinton (another northeastern Ivy League white woman) and her own strong corporate ties (Warren made money advising asbestos companies how not to pay claims, and is worth many millions) might hurt. Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley also gets a boost, though he’s the probably the longest shot of the three.

On the other hand, Clinton’s candidacy is well-established, heavily financed (though that’s part of the problem, I guess) and endowed with high name recognition, ’90s nostalgia and her husband’s formidable political skills. Losing that is a sore blow to the Democratic Party’s 2016 hopes.

On the Republican side, Clinton’s travails both hurt and help. By making the political establishment look corrupt, they especially help the anti-establishment candidates such as Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Sens. Ted Cruz and Rand Paul. …

From The Federalist we learn the Clinton Foundation only spent 10 percent of its budget on charitable grants. He wasn’t President Pig for nothing.

… If you take a narrower, and more realistic, view of the tax-exempt group’s expenditures by excluding obvious overhead expenses and focusing on direct grants to charities and governments, the numbers look much worse. In 2013, for example, only 10 percent of the Clinton Foundation’s expenditures were for direct charitable grants. The amount it spent on charitable grants–$8.8 million–was dwarfed by the $17.2 million it cumulatively spent on travel, rent, and office supplies. Between 2011 and 2013, the organization spent only 9.9 percent of the $252 million it collected on direct charitable grants.

While some may claim that the Clinton Foundation does its charity by itself, rather than outsourcing to other organizations in the form of grants, there appears to be little evidence of that activity in 2013. In 2008, for example, the Clinton Foundation spent nearly $100 million purchasing and distributing medicine and working with its care partners. In 2009, the organization spent $126 million on pharmaceutical and care partner expenses. By 2011, those activities were virtually non-existent. The group spent nothing on pharmaceutical expenses and only $1.2 million on care partner expenses. In 2012 and 2013, the Clinton Foundation spent $0. In just a few short years, the Clinton’s primary philanthropic project transitioned from a massive player in global pharmaceutical distribution to a bloated travel agency and conference organizing business that just happened to be tax-exempt.

The Clinton Foundation announced last week that it would be refiling its tax returns for the last five years because it had improperly failed to disclose millions of dollars in donations from foreign sources while Hillary Clinton was serving as Secretary of State.

Jonathan Tobin has more on the Clinton “good works.”

… The latest shoe to drop is the report about the way the Clintons became the “gatekeepers” for any company that wanted to do business in Haiti during the reconstruction effort after a devastating earthquake in 2010. By the same set of curious coincidences that led those who profited from the sale of 20 percent of America’s uranium reserves to Russia to become donors to the Clinton Global Initiative and sponsors of highly paid speeches by Bill Clinton, a different set of “philanthropists” wound up getting contracts to aid reconstruction and infrastructure work in Haiti also after donating fortunes to the ubiquitous Clinton Foundation. The former president, who was co-chair of a recovery commission, and the State Department facilitated such access. One of the most egregious and embarrassing examples came when a company with little mining experience was granted a gold mining permit. By another astonishing coincidence, Tony Rodham, the secretary of state’s brother, was soon named to its board.

In reply to this and the shocking revelations about a Russian state agency acquiring an American uranium mine from Clinton donors, friends of the putative 2016 Democratic presidential candidate can only shrug their shoulders and demand that critics “prove” to a legal certainty that the favors done their benefactors was part of corrupt deal. They’re right. There probably isn’t a piece of paper lying around in which Bill or Hillary say what it will cost in terms of charitable gifts or honorariums to help potential donors. And if it was ever written in an email, we know that email and the server on which it was recorded have since been erased. …

Abe Greenwald closes today’s look at the Clintons with an effort to understand the mindset of their apologists.

The Clinton Cash scandal has spurred much discussion of the serial misconduct of Bill and Hillary Clinton. But the affair speaks to realities larger and more destructive than the political pathologies of one family. The Clinton Foundation saga marries liberalism’s core grandiosity to the impunity of the new high-flying elite and lays bare a class of global VIP forever celebrating its progressive good works while holding the common citizen in contempt.

Progressive grandiosity was born long ago with the socialist impulse to remake the world. It lives on in the liberal expectation of a savior who will set things right. Such political messianism makes it hard for many liberals to find fault with liberal leaders. While conservatives reject perfection and take human defects as given, many liberals see the shortcomings of a Barack Obama or a Hillary Clinton as a threat to their faith.

It’s easier, then, for liberals to downplay a progressive politician’s record and focus instead on their “meaning.” This goes a long way in explaining both the reelection of Obama and the continued support for Hillary, two liberal politicians stuffed to the gills with meaning and shot through with teleological purpose. They’re not admired for what they’ve done but for simply being objects of admiration—and inevitability. …

… Liberal messianism and elite-worship enjoy a wholly complementary relationship. Progressives expect to cede large realms of their lives to capable leaders who will deliver a fairer world. The Clintons have traded on both their meaning and their unquestioned elite status to earn pardons for a multitude of sins. While the world looked the other way Clinton Cash happened. Both ideas are there in Hillary’s campaign message: “Everyday Americans need a champion. I want to be that champion.” The Clintons have long thrived in the convergence of these trends. It remains to be seen if they will also be undone by them.

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Kevin Williamson posts on global warming and intellectual dishonesty.

The BBC reports: “Scientists are calling on world leaders to sign up to an eight-point plan of action at landmark talks in Paris.”

Among those eight points we find:

Equity of approach — with richer countries helping poorer ones

Providing climate finance for developing countries.

Fair enough, though I’m not sure that anybody knows what “climate finance” is or how to provide it.

But whatever you think of these points, they are not scientific points; they are social, economic, and political points, and scientists have no special standing to speak to social, economic, and political ends, nor do they have any special insight into social, economic, or political questions. …

Kevin has more on global warming using California as an example.

… California presents the global-warming dispute in miniature. The Left, with the prominent advocacy of President Barack Obama, has argued that the challenge of global warming necessitates a new form of economic organization under political discipline. Never mind, for the moment, that the Left has been arguing for a new form of economic organization under political discipline for more than a century (the crisis changes every generation, but the identical solution endures); consider the actual choice presented by Sternbergh’s avocado. We could embark on a sprawling, unfocused, and unmanageable crusade to cajole and coerce the world — including the not-especially-cajolable gentlemen in Beijing — into reorganizing the entire human race’s means of sustenance in accordance with not especially well-defined atmospheric metrics. Or we could insist that California get its act together on the matter of water infrastructure.

California not only is effectively a single-party state operating under Democratic monopoly, its Democrats are impeccably progressive, almost spotlessly so. The progressives are forever insisting that they are the ones who know how to handle infrastructure projects, that they are the ones who care about them, and that their broader understanding of public goods will contribute to general prosperity. In reality, California has the worst water infrastructure situation in the country, with the EPA in 2013 calculating that the state requires nearly $45 billion in improvements. A more liberal view of California’s real possibilities would identify an even larger deficit. California’s recent lack of precipitation is nature’s doing; its inability to weather the ordinary variations of life on Earth is entirely man-made.

The actual challenges presented by the threat of global warming look a lot more like California’s current situation than Waterworld or The Day After Tomorrow. As a matter of political rhetoric, it is attractive to frame the choice as a matter of affiliation: Cast your lot with the truth-speaking scientists on one side or the oil-addicted pre-Enlightenment goobers on the other. The actual choice is between making a naïve attempt to reorganize the world’s economy — an attempt that certainly will fail — and embarking on a series of discrete, manageable adaptations, such as improving the water-management facilities of millions of people who live, let’s remember, in a desert.

The Left’s potted moral outrage notwithstanding, that isn’t a brief for denial, but a brief for adaptation. And if the Left really believed half as much in global warming as its rhetoric suggests, its leaders would be moving forward with a robust program for adaptation — especially in California, a large and prosperous jurisdiction that is under nearly complete progressive political control. …

Christopher Booker in Telegraph, UK writes on a group of scientists who are beginning to study falsified temperature data.

… Back in January and February, two items in this column attracted more than 42,000 comments to the Telegraph website from all over the world. The provocative headings given to them were “Climategate the sequel: how we are still being tricked by flawed data on global warming” and “The fiddling with temperature data is the biggest scientific scandal”.

My cue for those pieces was the evidence multiplying from across the world that something very odd has been going on with those official surface temperature records, all of which ultimately rely on data compiled by NOAA’s GHCN. Careful analysts have come up with hundreds of examples of how the original data recorded by 3,000-odd weather stations has been “adjusted”, to exaggerate the degree to which the Earth has actually been warming. Figures from earlier decades have repeatedly been adjusted downwards and more recent data adjusted upwards, to show the Earth having warmed much more dramatically than the original data justified.

So strong is the evidence that all this calls for proper investigation that my articles have now brought a heavyweight response. The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) has enlisted an international team of five distinguished scientists to carry out a full inquiry into just how far these manipulations of the data may have distorted our picture of what is really happening to global temperatures.

The panel is chaired by Terence Kealey, until recently vice-chancellor of the University of Buckingham. …

Elections in Great Britain are scheduled for May 7th. Commentary posts on the coming vote. 

Britain’s upcoming general election is fast turning into one of the strangest the country has ever witnessed. Quite apart from the fact that the outcome appears utterly unpredictable, there have also been all kinds of strange anomalies. Both the major parties–Conservative and Labor–are being seriously undercut by a formerly fringe single issue anti-European Union party, while a tiny far-left environmentalist party momentarily pushed itself to center stage in the election debate, and looming over the entire campaign has been the unpalatable prospect of Scottish separatists playing kingmaker in the next parliament. Yet perhaps more surreal than all of this has been the bizarre reality of a Labor party that now has its first Jewish leader, just at the very moment that it is losing the Jewish vote.

According to a poll carried out by Survation at the beginning of April, just 22 percent of British Jews intend to vote for Ed Miliband’s Labor, whereas an unprecedented 69 percent say they will back the Conservatives. This is quite some turnaround. Historically Britain’s Jews were aligned with the left. The old Liberal party—a sad remnant of which lives on within today’s Liberal Democrats—once boasted many Jewish members of parliament. At the same time working-class Jews from Eastern Europe, concentrated in London’s East End during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, overwhelmingly voted Labor. …

… While Jews make up less than one percent of the UK population, they could prove more significant in electoral terms, concentrated as they are in a whole series of suburban London and Manchester swing seats that the Conservatives must win if they are to have any hope of staying in office. In the past Labor has benefited from the support of some important Jewish donors. Yet more recently it has become known that several key figures can’t bring themselves to give to Labor this time around.

Under Miliband, Labor has taken a two-pronged approach to scaring off Jewish support. The first has involved the party’s sudden veer to the left with a clear commitment to wealth redistribution, a so-called mansion tax, and now rent controls. Miliband has truly earned his tabloid title, “Red Ed.” And as wedded to “progressive” notions about social justice as many middle-class Jews still are, even they have their limits when it comes to voting against the financial welfare of their own families.

The second, and no less significant factor, has been Labor’s turn against Israel. Despite having once been Britain’s most pro-Zionist party and despite the pro-Israel sentiments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, today Labor’s grassroots are virulently hostile to the Jewish state, and this is an attitude that most believe Miliband shares. After all, the highly political household he grew up in was far more affiliated with the Marxist left than it was with the mainstream Jewish community. …

We’ve been flogging the student debt crisis for a decade. NY Times had an item on law school grads struggling with both debt and a terrible job market. 

Jonathan Wang has not practiced law since he graduated from ColumbiaLawSchool in 2010, but he did not plan it that way.

When he entered law school, the economy was flourishing, and he had every reason to think that with a prestigious degree he was headed for a secure well-paying career. He convinced his parents, who work in Silicon Valley, that he had a plan. “I would spend three years at school in New York, then work for a big law firm and make $160,000 a year,” said Mr. Wang, 29. “And someday, I would become a partner and live the good life.”

Mr. Wang, who works in Manhattan as a tutor for the law school admissions exam, is living a life far different from the one he envisioned. And he is not alone. About 20 percent of law graduates from 2010 are working at jobs that do not require a law license, according to a new study, and only 40 percent are working in law firms, compared with 60 percent from the class a decade earlier. To pay the bills, the 2010 graduates have taken on a variety of jobs, some that do not require admission to the bar; others have struck out on their own with solo practices. Most of the graduates have substantial student debt.

Even as law school enrollment was peaking in 2010 — reaching 52,488, according to American Bar Association figures — those graduating were not receiving job offers from firms where they were interning. And offers to some students were rescinded.

“None of this was on my radar,” Mr. Wang said, “but it began to be obvious by the time second-year summer internships were over. We knew things were depressed, but then the legs were cut out from under us.”

After the economic collapse in the fall of 2008, corporations began to cut spending on legal matters, and law firms, in turn, began to reduce their hiring and even laid off employees. The legal profession was undergoing the early wave of turbulence that left graduates in subsequent classes facing a harsher job market that has shown few signs of a robust recovery. But the class of 2010 was the first to experience it full force. …

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Kate Bachelder, writing in the WSJ, interviews Mitch Daniels who says where kids go to college is not an important as many believe. Daniels also has ideas about how colleges could do a better job of serving their customers.

With acceptance letters in hand, millions of high-schools seniors ruminating over where to attend college—and their parents who are panicked that their kid might pick the place with the best climbing wall—should all take a breath: It doesn’t much matter where you go to college.

What matters is “how you go,” says Purdue University President Mitch Daniels, the former governor of Indiana. He then lays out the results of the Gallup-Purdue Index, a national survey of 30,000 college graduates that was first released last year. The survey attempts to quantify not only what graduates earn but also how well they are navigating adult life.

A mere 39% of college graduates report feeling engaged with their work, and in that group as many hail from top-100 schools as don’t. The three most important contributions that college makes to a sense of workplace thriving after graduation: Having one professor who made you excited about learning, feeling as though teachers cared about you, and working with a mentor. Graduates who checked those boxes were more than twice as likely to sense they are flourishing at work.

But only 14% of those surveyed said they had hit that trifecta in college. Other positive factors from undergraduate experience: working on a long-term project, having an internship and participating in extracurricular activities. Where graduates went to college barely registered as a predictor of job satisfaction. …

… soon after Mr. Daniels arrived at Purdue. His first order of business: freeze tuition.

“I had a sense, first of all, it seemed like the right thing to do. Not to skip over that. But secondly that we probably could do it without great difficulty,” he says. For decades college tuition has outpaced inflation, forcing students to increase their borrowing, but next year’s Purdue seniors will have never seen a tuition increase.

“I thought this whole process—it’s sort of like a bubble, and people are using that term—just couldn’t go on much further, and so why not get off the escalator before it broke,” he says.

Not many colleges have followed, and Mr. Daniels has a few theories about why. “Corporate boards 15 years ago or so were roundly and rightly criticized for being too compliant with the desires of management. If this was true of corporate boards, I think it’s really been true of a lot of college boards and trustees,” he says. “They have such an affection for dear old alma mater, love those 50-yard-line seats, ‘Whatever you want to do, Mr. President.’ And so it’s been observed a long time that colleges will spend everything they can get their hands on, in the absence of either market pressure or stewardship by a strong-minded board.” …

WSJ Editors write on the colleges that were ruined by the governments of California and the US.

It’s good that Education Department regulators don’t oversee drone strikes. Behold how DoE’s blunderbuss assault on the for-profit Corinthian Colleges has harmed thousands of students and employees.

On Monday the Santa Ana-based for-profit shut down its remaining 28 schools, which no buyer would purchase amid the government’s regulatory ambush. The closure displaces 16,000 or so students—many mere months away from graduation—and 2,500 workers.

Last summer the Education Department began to drive Corinthian out of business by choking off federal student aid for supposedly stonewalling exhaustive document requests. The Department claimed to be investigating whether Corinthian misrepresented job placement rates as California Attorney General Kamala Harris alleged in a lawsuit.

Note that the federal government doesn’t specify how for-profits calculate their job placement rates. States and accrediting agencies have disparate and often vague rules, which notably don’t apply to nonprofit and public colleges.  …

Jesse Cole asks what a college degree might be worth today if English majors have no requirement to study Shakespeare.

‘There is hardly a pioneer’s hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare,” Alexis de Tocqueville writes in Democracy in America, recalling his travels across the country in the early 19th century and suggesting the scope of the Bard’s influence. From the log cabins of our young republic to the classrooms of contemporary China, where he is known as Shashibiya, Shakespeare has been arguably the most read writer in the English language. He is also certainly the most translated. His work has been rendered in Zulu, Mandarin, even Klingon.

Why, then, is he vanishing from the curricula of America’s colleges?

A new study by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) reveals, depressingly, that only four of the nation’s top colleges and universities require a Shakespeare course, even for English majors. ACTA, a non-profit based in Washington, D.C., that encourages college trustees to act on behalf of academic freedom and excellence, surveyed U.S. News and World Report’s top 25 national universities and top 25 liberal-arts colleges. Of the former, only Harvard (the lone Ivy League institution to make the cut) and the University of California–Los Angeles require English majors to study Shakespeare. Of the latter, only WellesleyCollege and the United StatesNavalAcademy do. …

And Kevin Williamson writes on campus swastikas.

When tyranny arrives on these shores, it isn’t going to start off looking like something out of George Orwell — it’s going to look a lot like college, which is why the sort of people who twice made Barack Obama president of these United States will welcome it.

GeorgeWashingtonUniversity (“the Harvard of safety schools,” as alumnus Dan Foster calls it) has a swastika problem. This goes back a ways. In 2007, a Jewish student, Sarah Marshak, reported that her dorm-room door had been defaced with swastikas, and she complained that the university was doing too little to investigate. But the university was in fact investigating thoroughly — it had, ridiculously enough, gone as far as consulting the FBI — and its sneakily hidden surveillance cameras recorded the vandal in action.

No points for guessing that the malefactor was Sarah Marshak.

Recently, somebody drew swastikas on the wall of a GWU dormitory. Whether that is the work of another hoax artist or a genuine free-range national-socialist graffitist is unknown, but the school’s students have an unproud history of faking hate crimes. A group of left-wing students some years back drew up a phony anti-Muslim flier that was falsely attributed to a conservative group, the Young America’s Foundation, in an attempt to smear the organization as racist. …

Washington Post reports on how barbers are helping prevent colon cancer.

There are  26 barbers and stylists at The Shop in Hyattsville, Md. Between them, they cut the hair of more than 100 people each day. That’s around 600 people each week, 31,000 heads each year.

Over the last two years, 29 of  those customers received a colonoscopy as a direct result of conversations they had with their barbers at The Shop.  One of those people, says owner Fredie Spry, was already showing symptoms of colon cancer and is now getting treated.  Many more of Spry’s African-American clients  learned that the cancer is one of the few that are preventable and — given blacks’ higher-than-average risk for the disease– they should consider getting a first colonoscopy at 45.

“It makes me feel like I’m giving back to the community,” said Spry, who opened The Shop in 2001. “In life, you’re either helping or hurting. You’re part of the problem or the solution.”

The Shop was the first establishment to implement University of Maryland’s Health In-Reach and Research Initiative (HAIR)—a one-of-a-kind outreach program that trains barbers to teach their clients about colorectal cancer and measures, like a colonoscopy, that can prevent it. …