A CONFLICT OF INTEREST at Politico?

VIOLENT PROTESTERS TELL U2 TO PAY ITS TAXES. “Art Uncut argues that while Bono campaigns against poverty in the developing world, his group has avoided paying Irish taxes at a time when his austerity-hit country desperately needs money.” Less sanctimony, more accountability.

HATEMAIL OF THE DAY: Murder Trig Palin.

Not such a big step from there to that whole Buck v. Bell compulsory sterilization thing. . .

CHUCK SIMMINS: Minot, the Atlantis of the Plains.

HOPE AND CHANGE: Retirement As We Know It Is “Dead.”

If we had a Republican President, I bet we’d be seeing a lot of tearjerker news stories about how low interest rates are squeezing retirees. Luckily, with a Democrat in the White House, we won’t be subjected to those. Instead, we’ll hear about how liberating it is to work at McDonald’s when you’re 70!

THE HILL: Senator Sessions Challenges Obama To Make Debt-Ceiling Talks Public. “Sessions said Democrats have been avoiding making public the negotiations and laying out precisely what they want in a debt-limit package because ‘what they’re advocating for, I don’t think would be popular.'”

AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE, we’re getting a 12% tuition increase. We used to be a big bargain. Now, not so much. Some question the necessity. However, it’s not “tax dollars” — much of the tuition increase is to make up for reduced state support. The state apparently feels that higher education should be paid for by students, not taxpayers. That’s not necessarily bad — its taking education out of the “other people’s money” category — but it does mean that students, since they’re footing the bill (often with borrowed money) need to be sure that they’re getting their money’s worth.

POLIWOOD: Bridesmaids and Hollywood’s Wedding Movie Craze.

THE DISADVANTAGES OF AN ELITE EDUCATION: “One of the great errors of an elite education, then, is that it teaches you to think that measures of intelligence and academic achievement are measures of value in some moral or metaphysical sense. But they’re not. Graduates of elite schools are not more valuable than stupid people, or talentless people, or even lazy people. Their pain does not hurt more. Their souls do not weigh more. If I were religious, I would say, God does not love them more. The political implications should be clear. As John Ruskin told an older elite, grabbing what you can get isn’t any less wicked when you grab it with the power of your brains than with the power of your fists. . . . I didn’t understand this until I began comparing my experience, and even more, my students’ experience, with the experience of a friend of mine who went to Cleveland State. There are due dates and attendance requirements at places like Yale, but no one takes them very seriously. Extensions are available for the asking; threats to deduct credit for missed classes are rarely, if ever, carried out. In other words, students at places like Yale get an endless string of second chances. Not so at places like Cleveland State. My friend once got a D in a class in which she’d been running an A because she was coming off a waitressing shift and had to hand in her term paper an hour late. That may be an extreme example, but it is unthinkable at an elite school. . . . In short, the way students are treated in college trains them for the social position they will occupy once they get out. At schools like Cleveland State, they’re being trained for positions somewhere in the middle of the class system, in the depths of one bureaucracy or another. They’re being conditioned for lives with few second chances, no extensions, little support, narrow opportunity—lives of subordination, supervision, and control, lives of deadlines, not guidelines. At places like Yale, of course, it’s the reverse.”

Related: The Status Anxiety Of Liberal Elites. Why do they suddenly miss the 1950s? Because that was the zenith of their power.

TEACHERS’ UNIONS plan a counteroffensive.

SHOCKING NEWS: Musicians Rock On With Energy Drinks, Pharma Misuse.

FED UP with people looking the other way.

A FLYING SAUCER ANNIVERSARY: June 24, 1947: They Came From … Outer Space?

JOURNALISM PROF. W. JOSEPH CAMPBELL WRITES: “Why aren’t journos all over the Obama-Medal of Honor gaffe? The dearth of viewpoint diversity in American newsrooms has to be a factor.”

A NEW DEFENSE IN THE WAR AGAINST PHOTOGRAPHY: Spy-Like Sunglasses Shoot And Share Video. “The Ray-Ban-style shades capture an extra-wide 130-degree field of vision through a half-inch fisheye-like lens, which is masked as a grommet on the right side of the frame. A 0.2-inch high-def sensor captures images, and then a low-power one-gigahertz processor compresses the video. The footage is either saved into onboard flash memory or beamed from a 2.4-gigahertz Wi-Fi/Bluetooth radio to your smartphone. An app controls the camera remotely and acts a host through which footage streams to Facebook, YouTube or the Eyez homepage.”

VOTING PRESENT: House Refuses To Authorize Libyan War, Then Refuses To Defund Libyan War.

ATF SCANDAL UPDATE: Fired ‘Gunrunner’ Whistleblower Vince Cefalu Speaks (PJM Exclusive).

WHY THE SUPREME COURT CARES ABOUT ELITES, not the American people. From Lawrence Baum & Neal Devins, in the Georgetown Law Journal. “Supreme Court Justices care more about the views of academics, journalists, and other elites than they do about public opinion. This is true of nearly all Justices and is especially true of swing Justices, who often cast the critical votes in the Court’s most visible decisions.”

ADMINISTRATION PRIORITIES EXPLAINED: Geithner: Taxes on ‘Small Business’ Must Rise So Government Doesn’t ‘Shrink.’ “When Ellmers finally told Geithner that ‘the point is we need jobs,’ he responded that the administration felt it had ‘no alternative’ but to raise taxes on small businesses because otherwise ‘you have to shrink the overall size of government programs’—including federal education spending.”

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN, DEMOCRATS WOULD BE COMPLAINING ABOUT A WARMONGERING IMPERIAL PRESIDENCY. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! “A House Democrat warned Friday that the U.S. president is becoming an ‘absolute monarch’ on matters related to the authority to start a war.”

CONSENSUS: CONCEALED CARRY LAW PASSES IN WISCONSIN: Meaning 49 States allow concealed carry, in one form or another (no permit, may issue or shall issue).

HOW TO PROTECT YOUR HOME against tornadoes and hurricanes. “If an EF5 tornado barrels over your home, there’s not much you can do about it. But barring the very worst, there is a compendium of technology available to prepare for the high winds of tornadoes and hurricanes, from hurricane clips to make your roof connections a little stronger to ultra-tough materials that can protect your safe room against 2 x 4s flying around like missiles.”

We were awakened in the middle of the night last night by a tornado warning for a storm that never even came close to our house, but that hit north Knox County pretty hard. I’m happy to have the weather radio to warn us, but we’re beginning to suffer tornado-warning fatigue.

UPDATE: This advice on programming your weather radio is good, but mine’s actually set to ignore all but the highest-level warnings — tornado, tsunami, that sort of thing, and only for my county. (Though if there’s ever a tsunami warning for Knoxville, I’m not sure I want to know.) Nonetheless, we’ve gotten so many warnings this year that it’s getting old. That’s never happened before.

PHIL BOWERMASTER on reputation as currency.

HMM: SHORT TELOMERES BOOST PROGERIN AGING PROTEIN. “Each time a cell divides its chromosome caps (called telomeres) get shorter. When telomeres get really short they interfere with the health of cells and cell division becomes more difficult. Telomere length is an indicator (albeit not perfect) of cell age and cell health. Therefore mechanisms by which telomere length impact cell health and cell death are as important topic of aging research. So it is interesting that NIH researchers have discovered a mechanism by which telomere shortening boosts production of the toxic protein progerin in cells. . . . You might think, why not rejuvenate by lengthening telomeres? The problem (see that link) is that telomere shortening is probably a defense mechanism against cancer. So lengthening telomeres (assuming we had a treatment that would do this) might not lower the risk of all-cause mortality. However, throw in some great cures for cancer (the sooner the better) and telomere lengthening will suddenly become a very appealing idea. Another possibility: If we could bioengineer our immune systems to very aggressively police against cancers we could reduce the cancer risk from making our telomeres long again. Immune system rejuvenation along with tweaks to make the immune system more aggressive against cancers could so reduce cancer risk that telomere lengthening would carry far less risk.”

Alternatively, people might feel that a higher risk of cancer is worth it compared with feeling old and decrepit.