CHECK YOUR GUT BACTERIA PRIVILEGE: Gut bacteria regulate nerve fibre insulation

IT COULD BE WORSE, SHE COULD HAVE CHILDREN: Neutering speech until silence prevails! (And no menacing movements either!)

OH SHOCKED FACE, YOU ARE NEVER FAR: NYPD corruption scandal leads straight to de Blasio.

BACKGROUND CHECKS ARE SO DISCRIMINATORY: Only 3 U.S. Airports Require Employee Security Checks.

TO BE FAIR, IT’S ONLY BECAUSE THEY DON’T KNOW HOW TO FIDDLE: The feds dawdle while patients die needlessly.

THEY BECAME TEH GRAUNIAD SO SLOWLY I NEVER NOTICED TILL NOW: BBC News covers Higgs boson reboot with a smutty spelling gaffe.

Layers and layers of fact and spell checkers.  You know the drill. If only they were some gonzo guys (and gals) in their pajamas!

UPDATE: Link fixed!

AT AMAZON, deals on Bestselling Digital Cameras. Digital cameras have sure come a long way since I first started blogging about them.

Plus, up to 50% off Bosch tools. I still love my Bosch cordless drill. I was doing some deck repairs using it and the GRK fasteners that I blogged about a while ago. Everything was zippy and easy. Even the Insta-Wife was impressed.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Do we even own things anymore? Thanks to intellectual property laws, companies sell you “things” but still own the software.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Former New Berlin school teacher charged with sex with student. “Domres is the second teacher facing charges of sex with a student in Waukesha County in recent months. In December, April M. Novak, 30, of Sussex, a former Menomonee Falls School District teacher, was charged with sexually assaulting a 16-year-old student.”

IMPOSSIBLE. IT’S A GUN-FREE ZONE. Newtown, CT Middle School Teacher Arrested for Carrying Gun in School.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: It’s Unhealthy To Be A Widower.

Related: Men Living Longer: Women And Minorities Hardest Hit?

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “We tend to think of heretics as contrarians, individuals with a compulsion to flout conventional wisdom. But sometimes a heretic is simply a mainstream thinker who stays facing the same way while everyone around him turns 180 degrees.”

SOMEBODY WAS POSTING THIS ON FACEBOOK, AND TO BE HONEST IT SEEMS INCREASINGLY PLAUSIBLE: Human intelligence is declining according to Stanford geneticist.

Shut up and pour me another Brawndo. It’s got electrolytes!

“SHRIMP SIMULACRUM.” SOUNDS DELICIOUS! A New Shrimp Simulacrum Hopes To Take Plates By Storm. “Barnes told the Atlantic that the process of making the faux crustacean, out of red algae and protein powder, is like ‘baking a loaf of bread.’ New Wave won’t be the first faux shrimp on the market, but because they are made of the same algae that shrimp regularly eat, these shrimp knock-offs claim to have a much closer nutritional profile that any previously produced.”

Yum. Not just shrimp simulacrum. Algae-based shrimp simulacrum. Who could say no to that?

THE WILD, THE INNOCENT, AND THE LEFT’S WAR ON BATHROOMS: ‘Raising my voice in opposition’: Bruce Springsteen cancels N.C. concert over HB2 law.

Alternate headline: Semi-Retired Former Rock Star Turned Tool of the One Percent Ruling Elite Screws Working Class Fans to Send PC Virtue Signal to His Political Masters.

SHARING ECONOMY, DNA-EDITION: Forget the presidential race, the biggest story right now is the rapid spread of gene-editing technology. Tech Review reports on the entrepreneurial nonprofit driving its rapid spread:

AddGene is a nonprofit that exists to help scientists share their DNA inventions. Think of it as an Amazon.com for biological parts. Anyone can submit one—or order someone else’s part for $65.

Easy access to gene-editing technology is what has allowed labs everywhere to get into the game. Last year, there were more than 1,300 scientific papers on CRISPR, and it’s been used to do everything from curing muscular dystrophy in mice to making super-muscled beagles.

Read the rest here. (It’s short.)

WELL, THIS WON’T WIN HIM MANY NEW FRIENDS ON THE LEFT: Pope Francis Encourages Marital Sex, Condemns Gay Marriage.

CUTENESS IS JUST A MANIPULATIVE STRATEGY FOR KILLERS: Biologists Have Learned Something Horrifying About Prairie Dogs: Prairie dogs are cold-blooded killers.

SPACEX SUCCESSFULLY LANDS REUSABLE FIRST STAGE ON DRONE SHIP.

UPDATE: Video.

HOW NOT TO BE SEEN: Will This Weapon Change Infantry Warfare Forever?

For now, not much will change on the battlefield for dismounted soldiers in combat. However, once the weapon is distributed more widely at the squad level throughout the U.S. military, the impact of the XM25 could be revolutionary and fundamentally change small infantry tactics. The XM25 will essentially destroy the value of cover and with it the necessity of long-drawn out firefights. It will also make the old infantry tactic of firing and maneuvering to eliminate an enemy hiding behind cover obsolete.

“The XM25 is a next-generation, semi-automatic weapon designed for effectiveness against enemies protected by walls, dug into foxholes or hidden in hard-to-reach places,” according to the website of Orbital ATK, the producer of the XM25.

If there’s ever a civilian model, the range where I shoot is going to have to start hiding the targets just to keep things interesting.

THE SCIENCE IS CISGENDERED: GENDER-NEUTRAL CATS ARE THE CIVIL RIGHTS STRUGGLE OF OUR AGE.

FOUR REASONS REPUBLICANS SHOULD REJOICE AT CRUZ BEATING TRUMP.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: 6 ways to avoid ‘tech neck,’ why your cell phone may be killing your back.

SPRING CLEANING AT AMAZON: Organize Your Office!

Plus, Up to 50% Off Select Remington Airguns & Targets.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Do we even own things anymore? Thanks to intellectual property laws, companies sell you “things” but still own the software.

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW – PROFESSOR LAURA KIPNIS ON HER ‘TITLE IX INQUISITION’: Check out FIRE’s latest interview with Northwestern University professor Laura Kipnis. Last year, Professor Kipnis published an article called “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe” in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Little did she know, she would become the target of a Title IX investigation herself as a result. As FIRE’s Aaron Reese and Chris Maltby write:

Kipnis’ article described problems with a “post-Title IX landscape” where “sexual panic rules” on America’s campuses and Title IX investigations can be the result of just talking about sex. Following the article’s publication, Kipnis was subjected to a 72-day investigation that proved her point all too well. That’s right: A professor was subjected to a lengthy Title IX investigation for her article about how there are too many Title IX investigations.

You can watch the video below, and learn more about Kipnis’s “Inquisition” over at The Torch.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Why You Should Keep Backyard Chickens. My sister did that for a while, until she discovered that “fox in the henhouse” was not just an expression.

THIS WASN’T TRUE IN THE CLINTON ADMINISTRATION: Doctors: Oral Sex Is Still Sex.

YOU MEAN, IT TEXTS AND EATS A BURGER WHILE DRIVING? DARPA’s Self-Driving Submarine Hunter Steers Like a Human.

WELL, YES, THAT’S ABSOLUTELY THE GOAL: How a Cashless Society Could Embolden Big Brother: When money becomes information, it can inform on you.

I wrote on this a while back.

THIS WILL NOT END WELL: Here Come the Marketing Bots.

Actually, I think it was in Accelerando where the solar system eventually became a robot wasteland run by spambots and malware.

NEW YORK OBSERVER: Yes, Hillary Has Lost Her Momentum: Bernie Sanders’ win streak makes NY critical for Clinton.

AS SHOULD ALL RIGHT-MINDED PEOPLE: On Second Israel visit, Kevin Costner dismisses BDS champion Roger Waters.

Related: David Thompson writes, “[Ben] Shapiro’s talk, video of which is here, was on what happens when ‘diversity’ ideology and leftist censoriousness stifle free speech and intellectual pluralism. An irony that may have escaped the protesting students, who were busy feeling pleased with themselves while threatening violence if the talk didn’t stop and drawing swastikas on the face of a Jewish visitor.”

TWO KILLED IN SHOOTING AT LACKLAND AIR FORCE BASE.

JOURNALISM: “The linked article is in the NYT. The coverage leans cutesy, and there’s zero acknowledgement that Sweden might have a tourism problem based on news reports that might lead women to believe that we are not safe walking alone there.”

In the Nordic Paradises you don’t worry about rape. And if you do get raped, you feel guilty.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: North Korean Video Graphically Threatens to Turn Seoul into a “Sea of Flames.”

OCULUS RIFT PHONE HOME: The virtual reality headset reports your every move to Facebook and to advertisers.

When the headset’s software is installed on a computer, it adds a process that allows the PC to watch what the headset is doing and send that back to Oculus. That allows the headset to know when it is being used and turn itself on — but it also allows the company to collect information on people’s head movements and activity and send it back to advertisers.

The terms and conditions include a line saying that the headset will collect “Information about your physical movements and dimensions when you use a virtual reality headset”, along with a range of more usual information like data about users’ computers and location.

Given some of the sordid ways VR will be put to use, this “feature” should give people pause.

A TEXTBOOK CASE OF PATHOLOGICAL ALTRUISM: Male Norwegian politician raped by asylum seeker says he feels GUILTY that his attacker will now be deported because the man might suffer back in Somalia.

Barbara Oakley, call your office.

FASTER, PLEASE: Is the ability to regenerate lost limbs lurking in our genes? Study reveals hidden DNA that could be ‘reawakened.’

WE COULD DO WORSE, AND PROBABLY WILL: The Secret Movement To Draft General James Mattis For President: Gen. James Mattis doesn’t necessarily want to be president—but that’s not stopping a group of billionaire donors from hatching a plan to get him there.

Well, you can do it the easy way, or the hard way.

HIS PUERTO RICAN PREDICTION SEEMS TO BE IN THE PROCESS OF COMING TRUE, AND SEVERAL OF THE OTHERS ARE ADVANCING: Flashback: The Problematic Five: Events With the Power to Reshape the 2016 Election.

TWEET OF THE DAY:

I love it when a historical allusion comes together.

WAS IT OVER WHEN THE GERMANS BOMBED MOUNT RUSHMORE?! Trevor Noah Thinks There Are Four Founding Fathers and They’re All on Mount Rushmore.

SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: Trump Voters and Modern American Legal Academia.

AND NOW YOU KNOW…THE REST OF THE STORY: “Queens Neighborhood Still Haunted by Kitty Genovese’s Murder,” the New York Times noted on Wednesday, following up on the the prison death of Genovese’s murderer at age 81 late last month.

But doing a CTL-F on the word “Rosenthal” on the Times’ article brings up zero returns, as the Gray Lady continues to perpetuate a classic media myth* of their own creation, which did enormous long-term damage to the reputation of the people of Kew Gardens in Queens. Abe Rosenthal was the Times’ city editor at the time of the Genovese murder in 1964, on his way to becoming the paper’s longtime executive editor. A New York magazine article this week explains his role in “How the False Story of Kitty Genovese’s Murder Went Viral:”

As Nicholas Lemann wrote in The New Yorker in 2014, ten days after Genovese’s murder, which had initially gotten only a brief squib in the Times during a year which saw 636 murders in New York, [then-NYPD police chief Michael Murphy and Rosenthal] had lunch. “Murphy spent most of the lunch talking about how worried he was that the civil-rights movement, which was at its peak, would set off racial violence in New York,” wrote Lemann, but the conversation eventually shifted, through happenstance, to the recent murder of a woman named Kitty Genovese. Murphy told Rosenthal there had been 38 eyewitnesses: “Over a grisly half hour of stabbing and screaming, Murphy said, none of them had called the police. Rosenthal assigned a reporter named Martin Gansberg to pursue the story from that angle.”

As a result of Gansberg’s subsequent, less-than-skeptical article — and, perhaps as important, a follow-up story which ran the next day in which “a procession of experts offered explanations of what had happened, or said that it was inexplicable” — the narrative took hold and the case eventually found its way into psychology textbooks. As Lemann writes, “Stories like that of the silent witnesses to Genovese’s murder represent the real danger zone in journalism, because they blend the power of instinct — which is about whether something feels true, not about whether it is true — with the respectable sheen of social science.”

Or as James Lileks wrote a couple of years ago:  

Speaking of New York: the Post revisits the infamous case of Kitty Genovese. If you recall, the New York Times “reported that 38 of her neighbors had seen the attack and watched it unfold without calling for help.” Word spread:

The Times piece was followed by a story in Life magazine, and the narrative spread throughout the world, running in newspapers from Russia and Japan to the Middle East. New York became internationally infamous as a city filled with thoughtless people who didn’t care about one another; where people could watch their neighbors get stabbed on the street without lifting a finger to help, leaving them to die ­instead in a pool of their own blood.

Too bad it wasn’t true, as the piece reminds us. But it confirmed what people wanted to believe about other people — or at least what some people at the NYT wanted to believe.

The urban legend that no one responded to Genovese’s murder spread largely because the Times botched the initial reporting of her grisly death to slant the article against the working class citizens of Queens. But then, as Fred Siegel wrote at the start of his 2014 history of “Progressivism” in America, The Revolt Against the Masses, “The best short credo of liberalism came from the pen of the once canonical left-wing literary historian Vernon Parrington in the late 1920s. ‘Rid society of the dictatorship of the middle class.’” The Gray Lady, not least of which Abe Rosenthal, who helped drive the false story of Genovese’s heartless neighbors viral on his way to becoming a fixture at the paper until his retirement in 1999, internalized that motto a long time ago, indeed.

* Media Myth Alert is the name of longtime journalist W. Joseph Campbell’s blog, where he debunks numerous urban legends created in self-serving fashion over the decades by the MSM.

CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER: No ‘coincidence’ Romanian hacker Guccifer extradited amid Clinton probe.

One of the notches on Guccifer’s cyber-crime belt was allegedly accessing the email account of Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal, one of Clinton’s most prolific advice-givers when she was secretary of state. It was through that hack that Clinton’s use of a personal account — clintonemail.com — first came to light.

Former law enforcement and cyber security experts said the hacker, whose real name is Marcel Lehel Lazar, could – now that he’s in the U.S. – help the FBI make the case that Clinton’s email server was compromised by a third party, one that did not have the formal backing and resources of a foreign intelligence service such as that of Russia, China or Iran.

“Because of the proximity to Sidney Blumenthal and the activity involving Hillary’s emails, [the timing] seems to be something beyond curious,” said Ron Hosko, former assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division from 2012-2014.

The FBI had no comment, of course, but it’s been obvious almost from the start that clintonemail.com was improperly secured. It seems impossible that the Secretary of State’s “private” emails weren’t in Russian hands nearly in real-time, which makes yesterday’s report on Clinton’s Kremlin connection even more curious.

Hillary may be the most deeply compromised person ever to hold high office in this country — and she has a good chance of attaining the very highest office.

IN THE MAIL: The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future.

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And, also today only: Yamaha TSR-5790BL 7.2-Channel AV Receiver w/4K Ultra HD and Bluetooth, $299.99 (45% off).

Plus: TaoTronics Retractable Dog Leash, $14.99 (50% off).

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1065.

BLUE-MODEL ABSURDITY IN SAN FRANCISCO: Generous amenities for the wealthy and eviction notices for ordinary workers: Is this the future of the progressive city?

In a whirlwind session earlier this week in which it mandated gender-neutral bathrooms and passed the nation’s most aggressive paid family leave law, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors also “doubled down on its liberal credentials by enacting expansive anti-eviction protections for tenants who work in San Francisco schools, from teachers to janitors and cafeteria workers,” the SF Chronicle reports.
“This sets us on the level of European social democracies that have more forward-thinking policies,” Supervisor Eric Mar said proudly of the family leave law. Maybe so. But it’s hard to think of a more backward-thinking policy than the Board’s desperate, rearguard effort to protect teachers from skyrocketing rents (which now exceed $3,000 per month for a one-bedroom unit, on average—the highest in the country).

As Gabriel Metcalf has argued in CityLab, San Francisco is being devastated by a housing affordability crisis that was engineered by an alliance between wealthy NIMBYs interested in jacking up their home prices and grassroots progressive activists convinced that blocking new development was somehow sticking it to plutocrats. Now the same Board of Supervisors that refuses to amend zoning rules to bring down prices is instead handing out eviction exemptions to favored political constituencies. And of course, these new rules will drive up rents even higher by making landlords wary of signing leases with public employees.

Just as Chicago is the poster-child for the destruction wrought by blue city budgeting brought to its logical extreme, San Francisco is a case study in what happens when pie-in-the-sky progressives are allowed to set housing policy. The Golden Gate City is a idyllic haven for the tech and financial elite, who enjoy access to luxurious apartments without a high-rise in sight, a Whole Foods on every corner, and as much high-end shopping and dining as their hearts desire. Meanwhile, working class people—including, ironically, many of the progressive artists and activists who historically backed San Francisco’s exclusionary zoning laws—are being forced across the bay to places like Oakland and San Leandro, and the city’s homeless population is so large that the city is installing outdoor urinals in its public parks.

The future of the human race is a bum, peeing in the park, forever.

TO BE FAIR, IT WAS PROBABLY LESS SCREECHY THAN HILLARY’S VOICE: Clinton team blasts reporters with noise machine during Hillary fundraising speech.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Here’s how to deal with obnoxious social media trolls.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Academic Drivel Update: A Real Hoax, Instead of Mere Fraud.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Do we even own things anymore? Thanks to intellectual property laws, companies sell you “things” but still own the software.

IT’S AN IDEA SO CRAZY, IT JUST MIGHT WORK: The GOP Finally Turns to Conservatism to Save Itself.

Related: I Want a President to Teach Liberals a Lesson.

IRONY IS DEAD: Obama at Old Law School: ‘It Used to be That People Read the Constitution.’

IN REALITY, IT’S A STUDY OF MACROGRAFTERS IN ACTION: Feds Spend $548,459 of Taxypayer Funding to Studying Male Students’ ‘Microaggressions’ Towards Women.

THE WAPO WORRIES: Is an increasingly nasty Clinton-Sanders race doing lasting damage to Democrats?

KIMBERLEY STRASSEL: A Vast Email Conspiracy.

In recent weeks, not one, but two, esteemed federal judges have granted an outside group—Judicial Watch—the right to conduct discovery into the origins and handling of her private email system. It’s a reminder that Mrs. Clinton’s biggest problem this election isn’t Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump. Her problem is a 1966 statute known as the Freedom of Information Act, and the judges who enforce it.

The judges have taken unprecedented steps to resolve this case. It is exceedingly rare—almost unheard of—for a judge to allow discovery in a FOIA proceeding. This is a testament to how grave Mrs. Clinton’s email problem is. In the usual course of things, an outside group demands documents, a judge requires a federal department to hand them over, and the public learns something.

In this case—as we all know—the problem is that the State Department doesn’t have the documents. Or rather, it can’t confirm that it has them all, because State left it to Mrs. Clinton and her aides to possess them, and then to unilaterally decide what to hand over.

Read the whole thing.

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: A Tragic Night, Coming Soon to a Neighborhood Near You.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: The World Through SJW Eyes.

JERRY BROWN: White House Not Planning for ‘Existential Threat’ of Nuclear Attack.

But of course — Mr. Obama is confident America can “absorb” any size attack.

NEW YORK POLITICS IN A NUTSHELL: Homeless Man Removed From de Blasio Presser on Homelessness.

STAND UP TO THE MAN: Students petition Senate to stop federal overreach on sexual harassment, sexual assault.

More than 150 students have signed a letter that will be sent to senators next week requesting the Education Department not get additional funds to continue its sexual harassment and sexual assault overreach.

The students, led by Tufts University freshman Jake Goldberg, take issue with the damage being done to free speech and due process rights on college campuses in response to an overblown effort to combat sexual harassment and sexual assault. While cutting down on these two problems is noble, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights attempts have, through guidance documents known as “Dear Colleague” letters, created a dramatic broadening of the definition of those two offenses to include things that are not objectionably offensive.

“Though expressed as non-binding, this definition has still been widely adopted by our campuses all across the country,” the students wrote. “By allowing vague and far-reaching restrictions on speech to be incorporated into sexual harassment policies, [the Dear Colleague letter's] directives have led to the deprivation of our constitutional and contractual rights to free speech and expression.

In addition, OCR’s guidelines have eviscerated due process protections for those accused of violating the new definitions of sexual harassment and sexual assault. Across the country, schools have been incentivized to treat accusations as guilt or else risk losing federal funding.

To be fair, the main reason that school haven’t fought this ruling is that they’d be attacked by favored internal constituencies. They don’t mind selling thes 45% of their students who are male down the river, so long as they don’t anger the 3% who are noisy feminists.

ROGER SIMON: Are We Now or Have We Ever Been… a Democracy? Roger asks, will the Rules Committee at the GOP Convention resemble something out of Alice In Wonderland?

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The Reality-Denying Politicization of the English Language.

You may not be interested in the Gods of the Copybook Headings, but the Gods of the Copybook Headings are interested in you.

SNEAK PREVIEW — TOMORROW’S FINANCIAL MELTDOWN TODAY! About 40% of Americans with student loans aren’t paying, Wall Street Journal reports.

Don’t worry, it’s probably nothing, as I’m sure government officials said in the late 1990s as the default rates started to rise on the Clinton-created subprime mortgage market…

Related: The Coming Middle Class Anarchy.

UNEXPECTEDLY: Michelle Obama To Give Commencement Address in School System Ripe With Anti-Semitism.

WHITE HAIRED OLD MEN SAYING OFFENSIVE THINGS: Bill Clinton clashes with protesters over his crime bill.

Former President Bill Clinton repeatedly defended himself from criticism about his support of his controversial crime bill from a series of protestors during a rally for his wife’s presidential campaign.

The protestors interrupted the president’s stump speech, shouting criticism of his support of the 1994 crime bill that raised mandatory minimum sentences, with one holding up a sign that said “Clinton crime bill destroyed our communities.”

Clinton pivoted away from his typical stump speech and launched into a series of arguments about ways the crime bill did help the black community.

“You are defending the people who killed the lives you say matter,” a visibly heated Clinton exclaimed. “Tell the truth.”

In 1994, he said, “I talked to a bunch of African-American groups — they think black lives matter. [The groups said] to take this bill because people are being shot in the street by gangs. We had 13-year-old kids planning their own funerals,” Clinton said.

“Whose lives were saved that mattered?”

Related: Sanders interview causes uproar.

Bernie Sanders’s comments to the New York Daily News about banks are at the center of the biggest fight in the Democratic presidential primary to date.

Sanders has frequently used Wall Street as a cudgel against rival Hillary Clinton, but the muddy interview allowed Clinton to put him on defense over what has been his core strength.

It was a surprising turn of events and one that has led to the most bitter stretch yet in the contentious race for the Democratic nomination.

Party of youth and diversity.

ISIS OR ISLAM: WHICH BREEDS TERRORISM?

The search for those proverbial “root causes.”

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: “For Jews, anti-Semitism is terrifyingly real. And it came to a head at Stanford on Wednesday night.”

Read the whole thing.

ONE PIECE AT A TIME: Fighting Zika Mosquitos With Tires.

Using the appeal of tires to mosquitoes, the Canadian and Mexican researchers found a way to beat the bugs at their own game. The tires attract the mosquitos into the ovillanta, where researchers create a pseudo “pond” inside—a perfect place to lay eggs. At the bottom of it is a strip of paper to collect the eggs. Every few days, the researchers removed the strip and destroyed the eggs.

After filtering the liquid, they reintroduced it into the ovillanta, allowing the pheromone that female mosquitos release when laying eggs to attract even more mosquitoes. This pheromone, a sort of perfume that the female releases, lets others know that it’s safe to lay eggs. In other words—the longer it’s used, the more appealing and successful it becomes.

Typical bucket traps catch about 2,700 eggs per month, but this ovillanta method could catch seven times more.

A UNITER, NOT A DIVIDER! Clinton: ‘Everyone Who Violates the Law Anywhere Should Be Held Accountable.’

Related: The Server Is the Smoking Gun, Part 2,088,129.

BERNIE SANDERS: THE OLD LEFTY’S WRONG VIEW OF ISRAEL.

As someone who’s done a fair amount of editing, personally, I’d make that headline simultaneously tighter and more expansive by removing the last three words.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Warning to student journalists: ‘Asking hostile questions and videotaping’ may be treated as ‘threatening or endangering health or safety.’

ROCKY MOUNTAIN HIGH: First marijuana tax funded scholarship application opens.

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Americans spend more on Taxes than Food, Clothing, Housing, Combined.

Thus fueling the Coming Middle Class Anarchy.

DE BLASIO’S NEW YORK: Characters roaming free could find a new limited range.

New York City passed legislation Thursday that would allow the city to corral the characters and street performers who are scattered throughout Times Square.

The bill calls on the Department of Transportation to regulate pedestrian plazas in an effort to coordinate “the wide variety of sometimes conflicting civic and commercial uses of these finite spaces.”

Council members agreed to allow the controlling of the entertainers who gather at the “Crossroads of the World” looking for tips — including Elmos, Cookie Monsters, topless women and mixtape artists — with plans to gather them in tighter, rectangular areas on these pedestrian plazas that allow for traffic to move around them.

It’s a long way down from broken windows policing to Cookie Monster corralling.

NOT TO MENTION, FOR HARSHING BARRY’S MELLOW: Senior Intel Analysts Say They Were Kicked Out For Contradicting Obama’s ISIS Agenda.

That report is made even more damning when placed alongside the quotes that Bret Baier assembled from his interviews with Obama’s first three defense secretaries:

AWKWARD: Bill Clinton Gets Into Heated Exchange With Black Lives Matter Protester.

“Here’s what happened,” Clinton said. “Let’s just tell the whole story.”

“I had an assault weapons ban in it [the crime bill]. I had money for inner-city kids, for out of school activities. We had 110,000 police officers so we could keep people on the street, not in these military vehicles, and the police would look like the people they were policing. We did all that. And [Joe] Biden [then senator and chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee] said, you can’t pass this bill, the Republicans will kill it, if you don’t put more sentencing in it.”

“I talked to a lot of African-American groups,” Clinton continued. “They thought black lives matter. They said take this bill, because our kids are being shot in the street by gangs. We have 13-year-old kids planning their own funerals.”

Throughout the spirited defense of his policy, Clinton continued to be interrupted, and he repeatedly seemed to single out one protester.

There’s no small amount of schadenfreude in watching Bill Clinton attempt defend his relatively moderate record without sabotaging Hillary’s leftwing campaign.

MAYBE REPUBLICANS SHOULD TRY DOING THIS IN MANHATTAN: Going door to door, a Los Angeles-based activist group tries to reduce prejudice against transgender people. A new study finds that it works.

IT’S DEJA CHOOM ALL OVER AGAIN! Is Bernie Sanders your stoner college roommate? After he fumbles his way through a Daily News interview, there seems to be far less to the socialist populist than meets the eye.

Does America really want two stoner college roommates as presidents in a row?

REMINDER: IF YOU CAN HEAR THE DOG WHISTLE, YOU’RE THE DOG: CNN’s Toobin Calls Cruz’s ‘New York Values’ Comment ‘Anti-Semitic.’

(Classical reference in headline.)

IF THIS IS SERIOUSLY ATTEMPTED, THE ATTEMPTERS SHOULD BE HANGED FROM LAMPPOSTS: They Want Your IRA: The White House pushes investors toward government accounts. “The initial investment allocation, even for young workers, is likely to be heavy on government bonds. Naturally.”

RISE OF THE MACHINES: MIT Prints A Walking Robot With No Assembly Needed. “MIT researchers have created a working hydraulic robot from a single 3D print. Meaning the robot can move right off the printer after its done. No assembly required.”

WAIT, I THOUGHT THE DIETARY SCIENCE WAS SETTLED THAT SKIM MILK IS BEST? Full-fat milk ‘may drastically reduce risk of diabetes’ – study.

ON THE ONE HAND, A DISASTER. ON THE OTHER HAND, A TRIUMPH OVER THE PROBLEMS OF PRETTY MUCH ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY: Diabetes was once a problem of the rich. Now it belongs to the poor.

Want to be healthy? Try following Taubes and Rippetoe.

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THE GOVERNMENT WAS CONTROLLED BY SPECIAL INTERESTS, AND PUSHED “SETTLED SCIENCE” THAT WAS FAKE AND DAMAGING: In 1972, a British scientist sounded the alarm that sugar – and not fat – was the greatest danger to our health. But his findings were ridiculed and his reputation ruined. How did the world’s top nutrition scientists get it so wrong for so long?

In 1980, after long consultation with some of America’s most senior nutrition scientists, the US government issued its first Dietary Guidelines. The guidelines shaped the diets of hundreds of millions of people. Doctors base their advice on them, food companies develop products to comply with them. Their influence extends beyond the US. In 1983, the UK government issued advice that closely followed the American example.

The most prominent recommendation of both governments was to cut back on saturated fats and cholesterol (this was the first time that the public had been advised to eat less of something, rather than enough of everything). Consumers dutifully obeyed. We replaced steak and sausages with pasta and rice, butter with margarine and vegetable oils, eggs with muesli, and milk with low-fat milk or orange juice. But instead of becoming healthier, we grew fatter and sicker.

Look at a graph of postwar obesity rates and it becomes clear that something changed after 1980. In the US, the line rises very gradually until, in the early 1980s, it takes off like an aeroplane. Just 12% of Americans were obese in 1950, 15% in 1980, 35% by 2000. In the UK, the line is flat for decades until the mid-1980s, at which point it also turns towards the sky. Only 6% of Britons were obese in 1980. In the next 20 years that figure more than trebled. Today, two thirds of Britons are either obese or overweight, making this the fattest country in the EU. Type 2 diabetes, closely related to obesity, has risen in tandem in both countries.

At best, we can conclude that the official guidelines did not achieve their objective; at worst, they led to a decades-long health catastrophe.

But despite all the talk about going after tobacco companies and “climate deniers,” the culprits here will face no consequences at all. Meanwhile, note the record of dermatologists in actively persecuting colleagues who suggested that sunlight might have benefits. How many people have sickened or died because of their lousy, but unbending, advice?

Then there’s the whole salt thing. . .

How much healthier would Americans be, if we’d followed the principles espoused by Gary Taubes and Mark Rippetoe — principles that were well-known 50 years ago, but discarded because they didn’t serve the interests of scientists and activists?

DON’T DO THIS! People will pick up and use almost 50% of random, discarded USB drives, study finds.

A team from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign dropped 297 USB drives around the uni grounds, leaving them in places like parking lots, hallways, classrooms, libraries, and cafeterias. They found that almost half of the data sticks (and possibly a lot more) ended up being used in a computer, and almost all of them (98 percent) were picked up and removed from where they were originally dropped.

To track what people did with the USB sticks when they found them, the researchers put HTML documents on the drives, masquerading as files called “documents”, “math notes”, and “winter break pictures”. When somebody discovered these files on the drive and tried to open them with an internet-connected computer, the researchers were notified.

Amazingly, despite the potential risks of executing these random files, people did so with 45 percent of the discarded USB drives – representing 135 instances of users opening the files. It’s entirely possible that many more of the USB drives were inserted into computers too – the researchers were only notified if the HTML files were opened (and even then, only if the computer was online at the time).

So are people just nosey snoops who can’t resist rifling through others’ personal data? Not necessarily.

When people opened the HTML files on the drive, they were informed about the experiment (in which they had so far been an unwitting participant) and invited to complete an anonymous survey. This gave them a chance to provide some information about themselves and explain what had motivated them to pick up and use the drive in the first place.

Less than half of the 135 users at this point opted to continue the experiment, but 43 percent did provide feedback. Most of the respondents (68 percent) said they wanted to return the drive to its owner, while 18 percent acknowledged they were merely curious about the contents. Two people admitted they just personally needed a USB drive!

Some of the USB drives had been put on key rings with dummy house keys, and many of the participants indicated that this encouraged their altruistic intentions, as it added an extra sense of urgency to returning the keys (ie. the owner might be locked out of their house).

This is why many places that care about security superglue USB drives shut.

THIS IS COOL: Metal foam obliterates bullets – and that’s just the beginning.

Composite metal foams (CMFs) are tough enough to turn an armor-piercing bullet into dust on impact. Given that these foams are also lighter than metal plating, the material has obvious implications for creating new types of body and vehicle armor – and that’s just the beginning of its potential uses.

Afsaneh Rabiei, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at NC State, has spent years developing CMFs and investigating their unusual properties. The video seen here shows a composite armor made out of her composite metal foams. The bullet in the video is a 7.62 x 63 millimeter M2 armor piercing projectile, which was fired according to the standard testing procedures established by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ). And the results were dramatic.

“We could stop the bullet at a total thickness of less than an inch, while the indentation on the back was less than 8 millimeters,” Rabiei says. “To put that in context, the NIJ standard allows up to 44 millimeters indentation in the back of an armor.” The results of that study were published in 2015.

But there are many applications that require a material to be more than just incredibly light and strong. For example, applications from space exploration to shipping nuclear waste require a material to be not only light and strong, but also capable of withstanding extremely high temperatures and blocking radiation.

Last year, with support from the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy, Rabiei showed that CMFs are very effective at shielding X-rays, gamma rays and neutron radiation. And earlier this year, Rabiei published work demonstrating that these metal foams handle fire and heat twice as well as the plain metals they are made of.

People don’t think of materials science as sexy, but if he’d had the right materials Leonardo Da Vinci could have been flying.

THIS IS INCONSISTENT WITH THE NARRATIVE AND MUST BE CENSORED: For New Parents, Dad May Be The One Missing The Most Sleep. “The allure of the studies that include fathers is that much of the earlier research focused only on mothers and their level of fatigue. But a family with a newborn typically involves a parental partnership of some sort, and the role of the nonbirthing partner can be critical. And the sleep deprivation and fatigue of the nonbirthing partner go unrecognized by their birthing partner. . . . In other words, the women didn’t think the men were as sleep deprived as the men felt, and the men thought the women were moodier than the women felt.” Hmm.

Plus:

In addition to these short-term effects on function and mood and potentially long-term effects on partnership, sleep deprivation can have more acute consequences. Again, fathers bear the brunt.

A 2012 study of 241 new fathers found that even though they got less than six hours of sleep a night — interrupted sleep, at that — they still worked “long hours.” The fathers, completing a questionnaire when their infants were 6 and 12 weeks of age, were tired, and that fatigue seemed to feed into reduced vigilance about safe behaviors in the workplace. Without the ability to compensate for lost sleep during the day, these fathers simply rode out their fatigue while working.

Add to this that men tend to work more dangerous jobs and you’ve got something significant, though this story quickly pivots to . . . how women should be sure to take care of themselves.

WHAT DO YOU PEOPLE THINK THIS IS, 1998? Law Enforcement Raids Another Tor Exit Node Because It Still Believes An IP Address Is A Person.

BREAKING: GIULIANI WILL BE VOTING FOR DONALD TRUMP.

WOW, NO WONDER OBAMA CALLED HIM A RACIST IN 2008: Bill Clinton: ‘Black Lives Matter’ Protesters Are Defending Murders And Drug Dealers.

Also: Bill Clinton: “Things are coming apart around the world” under Obama.

AT AMAZON, bestsellers in Science Fiction & Fantasy.

Plus, shop the Spring Sales Event.

CRUMBLING INFRASTRUCTURE NOT A BIG DEAL WHEN IT’S DEMOCRATS WHO ARE IGNORING THE PROBLEM: Infrastructure Hypocrisy in NYC.

Americans are not wrong to worry about their nation’s aging infrastructure. Those crumbling “roads and bridges” that President Barack Obama has been going on about for precisely as long as Republicans have been in control of the appropriations process is, however, only half the story – and the most visible half, at that. Underground, another tale of decrepit infrastructure has been circulating, particularly among New York City residents, for decades. It is the story of near apocalyptic disaster; one which has been in the making for nearly a century. There’s a reason why you do not hear nearly as many national Democrats pointing politically charged fingers in the direction of their fellow party members in the highest echelons of city government. Theirs is a mess the national party would much rather ignore.

I think the goal is to let things get so bad they can demand a federal bailout.

HELPFUL HINTS: “Expansive postures” may make you more attractive to potential mates.

VIDEO: YOU WANT THE NEW STAR WARS “ROGUE ONE” TRAILER SO HERE’S THE NEW STAR WARS “ROGUE ONE” TRAILER.

“‘Rogue One’ is catchy,” Allahpundit writes, “but Sonny Bunch’s title is better: ‘Mary Sue Steals the Death Star Plans.’”

Perhaps the best title though is “Rouge One,” a malapropism that was trending on Twitter this morning.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Understanding Your Handgun Trigger.