Scott Johnson comments on John Podhoretz.

In his New York Post column today John Podhoretz puts the revelation of the Bergdahl disgrace over the past week in the context of Obama’s carefully manicured image. “What happens,” he asks, “when the world’s greatest spin doctor commits malpractice — on himself?”

Don Boudreaux muses on Gordon Tullock.

Note that Gordon does not say here that lying by politicians is unnecessary; he says that lying is insufficient. Lying must be accompanied by persuasive props on the political and governmental stages designed to dupe the audience into thinking that something noble (or at least in the self-interest of most members of the broad audience) is taking place – while, in fact, what is really taking place is something quite ignoble and almost surely at odds with the self-interest of most members of the broad audience.

Just as the London and Broadway stages, and as Hollywood movie sets, select for success those actors who can act most persuasively – those actors who can best convince audiences to believe in make-believe – the stage that is politics selects for success those politicians who can act most persuasively. The political process is biased against the success in politics of honest people – people who, if not incapable of lying and engaging in dupery, at least feel badly enough about doing so that their guilt at the prospect of performing such unethical shenanigans shows on their faces.

Read it.

Hint: No. (Of course, This Is CNN, so I’d check another source if I were you.)

For the past four decades, we’ve been told to stay away from red meat, dairy and cheese — foods high in saturated fats — because saturated fat is bad for the heart.

But investigative reporter Nina Teicholz says that isn’t the case.

“When the dietary recommendations came out in 1961 saying that saturated fat causes heart disease, that was based on total cholesterol,” Teicholz said. “But our understanding of heart disease has evolved enormously.”

She said the science condemning saturated fats just isn’t there. In her new book, “The Big Fat Surprise,” Teicholz writes that the low-fat, fruit- and vegetable-filled diet that you thought was healthy doesn’t have all the benefits it claims.

Steve Sailer turns over a rock and finds a lot of green.

Thomas Piketty is worried that the rich will get ever richer because they won’t give their money away; but perhaps we should also worry about what happens when the rich do give their money away.

Lyndsey Layton offers a solid article in the Washington Post on how Bill Gates bought off all credible expertish opposition to the not-unintelligent Common Core school standards.

The essential problem with the Common Core is simply megalomania. The foremost author of the Common Core, David Coleman, is a smart guy, but his assumption that he can sit down and write a set of instructions for turning every student into American into the kind of close-reader he likes to point out he proved himself to be during his Bar Mitzvah speech, is, uh, probably over-confident.

Similarly, Bill Gates’ decision to not let Coleman’s Common Core be tried out first in one willing guinea pig state like Kentucky, but to try to hustle almost every state in the Union into adopting this untested system is megalomaniacal.

Why in the world are we betting the country on Coleman’s and Gates’ un-proven brainstorm?

Well, because Gates bribed more or less all of respectable opinion.

So, when you hear denigrations of opponents of Common Core as “angry,” well, of course they are angrier than the “experts,” since the experts are all fat and happy on the Gates Foundation Gravy Train.

Read it.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

Read it.

What he said.

Read it.

In the first evidence of a natural intervention triggering stem cell-based regeneration of an organ or system, a study in the June 5 issue of the Cell Stem Cell shows that cycles of prolonged fasting not only protect against immune system damage — a major side effect of chemotherapy — but also induce immune system regeneration, shifting stem cells from a dormant state to a state of self-renewal.

In both mice and a Phase 1 human clinical trial, long periods of not eating significantly lowered white blood cell counts. In mice, fasting cycles then “flipped a regenerative switch,” changing the signaling pathways for hematopoietic stem cells, which are responsible for the generation of blood and immune systems, the research showed.

Read it.

On Friday, the Justice Department announced a “justice AmeriCorps” program that will fund nearly 100 lawyers across 29 cities with one-year grants and stipends so they can represent illegal immigrants who have been flooding into the country and being warehoused, most notably in Texas.

“With the launch of justice AmeriCorps, we’re taking a historic step to strengthen our justice system and protect the rights of the most vulnerable members of society,” Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement. “How we treat those in need, particularly young people who must appear in immigration proceedings – many of whom are fleeing violence, persecution, abuse or trafficking – goes to the core of who we are as a nation.”

According to The New York Times, the $2 million grant will be “distributed to nonprofit organizations in 29 cities,” and federal officials expect nearly 10,000 illegal immigrant children to appear in courts in those cities.

Holder also said the program will “reaffirm our allegiance to the values that have always shaped our pursuit of justice” and “empower new generations of aspiring attorneys and paralegals to serve their country and stand on the front lines of this fight.”

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As incredible as it sounds, that’s what the evidence is showing. For psychologist Traci Mann, who has spent 20 years running an eating lab at the University of Minnesota, the evidence is clear. “It couldn’t be easier to see,” she says. “Long-term weight loss happens to only the smallest minority of people.”

We all think we know someone in that rare group. They become the legends — the friend of a friend, the brother-in-law, the neighbour — the ones who really did it.

But if we check back after five or 10 years, there’s a good chance they will have put the weight back on. Only about five per cent of people who try to lose weight ultimately succeed, according to the research. Those people are the outliers, but we cling to their stories as proof that losing weight is possible.

Read it.

In Piketty’s book, there is surprisingly little economic analysis.  Armen Alchian or Harold Demsetz or Yoram Barzel or Jim Buchanan or David Friedman or Ronald Coase – to choose just some examples – each has more economic analysis on any one randomly chosen page of any of his works than Piketty has throughout his entire book.

Like Marx, Piketty’s agenda is political, and only incidentally economic.

Trinity Portable Wind Turbine Power Station.

BT1-11 Foldable Lonely Tent.

KLAX.

Laser-Guided Tactical Necktie. I am not making this up.

Smart Garden Tools.

The Other McCain turns over a rock.

Liberalism is simply a set of prejudices, a collection of syllogisms all of which end, “ergo, vote Democrat.” Their smug presumption of their own  moral and intellectual superiority makes liberals the most easily deceived people in the world.

…

Liberals fall for this kind of hoax because (a) they overestimate the value of their own intelligence, (b) they naïvely underestimate the ability of cynical manipulators to wrap themselves in the mantle of victimhood, and (c) they are themselves  utterly unscrupulous in exploiting any narrative that advances the liberal cause.

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These only look at foreign trips, of course, so domestic fund-raising-and-traffic-snarling (and the occasional jaunt to Hawaii to get the girls away from it all) are off the radar. That would make a far more interesting picture.

Read it.

A gunman, presumably Islamic and possibly a “Frenchman” named Mehdi Nemmouche, recently shot down four people in the Jewish Museum in Brussels. The principal victims of his actions were…

You guessed it: Muslims.

After Mr. Nemmouche was arrested, French Muslim leaders stood at the microphones in front of the TV cameras and exhorted the audience to guard against the “stigmatization” of Muslims, whilst reassuring them that the gunman’s actions had nothing — nothing, I tell you! — to do with Islam.

Read it.

Apparently the Chinese have learned the lesson that Obama only does nice things for our enemies.

Read it.

Opponents of Common Core have plenty of ammunition by now: The standards erode local autonomy, are costly to implement, and some experts dispute their rigor.

But an underexplored aspect of this problematic national education reform is the massive financial incentive that certain textbook and standardized test companies have to keep the U.S. on board with it. The Washington Post’s Valerie Strauss provided a good example of Common Core’s crony corporatist side in a recent article.

Today is D-Day. Google, which has a penchant for creating special ‘doodles’ on its home page for Special Events, apparently considers today Nothing Special.

Of course, for Rachel Carson, Google pulled out all the stops, although Carson’s book Silent Spring prompted a jihad against DDT and other insecticides that has been responsible for more deaths from tropical disease around the world than occurred during the Normandy invasion.

Maybe that’s it — there’s a death count threshold that has to be exceeded in order to rate a special ‘doodle’ on Google.

Read it.

Remember that the definition of “beta-male rage” is that the perpetrator has no history of violence, criminal behavior or thugishness, does not have a wife or girlfriend and has below-average success with women, and is not suffering from a mental illness such as schizophrenia.

George Sodini used to be the most well-known case of beta-male rage, but that mantle of infamy has now passed to Elliot Rodger.

Read it.

On June 5 one person was shot dead at Seattle Pacific University, a school where security guards are not allowed to carry guns.

Chalk up one more for ‘gun free zones’.

Read it.

The data reveal a clear break in 2000. Between 1992 and 2000, each successive entry cohort has a higher share in cognitive occupations at the outset of their working lives, with the proportion increasing by 0.1 between the 1994 and 1998 cohorts. After 2000, with the exception of the difference between the 2004 and 2006 entry cohorts, each successive cohort has a lower share in these occupations, with the share at entry for the 2010 cohort being approximately the same as for the 1990 cohort. Given all the attention that has been paid to growing demand for cognitive skills, this complete reversal is striking.

Read it.

I pity Bowe Bergdahl. It must be quite a trial to have a father who’s a werewolf. (Look at this picture and tell me I’m wrong.)

Read it.

So, how could a federal agency seize surveillance records local officials are required to maintain? According to the ACLU “a few hours before that appointment, an assistant city attorney sent an email cancelling the meeting on the basis that the U.S. Marshals Service was claiming the records as their own and instructing the local cops not to release them. Their explanation: the Marshals Service had deputized the local officer, and therefore the records were actually the property of the federal government.”

The feds then physically removed the records to an unknown location.

Read it.

A North Carolina woman currently living her dream- to own a salon- could soon shatter and crumble, leaving her employees to pay astronomical costs for health insurance, all because of Obamacare.

Julia Vittorio, owner of Fresh Salon for the past five years, is worried that she will not be able to provide her employees with health insurance.”

“I think you just want the best for your employees. We are a small business and it’s very much like a family, so I care about our staff,” Vittorio told WCNC.

She previously offered her employees health insurance and paid part of it, but has been forced to reconsider her decision because of the rising costs of premiums.

I guess that bit about people saving money on their health insurance was JUST ANOTHER OBAMA LIE.

Mark Steyn looks at the Obamanation.

On Tuesday morning, and later guest-hosting for Rush, I discussed the deeply troubling case of Bowe Bergdahl, a deserter at best and at worst enemy collaborator. Nevertheless, Barack Obama decided to honor this man in the Rose Garden, and to embrace his parents. In front of the President and the world, Bergdahl’s father sent greetings to his son in Arabic and Pashto, and began with the words, “In the name of Allah the most gracious and most merciful…”

This is, to put it at its mildest, odd and unsettling.

Check it out.

Pretty cool.

Read it.

“He left his weapons and equipment, took minimal supplies, and walked off to either join the Taliban or do something else… The general feeling was that he deserted us and walked off and left us,” Vierkant said.

No wonder Obama values him; they have the same attitude toward the United States.

Read it.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is creating a $2 million research center to study how the government can “nudge” Americans toward making healthier eating habits.

And if the ‘nudge’ doesn’t work, it will inevitably be followed by the whip.

Remind me again what business is this of government at all, and the Federal government in particular.

Read it.

According to CNN Money, Colt sold “twelve times as many handguns early this year than it did in 2013.”

The impetus behind handgun popularity is a combination of self-defense concerns and concerns over the Obama administration’s penchant for gun control.

Read it.

As can be seen on the following chart, during the period from January 2011 to March 2014, there have been slightly more single-family housing starts in Houston (95,037) than in California for the entire state (94,993).

Read it.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

SeaTac, a suburb of Seattle, recently decided to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour and United Liberty tells us that employers in SeaTac have had to cut employee benefits to stay in business after the dramatic raise. In an interview with a publisher from Northwestern Asian Weekly, one employee describes how her company had to cut her benefits to counter the skyrocketing cost of wages: “I lost my 401k, health insurance, paid holiday, and vacation,” she responded. “No more free food,” she added. The wage hike is already hurting Seattle businesses, even though it has not been implemented yet.

Read it.

Despite the benefits of government programs such as affirmative action – something opposed by some other minorities, notably Asian Americans – African Americans have not expanded their share of the middle class in recent decades. Indeed, racial economic disparities are growing, with black unemployment more than double the white jobless rate and reaching 40 percent among youths.

Even more revealing, many of those areas under the most complete progressive control – New York, San Francisco and Chicago – also have among the worst disparities between black and white incomes, notes a recent National Urban League study.

It may well be that hyper-regulatory regimes in the left-leaning cities tend to chase away blue collar jobs and raise the price of housing so high that minorities simply leave. Many of those who stay pay an inordinate share of their income, often upwards of 50 percent, just to keep a roof over their head.

As Thomas Sowell has observed, the black population of San Francisco, the ultimate gentry city, is now half of what it was in 1970, even as the city has experienced an overall demographic resurgence.

Read it.

The report focuses on cities that are building systems that, like heavy rail, have costly, exclusive rights of way yet, like light rail, can’t move more than about 9,000 to 12,000 people per hour. Seattle, for example, is spending well over $600 million per mile building an underground light-rail line that will be able to move no more people than San Diego’s original, 1981 light-rail line that cost just $17 million per mile (in today’s dollars). Honolulu is spending $250 million a mile building an elevated line whose capacity will be little greater than a surface light-rail line.

Yet these are only the most extreme examples of high-cost, low-capacity transit systems. Streetcars qualify: they cost at least half as much to build as light rail yet can carry little more than a fifth as many people. A proposed light-rail line in Austin may qualify: the city wants to spend $100 million per mile building the line yet planners say demand is so low that they expect to run “trains” that are just one-car long.

The real point of the report is that almost all proposed new rail lines are high-cost, low-capacity transit. Double-decker buses can move 18,000 people per hour on city streets, twice what three-car light-rail trains can move; double-decker buses can also move more than 100,000 people per hour on a freeway lane, twice what a subway line can move.

Mark Steyn does a little excavation into the Memory Hole.

Do you remember a lady called Molly Norris? She’s the dopey Seattle cartoonist who cooked up “Everybody Draws Mohammed” Day, and then, when she realized what she’d stumbled into, tried to back out of it. I regard Miss Norris as (to rewrite Stalin) a useless idiot, and she wrote to Mark’s Mailbox to object. I stand by what I wrote then, especially the bit about her crappy peace-sign T-shirt. Now The Seattle Weekly informs us:
No one should lose his name, his home, his life, his liberty because ideological thugs are too insecure to take a joke. But Molly Norris is merely the latest squishy liberal to learn that, when the chips are down, your fellow lefties won’t be there for you.

You may have noticed that Molly Norris’ comic is not in the paper this week. That’s because there is no more Molly.

On the advice of the FBI, she’s been forced to go into hiding. If you want to measure the decline in western civilization’s sense of self-preservation, go back to Valentine’s Day 1989, get out the Fleet Street reports on the Salman Rushdie fatwa, and read the outrage of his fellow London literati at what was being done to one of the mainstays of the Hampstead dinner-party circuit. Then compare it with the feeble passivity of Molly Norris’ own colleagues at an American cartoonist being forced to abandon her life: “There is no more Molly”? That’s all the gutless pussies of The Seattle Weekly can say? As James Taranto notes in The Wall Street Journal, even much sought-after Ramadan-banquet constitutional scholar Barack Obama is remarkably silent:

Now Molly Norris, an American citizen, is forced into hiding because she exercised her right to free speech. Will President Obama say a word on her behalf? Does he believe in the First Amendment for anyone other than Muslims..?

No one should lose his name, his home, his life, his liberty because ideological thugs are too insecure to take a joke. But Molly Norris is merely the latest squishy liberal to learn that, when the chips are down, your fellow lefties won’t be there for you.

Read it.

At last, the truth comes out.

Varoufakis: If we think of ourselves as empiricists who judge the value of the theory on the basis of how well it predicts, then we should have ditched economic models years ago. Never have our models managed with data to predict the major turning points, ever, in the history of capitalism. So if we were honest, we should simply accept that and rethink our approach.

But actually, I think they’re even worse. We can’t even predict the past very well using our models. Economic models are failing to model the past in a way that can explain the past. So what we end up doing with our economic models is retrofitting the data and our own prejudices about how the economy works.

This is why I’m saying that this profession of mine is not really anywhere near astronomy. It’s much closer to mathematized superstition, organized superstition, which has a priesthood to replicate on the basis of how well we learn the rituals.

Video game communities, social economies, give us something that we never had as economists before. That’s something of an opportunity, a chance to experiment with a macroeconomy. We can experiment in economics with individuals. We can put someone behind a screen and experiment on the subject, and ask him or her to make choices and see how they behave.

That has nothing to do with macroeconomics. Macroeconomics requires a different scenario. You conduct controlled experiments with a large economy. We are not allowed to do this in the real world. But in the video game world, we economists have a smidgen of an opportunity to conduct controlled experiments on a real, functioning macroeconomy. And that may be a scientific window into economic reality that we’ve never had access to before.

Read it.

In the past decade a growing number of studies have questioned the anti-fat orthodoxy. Ms Teicholz’s book follows the work of Gary Taubes, a science journalist who has cast doubts on the link between saturated fat and health for well over a decade—and been much disparaged for his pains. There is increasing evidence that a bigger culprit is most likely insulin, a hormone; insulin levels rise when one eats carbohydrates. Yet even now, with more attention devoted to the dangers posed by sugar, saturated fat remains maligned. “It seems now that what sustains it,” argues Ms Teicholz, “is not so much science as generations of bias and habit.”

Think about that, then, next time some Occupy Wall Street slacker gets in your face about Global Warming.

Theodore Dalrymple lays out some inconvenient truth.

In the developed world, our problems are much less acute. And we are fortunate in actually needing large numbers of educated and trained people. Yet we have nevertheless made a similar mistake, and there is now often little connection between the market in education and the market in employment. The economic value of a university degree has correspondingly declined (of its intellectual or cultural value I dare not speak, for the vast majority of students now regard their education merely as a means to an end, and not as an end in itself), and it has become obvious to more and more students that the main purpose of their tertiary education is to lower the rate of youth unemployment for the propaganda benefit of government. In many countries, worse still, students are now being made to pay, by means of indebtedness, for their own unemployment. But while the economic value of a degree has declined, it is something they cannot do without, for without it they have no chance even of a job for which they would have been overqualified a few decades ago. Thus they are on a treadmill from which they cannot alight. Awareness of this accounts for the Indignés in Europe and the Occupy Wall Street movement in America. They are Boko Haram in a minor key; for them, too, the personal is political.

Read it. And watch the  video.

The institutions responsible for informing the public about what is going on in their government are willing tools of the most corrupt elements of both political parties, with results as you see them.