IF STACY MCCAIN INSULTS YOU, pray to God he doesn’t apologize. You’ll be reading for days.

TEN YEARS AGO ON INSTAPUNDIT: “Yep. Enron’s failure is a success — at least compared to a state bailout or coverup.” Truer than I knew. . . .

#OCCUPYFAIL: How ‘Occupy’ went wrong: A trashed house in Brooklyn has become a symbol of a movement that failed to capitalize on popular anger. “Their efforts have actually made the neighborhood worse — because what used to be an empty house is now a hovel of squatters and probably should be condemned.” Gosh, who could have seen that coming? Oh, well. Add it to the syllabus.

UPDATE: Reader Clifford Grout writes: “If he’d let Tea Partiers move in instead, his house would have been vacuumed, the dishes washed, and there’d be clean towels in the bathroom. Hell, there would still be a bathroom.”

THE CASE FOR DYING BROKE. Well, it’s easier than it used to be in the Obama era!

HISTORY: It was exactly 1 year ago today, at the Wisconsin protests, that UW doctors stood on the street corner, writing excuse notes for the teachers who had called in sick to go to the protests.

THIS IS WHY your boss hates you.

SARAH HOYT: Dispatches From Different Wars. “Over the last few days it’s been impossible for me to log on to the Face Book without being assaulted by postings on the ‘Republicans War On Women’ from my female Face Book Friends most of whom are educated and many of whom work in a profession that, at least in broad theory, requires them to have the capacity for original or individual thought. . . . But no one is discussing banning contraceptives or even abortion. The contraceptive issue was introduced in a Republican debate by George ‘Supine’ Stephanopoulos as a means of painting Republicans as being against contraceptives. . . . What kind of enormous, unyielding, painful daddy issues have you got to have to think that Uncle Sam has to force a CHURCH to pay for your contraception?”

Democrats are worried, so they’re playing the Republicans Will Steal Your Ladyparts!!!! card. And the knees are jerking as hoped. Women, you’re being played. Again.

CAN EMAIL WORDING BE A TIPOFF TO who’s the boss? “The ‘Enron corpus,’ as the database of employee emails revealed during investigations into Enron’s massive fraud in the early 2000s became known, has turned into a gift that keeps on giving to researchers. For Eric Gilbert, assistant professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, the email database has shed light on which words are used most frequently in messages going up and down the corporate hierarchy (and yes, a conservative approach and many filters were used to ensure the types of messages examined would apply to a typical organization, not just a fraudulent one).”

AT AMAZON, an outlet sale on Bedding.

THOUGHTS ON statism, psychology, and scholarship.

FEDS URGE COURT TO reject laptop decryption appeal.

The government is urging a federal appeals court not to entertain an appeal from a bank-fraud defendant who has been ordered to decrypt her laptop so its contents can be used in her criminal case.

Colorado federal authorities seized the encrypted Toshiba laptop from defendant Ramona Fricosu in 2010 with valid court warrants while investigating alleged mortgage fraud, and demanded she decrypt it.

Ruling that the woman’s Fifth Amendment rights against compelled self-incrimination would not be breached, U.S. District Judge Robert Blackburn ordered the woman in January to decrypt the laptop by the end of February. The judge refused to stay his decision to allow Fricosu time to appeal.

The Colorado woman’s attorney appealed anyway, and the government on Thursday asked the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reject the petition that asserts the woman’s constitutional rights would be breached by being forced to hand over evidence against herself.

I think the District Court was wrong, and I hope the Court of Appeals goes ahead, hears the case, and agrees with me.

UPDATE: A reader emails: “What is runaway prosecutors’ next idea, that it’s obstruction of justice to get a lawyer?”

ANN ALTHOUSE ON THE LATEST INVENTION: “Birth-Control Moms.”

But it’s distractingly oxymoronic: if you use birth control, it’s to avoid motherhood.

Except… soccer moms don’t play soccer. And security moms — is that really a famous term? — aren’t providing the security. The “mom” part of the term is about… well, what is it about? It’s what patronizing politicos call the women who they imagine don’t think, but emote and intuit their way through elections. Or perhaps, in part, it’s that women who are mothers are concerned about the children. In that light, a “birth control mom” isn’t a woman who wants her birth control devices. As a soccer mom likes to see the kids playing soccer, a birth control mom likes to see the kids using birth control, when they fuck, which they will do… you can’t stop ’em… or if you think you can, you might already be a Santorumite.

“Santorumite?” Sounds suspiciously like “sodomite.” Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Plus, from the comments:

Headline at Politico today: Voting Rights Act under siege.

It’s all so 1964!

Down in the eighth frickin’ paragraph:

Despite the misgivings, the final vote for the bill was a lopsided 390-33 in the House. And in the Senate, critics of the law couldn’t pick up a single no vote. It passed, 98-0.

Oh, sure, but let’s do a scare headline anyway.

Black people: no vote for you!

Women: no birth control!

Politico is getting frantic.

If the Dems were confident, would they be making such frantic efforts to shore up the core of their base?

EXPLAINED: A Home Generator Setup.

PERHAPS WE’VE FOUND A SOLUTION TO LONG-TERM UNEMPLOYMENT: Human Hibernation.

AMERICA FACES A SERIOUS ICEBREAKER SHORTAGE. “The United States has just one functioning icebreaker. While the Arctic region is of increasing strategic importance, the U.S. is falling behind Russia, China, Canada, and other countries in its ability to operate there.”

THIS WEEK IN THE FUTURE.

AT AMAZON, new releases in Mystery, Thrillers & Suspense.

VITAMIN D UPDATE: Vitamin D linked to children’s language issues. “Mothers who had low vitamin D levels while they were pregnant are more likely to have a child with a language impairment than mothers who had higher levels of the vitamin, according to an Australian study.”

Also: Vitamin D deficiency epidemic among Black people. “A white person will make enough vitamin D by getting exposed to the sun for only 10 minutes. It can take more than two hours for a Black person to get the same quantity of vitamin D.” Note that however pale you are, if you slather sunscreen on every time you go out, you’ll have similar problems.

UPDATE: Patrick Cox sends this piece: Death By Scientific Consensus.

And they’ll be talking about this at Chris Peterson’s Personalized Life Extension Conference later this spring.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader DRJ emails: “I was diagnosed with cancer last year and I asked all my doctors to test the Vitamin D levels for myself and my family. (Only one agreed to do it and I had to pay for it myself. The rest claimed I didn’t need the test.) Well, guess what? My Vitamin D levels were very low, as were those of 3 other members of my family. After my test results came back, several of my doctors had their Vitamin D levels tested and they were low, too. As someone I admire likes to say: Heh!” My doctor has been testing patients, with similar results. I try to get reasonable amounts of sun when I can, but I also take 2-4000 units a day.

MORE: From Johns Hopkins: Vitamin D and prostate cancer: “Vitamin D may turn out to be a ray of hope for men with prostate cancer. Laboratory and population-based research suggest that adequate levels of vitamin D reduce the risk of developing prostate cancer and may help suppress the growth and spread of prostate cancer cells in men who already have it.”

HOW DID THAT HAPPEN? The Simpsons at Episode 500.

Older episodes here.

WE’D BETTER DESIGN THEM TO: Will Artificial Intelligences Find Humans Enjoyable?

EASTERN EUROPEANS FIGHT FOR INTERNET FREEDOM:

A grassroots protest movement erupted last month in Poland and spread quickly across the former Eastern Bloc and beyond. The growing opposition against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, has raised questions about the fate of the treaty, which is important to the governments of the United States and other industrialized economies.

There have been street protests across Eastern Europe, attacks on government websites in the Czech Republic and Poland, even a heartfelt apology from a Slovenian ambassador who signed it and then decried her act as “civic carelessness.”

In a region where people remember being spied upon and controlled by oppressive communist regimes, the treaty has provoked fears of a new surveillance regime.

They’re right to be angry, and Americans are wrong to be complacent.

POLICE MILITARIZATION: Small town up in arms over armored transport vehicle purchase.

The Keene, NH, police department was going to get its own Lenco BearCat, a vehicle the town’s mayor reportedly described as a “tank.” However, citizens in the town of 23,000 revolted, according to the article, with nearly 100 of them packing a city council meeting in opposition. Critics said the vehicle promoted violence, and cited a promotional video for the BearCat that shows gun-wielding cops using one of the armored trucks to knock down the door of a house and spray tear gas inside. The issue is scheduled to come up again at next month’s meeting.

I had an article on police militarization in Popular Mechanics a while back.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Is Iowa A Nest of Vicious Racists?

ORBITAL DEBRIS UPDATE: For Space Mess, Scientists Seek Celestial Broom.

The most obvious sign that there is a lot of junk in space is how much of it has been falling out of the sky lately: a defunct NASA satellite last year, a failed Russian space probe this year.

While the odds are tiny that anyone on Earth will be hit, the chances that all this orbiting litter will interfere with working satellites or the International Space Station are getting higher, according to a recent report by the National Research Council.

The nonprofit group, which dispenses advice on scientific matters, concluded that the problem of extraterrestrial clutter had reached a point where, if nothing was done, a cascade of collisions would eventually make low-Earth orbit unusable.

“NASA is taking it very seriously,” said Mason A. Peck, chief technologist for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

There is a straightforward solution: dispose of the space junk, especially big pieces, before they collide and break into smaller ones

Here’s a piece on the legal issues involved that Rob Merges and I wrote for The Environmental Law Reporter a couple of years ago.