NEWS YOU CAN USE: How to Choose the Right Roof Rack to Carry All Your Gear.
Do your shopping right here.
AT AMAZON, deals on Luggage & Travel Gear.
SO PUTTING HIM IN JAIL DIDN’T SOLVE THE PROBLEM? WEIRD. Drug made famous by Shkreli’s 5,000% price hike is still $750 a pill.
DON’T MESS WITH BEARS: Really. No selfies with bears. That’s a rule to live by.
I TOOK A LOOK AT THE TEXT OF THE LOGAN ACT: I’m not sure it’s the most carefully considered legislation Congress ever produced, but I didn’t see anything about its applying only to Republicans.
LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: A criminal gang used a swarm of drones to disrupt an FBI raid. “Mazel said the suspects had backpacked the drones to the area in anticipation of the FBI’s arrival. Not only did they buzz the hostage rescue team, they also kept a continuous eye on the agents, feeding video to the group’s other members via YouTube. . . . Mazel said counter surveillance of law enforcement agents is the fastest-growing way that organized criminals are using drones.”
NEWS YOU CAN ABUSE. Andrew Klavan: Your Culture is My Underpants.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Nine Iconic ’90s Trends That Made Us Too Cool for School.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: USC student put on trial after debating peers on Facebook. We can’t have debate here, this is a university!
IT’S THEIR FAULT! THEY KEEP COMING ON CAMPUS WEARING THOSE SHORT SKIRTS! Berkeley task force blames conservatives for leftist violence.
We’d have a nice quiet community here if it weren’t for them outside agitators comin’ in and stirring’ folks up.
UNEMPLOYMENT HITS 3.9% UNDER TRUMP AND, RIGHT ON CUE, HERE’S SLATE: “The unemployment rate is meaningless.”
IN RESPONSE TO SJW LIBELS, John Ringo explains the difference between fiction and autobiography. “There is a word in the English language for someone who thinks a character is the author. That word is: Idiot.”
Plus: “I’m also not a gay Imperial Space Marine Gunnery Sergeant just to make that perfectly clear. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a gay Imperial Marine Gunnery Sergeant. Live and let live. I’m just not one.”
Meanwhile, if you want to support him, the best thing you can do is buy his books.
MICHAEL BARONE: Democrats’ dangerous case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Newton’s third law of motion states that in nature for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. It can operate in politics, too. Or as Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith recently wrote, “It is part of Trump’s evil genius that he elevates himself by inducing his critics to behave like him.“
Call it Trump Derangement Syndrome, and recognize it for what it is: something that could end up snatching defeat from the jaws of victory for the Democratic Party once again in 2018 and 2020.
Signs of that possibility are apparent in the polls. President Trump’s job approval has remained low, by historic standards, but it has also remained pretty steady — and has been rising, just a bit, in recent weeks. . . .
Trump’s recent upswing has his approval at 43.5 percent — well below 50 percent, but far higher than the 35 percent President George W. Bush had before the Republicans’ “thumping” in 2006.
Perhaps this reflects the economic upswing since the Republican tax bill passed in December. Perhaps it reflects presidential initiatives on Korea, Iran, China, or the respect shown him by the leaders of France, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Germany, and others. He may be uncouth, some may think, but he’s getting results.
And perhaps it reflects the Democrats’ Trump Derangement Syndrome.
You had the spectacle of every Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and 42 Democrats on the floor opposing Trump’s nominee for secretary of state — a nominee, Mike Pompeo, for whose confirmation as CIA director some of them voted and who has been getting good marks at Langley.
That’s as unprecedented as Trump’s insulting tweets, and less fact-based than many of them, too. Some Democrats complained about Pompeo’s stands on gay issues. But they’re the party that blocked for seven months the nomination of a gay ambassador to Germany, Ric Grenell.
Another spectacle of Trump Derangement Syndrome was last Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ dinner where a comedienne’s vitriolic monologue and mean-spirited attacks on the physical appearance of Trump’s press secretary validated his decisions this year and last not to attend. The event only further undermined the credibility of the anti-Trump press.
Its credibility may be further reduced if, as seems likely, special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation ends with no finding of “collusion” between Russia and the Trump campaign. Mueller’s questions for the president leaked to the press, if accurate, indicate that he has reluctantly concluded as much and is looking now for evidence that he can spin up as obstruction of justice.
Much of the press, notably CNN, have treated the Russian collusion story as a second Watergate, and many Democrats amuse their friends with little quips assuming Trump administration policy is set in Moscow. It’s not very funny any more.
The “collusion” that seems more likely to have occurred is between President Barack Obama administration intelligence and law enforcement personnel and the news media to push the Russia collusion story largely or solely on the evidence of the Clinton-financed Steele dossier.
Yep.
and 
WELL, GOOD: Federal prisons abruptly cancel policy that made it harder, costlier for inmates to get books.
Federal prison officials abruptly reversed a controversial policy Thursday that had made it harder and more expensive for thousands of inmates to receive books by banning direct delivery through the mail from publishers, bookstores and book clubs.
The restrictions were already in place in facilities in Virginia and California and were set to start this month at a prison in Florida.
Under the rules, inmates in at least four facilities were required to order books only through a prison-approved vendor and, at three of the prisons, to pay an extra 30 percent markup.
The reversal came after two days’ of inquiries from The Washington Post asking about the vendor, the markup and the rationale for the restriction.
Prison officials said in an email Thursday that the bureau had rescinded the memos and will review the policy to “ensure we strike the right balance between maintaining the safety and security of our institutions and inmate access to correspondence and reading materials.”
Officials declined to identify the vendor and explain the costs added to the book purchase prices.
For months, the restrictions meant inmates could not have books shipped free from friends and relatives but also could not have books sent directly from online retailers like Amazon.com or book clubs. Using online retailers or book clubs are two avenues many facilities employ as a way to preserve access but reduce opportunities to alter books or use them to smuggle drugs and other contraband.
One of the many under appreciated travesties of our criminal justice system is how inmates, and their families, are fleeced by corrupt crony vendors employed by correctional systems.
I THINK THEY’RE TRYING TO RUN OUT THE CLOCK: Why The Justice Department Is Defiant.
What we do know is that every time they’ve withheld information up to know, it’s turned out to be because it made them look bad.
“TEMPORARY” PROTECTED STATUS: DHS ends immigration protection for 57K Hondurans. “The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced Friday the end of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for 57,000 Honduran citizens in the United States. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen gave them until January 2020 — the maximum 18-month period — to return to Honduras or seek different immigration status. The Hondurans protected by TPS have been in the United States at least since Hurricane Mitch hit the country in 1998.”
BUT IT THINKS IT’S HELPING: The Media Is Killing the Democratic Party .
WHY THE PONZI SCHEME IS BROKEN: Social Security: How many people were expected to receive benefits?
AIN’T THIS A KICK IN THE HEAD: Loud snoring may be weakening your skull.
INVERT THE GENDER ON THIS HEADLINE AND SEE HOW IT READS: I left my husband because he couldn’t sexually satisfy me.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Giving your kids financial help may ruin their careers forever.
DON’T YOU WANT A BED OF NAILS ALL YOUR OWN? Can this ‘torture mat’ cure your back pain?
ABOUT THOSE ARTICLES YOU’VE READ ABOUT TAKING SELFIES BOOSTING YOUR HEALTH … LEAVE THE BEAR OUT: Man mauled to death by bear while taking selfie with it.
SAVE THE TA-TAS? New ownership could spell big changes for SI Swimsuit edition.
May 4, 2018
YOU CAN’T MAKE THIS STUFF UP: Well, you could, but who’d believe you.
After pouring whisky over the statuette, the revelers perch a wide-brimmed hat atop its head and parade it up the street as a band plays a rowdy tune.
This is the festival of Jesus Malverde, considered the patron saint of drug traffickers, held every year in the Mexican city of Culiacan.
Culiacan is the capital of Sinaloa state, home base to one of the country’s most powerful drug cartels.
It is also home to a chapel devoted to Malverde, a folk hero who legend has it stole from the rich to give to the poor in early 20th century Sinaloa.
Here’s my beef. Why pour whisky (whiskey) on an idol? Will Vodka Pundit dare comment?
HYPOCRISY ALERT: A new study finds that the more one believes in global warming, the less one is likely to engage in eco-friendly individual behaviors. It’s funny how that works.
ROBIN HANSON responds to his critics. It’s fun to watch Slate’s Jordan Weissman trying to shove him into a box, while he refuses to cooperate. But Weismann’s notion that a man should clear his ideas with women before writing about sex is offensive and sexist — no one would suggest that a woman should clear her ideas with men.
Then, for irony, there’s this on Slate.
SCOTT ADAMS COMPILES A LIST: “People keep asking me what exactly @realDonaldTrump did to deserve a Nobel Prize.
21ST CENTURY PROBLEMS: Lightning Struck Her Home. Then Her Brain Implant Stopped Working.
KERRY’S ENGAGING IN “SHADOW DIPLOMACY.”
John Kerry’s bid to save one of his most significant accomplishments as secretary of state took him to New York on a Sunday afternoon two weeks ago, where, more than a year after he left office, he engaged in some unusual shadow diplomacy with a top-ranking Iranian official.
He sat down at the United Nations with Foreign Minister Javad Zarif to discuss ways of preserving the pact limiting Iran’s nuclear weapons program. It was the second time in about two months that the two had met to strategize over salvaging a deal they spent years negotiating during the Obama administration, according to a person briefed on the meetings.
With the Iran deal facing its gravest threat since it was signed in 2015, Kerry has been on an aggressive yet stealthy mission to preserve it, using his deep lists of contacts gleaned during his time as the top US diplomat to try to apply pressure on the Trump administration from the outside. President Trump, who has consistently criticized the pact and campaigned in 2016 on scuttling it, faces a May 12 deadline to decide whether to continue abiding by its terms.
Kerry also met last month with German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, and he’s been on the phone with top European Union official Federica Mogherini, according to the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal the private meetings. Kerry has also met with French President Emmanuel Macron in both Paris and New York, conversing over the details of sanctions and regional nuclear threats in both French and English.
Remember that the Logan Act was the original excuse for putting Trump under surveillance? It’s quite extraordinary to have a former Secretary of State meeting with foreign leaders in an effort to frustrate the diplomatic policies of an elected president. I’m in favor of repealing the Logan Act, but as long as it’s on the books, it’s hard to imagine a more suitable case . . .
THIS DOESN’T SURPRISE ME: Study: Exercise, cold exposure boost metabolism hormone.
KANYE IMAGINE THAT?: If you didn’t watch the Bill Whittle video posted by Stephen Green this morning, here’s the part you shouldn’t miss: Kanye West isn’t just a guy who has a few nice things to say about Donald Trump. He listens to Jordan Peterson AND HE QUOTES THE GREAT THOMAS SOWELL.
I tend to be pretty skeptical of celebrity endorsements in politics. And to be honest, I remain skeptical of this one. But I have to admit, learning that Kanye West quotes Thomas Sowell made me smile. Maybe there’s hope for the world after all.
AT AMAZON, spring savings in Storage and Organization.
THE #METOO MOVEMENT, WHICH WAS DESIGNED TO DESTROY TRUMP, SEEMS TO BE LEAVING A TRAIL OF WRECKAGE THROUGH LEFTY INSTITUTIONS: Sex assault scandal postpones Nobel Prize in Literature for 2018.
HERE’S A NICE REVIEW of Salena Zito & Brad Todd’s new book, The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics.
I’m reading it now, and it’s fascinating and very well reported.
THE LITTLE VARMINTS ARE AFTER GEORGE WASHINGTON NOW: Students at GWU don’t like the university’s “Colonial” mascot, which has honored the school’s namesake, George Washington, since 1926.
ENDORSED: Drinking Tequila? Ditch the Lime and Salt.
According to our guide, the whole lime and salt thing was invented back when people were drinking some pretty rough tequilas where you needed that lime/salt combo to make the drink remotely palatable.
Today, tequila has gotten a lot more refined, so that salt and lime combo isn’t really necessary. That said, if you’re going for an aged tequila like a Reposado or Añejo, then the perfect fruit to pair with it isn’t a lime, but a grapefruit. And instead of salt, sprinkle a little cinnamon on the fruit.
I’m not sold on the cinnamon, but I’ll try grapefruit with almost anything.
AT AMAZON, save on bestsellers in Military History.
AT AMAZON, Champion Men’s 6 Pack No Show Socks.
Plus, Lightning Deal, Match Men’s Cargo Shorts.
JUST NBC THE CREDIBILITY MELTDOWN: Past Weeks Reveal Deep Issues At NBC.
REP. KEITH ELLISON TO SECDEF JAMES MATTIS: Investigate White Supremacists in the Military.
THE JOKE IS, GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS KNEW ABOUT THIS FOR YEARS AND KEPT QUIET FOR JOBS AND EXPORT EARNINGS: Volkswagen’s Former CEO Finally Charged Over Diesel Cheating Scandal.
AT AMAZON, Deals On Top Rated Products.
OVER AT HOT MIC: The Sad Decline of Jennifer Rubin.
THE EEOC SUES ALBERTSONS GROCERY CHAIN FOR REQUIRING ITS BILINGUAL EMPLOYEES TO SPEAK ENGLISH WHEN AROUND ENGLISH-SPEAKING CUSTOMERS: Seems like an extreme interpretation of liability under Title VII to me (and indeed several federal courts have agreed).
A few years ago, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights asked employers why they chose to require their bilingual employees to speak English while at work, and their responses seemed sensible: First, it’s human nature that when some people hear others speaking a language that they don’t understand, they worry whether the others are talking about them. So it’s rude speak in a language that others don’t understand. When customers (or even fellow employees) are the one’s who feel uncomfortable, it’s bad for business. Second, sexual harassment law makes an employer liable for “hostile environment.” But if the employer or the employer’s managers speak only English, it is much more difficult to supervise and to ensure employees are not being abusive to each other. And there were other reasons. I wrote about the topic in my Commissioner Statement in the Report of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on English-Only Policies in the Workplace.
I can’t help but wonder if Americans would have a more favorable attitude toward immigration if the federal government hadn’t been zealously pursuing anti-assimilationist policies for so many decades. Attempts to impose bilingual education and affirmative action are two of the biggest ones. (Why identify with the majority if your one of your grandparents will get you diversity points?) But in a small way these “Speak English, please” rules are another example. (By the way, the EEOC seems to be going out of its way to “interpret” the Albertsons rule to be more demanding than it really is. It is not the intent of the rule to prevent Spanish-speaking employees from assisting Spanish-speaking customers in Spanish if they happen to be within earshot of an English-speaking customer.)
While all this is happening, Trump’s appointees to the EEOC are still awaiting Senate confirmation. And it’s 2018. Tick, tick, tick.
REUEL MARC GERECHT: The Iran Deal Is Strategically and Morally Absurd. “It is less an arms-control agreement than cover for American inaction.”
With Iran, Obama certainly appeared to have a cause, something beyond just avoiding a fight. The Islamic Republic for Obama, and Secretary of State John Kerry, too, appeared to be a left-wing “realist” dream, offering a progressive version of Richard Nixon’s opening to Communist China. The many debilitating weaknesses of the JCPOA—for one thing, the strategic and moral absurdity of paying, via sanctions relief, for Iranian imperialism in the Middle East so we can have a short surcease to the mullahs’ quest for the bomb—stem directly from Obama’s paralyzing fear of war, as well as his aspiration for a Middle Eastern détente.
The suggestion that going to war with the clerical regime is too high a price to pay to stop the mullahs from acquiring nuclear weapons (which is what’s implied by defending the limited, temporary utility of the JCPOA) is downright odd. Obama was, in theory, willing to do just that in the nuclear negotiations. In theory, when he uttered the mantra that “all options are on the table,” Obama was—to borrow from La Rochefoucauld—giving the homage that hypocrisy pays to virtue. The nuclear deal wasn’t just “far from ideal”: It is the hinge of America’s downsizing in the region, the guarantor of a decent interval before nuclear proliferation comes to the Middle East.
It was always about downsizing American power, prestige, and influence.
Plus:
Obama’s “wishful thinking” about the region was never more fully on display than when he speculated that his nuclear agreement with Tehran ought to allow the Iranians and the Saudis time to learn “to share” the region.
Heckuva job, Barry.
FASTER, PLEASE: NASA considering flight test of space nuclear reactor technology. “After a successful campaign of ground tests, NASA is considering performing a flight test of a small nuclear reactor, possibly on a lunar lander mission in the mid-2020s. At a May 2 press conference at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, representatives of NASA and the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) said a series of tests of the Kilopower nuclear reactor at the Nevada Test Site demonstrated its ability to safely generate 1 kilowatt, and ultimately as much as 10 kilowatts, of electrical power.”
The mid-2020s timetable, however compares unfavorably to the faster timetables at places like SpaceX and Blue Origin.
FIRST IN FLIGHT FROM FISCAL SANITY: North Carolina Medicaid Scandal Broadens on Dem. Gov. Cooper’s Watch.
The political backstory to this tale begins with Cooper surprising the pollsters and his opponent — incumbent Republican Gov. Pat McCrory — in November 2016 by winning a narrow victory. Through deft sleight-of-hand, and taking advantage of a quirk in state law, Cooper arranged an early swearing-in for himself just minutes after midnight on January 1, 2017. That legerdemain allowed Cooper just 12 days laterto appoint Cohen, at the time Obama’s Chief Operating Officer of Medicaid, to head the North Carolina DHHS before Barack Obama left office.
Thus was set the stage for the Cooper Administration to bring to a screeching halt what had been one of his predecessor’s top priorities — rolling back years of reckless spending by North Carolina Democrats. One of McCrory’s main targets had been Medicaid spending in the state; which had come to swallow nearly $15 billion of North Carolina’s $23 billion annual budget.
The runaway Medicaid spending had placed North Carolina in a financial bind, with little cash for anything else. Thus, in 2015 McCrory and the Republican state legislature passed a law that would limit Medicaid spending, remove management of the program from the state Health Secretary and contract it out to private companies, and prohibit further expansion of the program; all steps permitted under federal law.
As soon as Cooper had himself sworn in early, he immediately submitted a request to the Obama Administration to illegally expand Medicaid and maintain government control of the program.
Read the whole thing.
FAKE NEWS: NRA to host company with ties to sanctioned Russians at annual convention.
But as David Harsanyi noted on Twitter, “By this standard, every big company in America has ties to Russia — including every tech giant and every car company. They admit there’s nothing illegal about it in the fourth graph.”
But, hey, anything to flesh out the RUSSIA RUSSIA RUSSIA narrative.
ANDREW KLAVAN: Your Culture is My Underpants.
It’s always in the last place you look.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Sauna use may lower stroke risk by 60 percent.
DOES THIS MEAN HEALTH INSURANCE HAS TO COVER IT? Could fast food make it harder for you to get pregnant?
KANYE WEST: Why Liberals Are So Freaked About Him.
MONICA SHOWALTER: Democrats’ worst nightmare about Kanye West just came true.
The shift in black opinion represents a major break in the cultural firewall that has kept black people from embracing the Republican Party and left them taken for granted by Democrats. Do Democrats pay any attention to widespread black views on gay marriage or transgenderism, for example? Do they pay any attention to whether black teenagers need jobs and how calls for minimum wage hikes shut them out of the market? Do Democrats pay any attention to how gun-free zones facilitate violence in black neighborhoods in places such as Chicago? Do they pay any attention to how illegal immigration has driven down the wages of black unskilled workers? Not in the least: The only thing they ask themselves is where else black people can go – and well, now they have their answer, because Kanye opened that door.
Kanye’s own bad experiences with self-centered, rude Democrats such as President Obama, as well as his pleasant experiences with President Trump, probably had much to do with his own epiphany, as did his concern about the sufferings of black people by violence in Chicago. But it wasn’t just a loud endorsement of President Trump that went on with his series of tweets. He not only broke the barrier to blacks supporting Republicans, but did two other things to change perceptions. He made a massive series of tweets about the importance of “love” and how he is centering his life on “love” (and talking like that takes a lot of courage), and he tweeted a lot about thinking freely. Both of these things went a long way to breaking the perception among blacks and others that Republicans are hateful and that Republicans are narrow-minded.
There’s nothing more narrow-minded than identity politics, which is the modern version of Marx’s false consciousness, which is a gussied up version of “You’re just stupid if you don’t agree with me.”
FEDERAL JUDGE: THIS MUELLER THING KINDA LOOKS LIKE A WITCH HUNT TO ME:
A federal judge on Friday sharply criticized Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s criminal case in Virginia against President Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, and openly questioned whether Mueller exceeded his prosecutorial powers by bringing it.
“I don’t see what relationship this indictment has with anything the special counsel is authorized to investigate,” U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis in the Eastern District of Virginia said.
At tense hearing at the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia, the judge said Mueller should not have “unfettered power” in his Russia probe and that the charges against Manafort did not arise from the investigation into Moscow’s alleged meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.
Indeed.
US District Court Judge T.S. Ellis III suggested that the reason prosecutors are going after Manafort is to try to get him to flip on President Donald Trump.
“I don’t see what relation this indictment has with what the special counsel is authorized to investigate,” Ellis said to prosecutors. “You don’t really care about Mr. Manafort’s bank fraud. … What you really care about is what information Mr. Manafort could give you that would reflect on Mr. Trump or lead to his prosecution or impeachment.”
Well, that’s clearly true.
UPDATE: You know it’s bad when even Vox has this headline: Robert Mueller’s team just had a really rough day in court: Judge T.S. Ellis III questioned whether Mueller had just charged Manafort to try to “get” President Trump.
Related: Rod Rosenstein is doing a star turn as principled defender of the law, but he’s performed abysmally as deputy attorney general, and President Donald Trump would be fully justified in firing him. “Neglecting to place restrictions on the Mueller investigation is grounds for his removal.” (Bumped).
I HATE IT WHEN THIS HAPPENS: Robot Stingrays Sunk Your Battleship.
RELIGION OF PEACE: ‘Go to Hell!’ Egypt Responds to French Call to Revise Koran. “Sarkozy and 300 other French notables asked them to remove the commands to murder.”
To be fair though, I wouldn’t expect Christian leaders to take seriously any Muslim call to rewrite parts of the Bible.
MATTHEW CONTINETTI: The Media Is Killing the Democratic Party.
Reports from the front lines of the Democrat-Media Complex:
What the Democratic Party has not recognized is that Trump’s legal dramas, though good for ratings, have done little to benefit the political opposition. On the contrary: President Trump’s approval rating has been on the upswing. He stands at 44 percent approval in the Real Clear Politics average, his highest rating in a year. That number might well be slightly higher, given the existence of “Shy Trump Voters” who are afraid of the stigma attached to approving of the president.
Meanwhile, since December, the Democratic advantage on the congressional generic ballot has been cut in half, from plus 13 points to plus 6.5 points. In a new survey, pollsters for Democracy Corps and Women’s Voices Women’s Vote Action Fund, while optimistic about Democratic chances in the fall, nonetheless concede that the party’s “momentum has stalled in the last few months.”
Why? Well, the most obvious answer is the economy, with its strong job market and positive wage growth. One could also say that voters like peacemakers, and so have embraced President Trump’s desire to meet with Kim Jong Un of North Korea. Both explanations sound reasonable to me.
But I would also suggest another one: The American electorate has not changed fundamentally in the decades since the Clinton presidency, when in the words of the late Jeffrey Bell it held a “bifurcated view” that separated the man from his policies. And as long as the policies seemed to be working, the man’s opponents found themselves wrapped around the axle of personal disgust, waiting in frustration for voters to recognize and repudiate defects of character that were all too plain to see.
Kurt Schlichter was right: They don’t like playing under the new rules they made.
SWAMPLAND: Trump’s Appointees Pledged Not to Lobby After They Leave. Now They’re Lobbying.
Glenn’s revolving-door surtax — now with bipartisan appeal!
#THEMTOO: No 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature, Panel Says Amid Sexual Abuse Scandal. “The Swedish panel that awards the Nobel Prize in Literature said on Friday that it would take the extraordinary step of not naming a laureate this year — not because of a shortage of deserving writers, but because of the infighting and public outrage that have engulfed the group over a sexual abuse scandal.”
Our political and cultural betters are anything but.
THOUGH SHE BE BUT LITTLE, SHE IS FIERCE: On this day in 1776, Rhode Island (officially the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations) renounced its allegiance to George III—a full two months before the Continental Congress approved the Declaration of Independence. For such a little squirt, Rhode Island was fiercely independent. It refused to send a delegation to the Constitutional Convention in 1787, and for a long time refused to ratify the Constitution the Convention produced. Finally, after the Constitution was up and running, President Washington was inaugurated, and the 1st Congress was assembled, Rhode Island was reminded that if it isn’t part of the United States and America, then it’s a foreign country. If it’s a foreign country, then tariffs can (and likely will) be imposed. Meanwhile, Congress passed the Bill of Rights, which reduced some of the concerns of Rhode Island citizens. Rhode Island decided to be “in.”
So if Crown Prince Bin Salman is serious about introducing pluralism to his country — and there’s no denying it now — this one big and in-your-Wahhabi-face way of going about it.
IN THE MAIL: Published by Castalia House, Wardogs Inc. 1: Battlesuit Bastards (Wardogs Incorporated)
FASCISM IS THE NEW ANTIFASCISM: L.A. Antifa Group Hangs Trump in Effigy, Calls for ‘Revolutionary Violence’ Against ‘the Capitalist State.’ “We must carry out military actions against the enemies of the people!”
DIVERSITY IS OUR STRENGTH: Kanye West banned from radio station over recent comments.
OOPS: Twitter Tells Users To Change Passwords After Discovering Glitch.
The company says it fixed the bug and there is no indication of a breach or misuse.
Still, it’s urging its 330 million users to change their passwords as a precaution.
The issue appeared through a bug in Twitter’s password hashing. It’s a standard security practice for companies to encrypt passwords to store on its internal servers. So if your password is “12345” — which we highly recommend against — it wouldn’t show up on the website’s database as “12345,” but rather a random mix of numbers and letters representing each character.
Twitter said it stored encrypted passwords using a hashing algorithm called bcrypt. But the social network had stored the password in plain-text before it was encrypted. Twitter said this happened because of a bug. The company did not respond to a request for comment to clarify what the bug was.
If you’re still on Twitter, here are instructions for changing your password.
IF YOU’RE FROM BANGLADESH, $30K GETS YOU SMUGGLED INTO THE US VIA MEXICO: It costs more if you want to be smuggled alone instead of with a bunch of other illegals on a tractor-trailer, but being from Bangladesh, odds are you are accustomed to over-crowding. LifeZette’s Brendan Kirby reports on the swelling tide of border-crossers who are not from south of the border. You know smuggling humans into the U.S. is extremely lucrative because, as one of the Border Patrol agents tells Kirby, “every sector of the border is controlled by a particular drug cartel.”
TURKEY’S SNAP ELECTION: Opposition parties are trying to find a way to cooperate and defeat Recep Tayyip Erdogan in next month’s national election. Iyi Party candidate Meral Aksener (nickname “the she-wolf”) claims she is the only opposition leader who can beat Sultan Recep. The Republican Peoples Party (CHP, the Kemalist party) just named Muharrem Ince as its candidate. Ince is a dedicated secularist and a bitter critic of Erdogan. Stay tuned.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Wiretaps, Pen Registers, and Much, Much More.
THE SCIENCE WASN’T SETTLED, THOUGH THEY CLAIMED IT WAS: How Big Government Backed Bad Science and Made Americans Fat.
RIM LAUNCH: The USS Abraham Lincoln test fires a RIM-116 rolling airframe surface to air missile.
BLUE WAVE? Poll Shows Republicans Could Pick Up 9 Senate Seats.
According to new Morning Consult polls, Democrats are in serious trouble in Senate races across the country. Republicans have serious leads in West Virginia, where incumbent Democrat Joe Manchin trails by 14 points; North Dakota, where incumbent Democrat Heidi Heitkamp trails by 8; Indiana, where incumbent Democrat Joe Donnelly trails by 5; Missouri, where incumbent Democrat Claire McCaskill trails by 5; Montana, where incumbent Democrat Jon Tester trails by 5; Florida, where incumbent Democrat Bill Nelson is locked in a near-deadlock with Rick Scott; and Pennsylvania and Ohio, where incumbent Democrats Bill Casey and Sherrod Brown are leading by less than two points each, plus Virginia, where Tim Kaine leads by just 3 on the generic ballot. In the best-case scenario for Republicans, then, they could win up to nine additional Senate seats.
The polls are similarly shoddy in the House of Representatives for Democrats. The RealClearPolitics poll average for the generic ballot has Democrats up 6.7 percent, but the polls are all over the place.
I’ll repeat Glenn’s advice: Spend less time on the internet, and more time volunteering for a local campaign.
JOHN HINDERAKER: OUR DERANGED WHITE HOUSE PRESS CORPS. “A lot of people, sadly, aren’t very good at their jobs. But I doubt that you could find, anywhere in our vast country, a group of people who are as terrible at their jobs as the members of the White House press corps.”
WHY DOES YALE HATE MUSLIM IMMIGRANTS? A jury acquitted him of rape in less than four hours. Now Yale has the chance to quietly railroad him.
HMM: U.S. Air Force Leaders Are Deliberately Slow-Rolling A-10 Refurbishment.
In a victory for supporters of the battle-proven A-10 close air support aircraft, Congress provided the necessary seed money to extend the fleet’s lifespan for at least another decade in its last spending bill. The U.S. Air Force had announced in 2017 that 110 A-10s were in danger of being retired because their wings were rapidly approaching the end of their useful service life.
The seed money is not as clear-cut a victory as many have supposed, however. The $103 million Congress appropriated for the A-10 re-winging project will only produce four new pairs of wings and it will likely take six years before new wings are installed on any operational A-10s. These funds will mainly be used to start up an entirely new production line.
The Air Force claims it needs all this money and time to get competitive bids to start up the new wing production line. All the while, the men and women serving in combat for the next six years badly need to be able to count on an A-10 force that is not shrinking rapidly due to a failure to replace worn out wings.
Air Force procurement hasn’t exactly been aiming high in recent years.
LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: In Venezuela, inflation quadruples to 18,000 percent in two months, with no end in sight.
The 17,968 percent rate registered at the end of April already surpassed the 13,864 percent rate predicted by the International Monetary Fund for all of 2018.
“What we’re seeing at this point is a giant jump in inflation,” Steve Hanke, a professor at Johns Hopkins University and one of the world’s top experts on inflation, told el Nuevo Herald.
“And it could go much higher than what we’re seeing today,” added Hanke, who calculated the 17,968 percent figure. He keeps a daily record of inflation in Venezuela.
The only thing socialists never run out of is zeroes — oh, and excuses.
CRUSHING INNOVATION WITH REGULATION IS THE CALIFORNIA WAY: California Supreme Court Deals Major Blow To Gig Economy Business Model, Treats Workers As Employees Rather Than Independent Contractors.
DISPATCHES FROM THE STUPID PARTY. W. Va. GOP Senate candidate: “Cocaine Mitch” McConnell is in the tank for the “China people.”
BLUE (HAIR) WAVE: Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden Lead in 2020 New Hampshire Poll.