HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): More Young Adults Homeless, Living In Street. Forward!

HEH: “Preview of Obama remarks at 5pm: Narcissistic diatribe followed by casting blame, false statements of unity, then taxpayer paid trip to HI.”

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Roboticist Building “Decepticons.”

ATLANTIC MONTHLY: The Single Best Anti-Gun-Death Policy? Ending the Drug War. Won’t happen. Too much opportunity for graft.

DAVID BARON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Woman calls for help, says she’s trapped in trailhead bathroom by Mountain Lion.

YA THINK? Max Boot: Benghazi Report Leaves Some Questions Unanswered.

There is little said about the military response to the attacks, beyond the sending of a drone aircraft and the evacuation of the diplomats in Benghazi; and there is even less about the White House role in managing the response to the crisis, even though senior officials, up to and including the president, must have been aware of the attacks as they were occurring. Nor is there anything in the report about the failure, so far, to bring the perpetrators of the attacks to justice. Why, for example, has the administration seemingly decided to treat this as a law enforcement matter, with the FBI in the lead, rather than treating it as an act of war, with the armed forces in the lead? A fuller explanation of those issues awaits, presumably, more congressional digging.

According to a State Department spokesperson, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was unable to comment due to a flare-up of irritable bowel syndrome.

ENERGY CONSERVATION AND THE PUZZLE OF THE BODY’S HEALING RATE.

One of the fundamental puzzles is why wound healing proceeds so slowly when cells by themselves grow very quickly. For example, fibroblast cells, which play an important role in wound healing, can double in number just 10 hours when grown in a petridish in ideal conditions. That’s clearly much faster than wounds heal in the body; why the difference?

Today, Peter Apell at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden and a couple of pals say they’ve worked out an answer using a rather unconventional approach. These guys study wound healing from the point of view of energy conservation. They ask what basic restrictions the laws of physics place on wound healing and what kind of insights this gives into an otherwise hugely complex process.

Interesting stuff.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How To Be In A Friends With Benefits Relationship.

I DIDN’T SEE THE PRESS CONFERENCE, but reader Theo X. Rojo writes: “I’m very proud of my membership in the NRA as a ‘Life Member.’ I thought Mr. LaPierre hit it out of the park today.”

Well, he had journalists seething, which is probably a good sign. I mean, the reporters are an audience he’ll never win over, but if the members are onboard and motivated, NRA can block most anything it needs to.

UPDATE: Jeffrey Goldberg: “Reporters on my Twitter feed seem to hate the NRA more than anything else, ever.” I think there’s a race/class angle to that.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY: 3D Printing On The Surface Of The Moon.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Is Exchanging Naughty Pictures With Strangers Cheating? Not really seeing the distinction between that and “sexting.”

CHINA’S OTHER TERRITORIAL DISPUTE: Baekdu Mountain.

POLIWOOD: Does Hollywood Need To Rethink Its Relationship To Violence?

QUICK! DEMONIZE AND ARREST THE FILMMAKERS! U.S. on alert for Islamist ire to ‘Zero Dark Thirty:’ Film depicts harsh interrogation methods.

SACRE BLEU! The Collapse of French Pensions.

France is between a rock and a hard place. French public debt is almost 90 percent of GDP, and the French people are unwilling to give up any more, even though France’s average retirement rate is lower than elsewhere in Europe. Sarkozy’s original reforms met with large protests, and any change in the retirement age by Hollande is likely to engender a similar reaction.

As in America, years of disastrous blue policies and overgenerous pension promises are finally catching up with France. Now policymakers are left with with a depressing choice: renege on promises to workers or watch the system go broke. Hollande has made it clear that he doesn’t want to do anything that could be seen as an attack on the workers, but he may have no choice. When the money isn’t there, it isn’t there.

Things that can’t go on forever, won’t. Debt that can’t be repaid, won’t be. Promises that can’t be kept, won’t be.

Related: Task Force Warns of NY Budget Meltdown.

THE REPUBLICANS WHO KILLED BOEHNER’S PLAN B. “This was a botched GOP House Leadership issue.”

Related: Why Republicans Failed. “The Democrats don’t understand how Boehner couldn’t get things through his caucus because Democrats operate differently. They are a centrally planned bureaucracy. It’s top down, monolithic decision making. The head speaks and the party machine enforces discipline so everyone follows the same line. . . . 21 Republicans didn’t vote for the plan that was passed. Why? Because it didn’t go far enough. They wanted even more budget cutting.”

Also: “Leaders” Are People With Followers. “Boehner really ought to have been playing chess, and not poker. . . . The Republican Party, if interested in turning around both its and the country’s decline, ought to consider a full reform platform, and start selling it to voters for the 2014 election. Something that admits that the last century of collapse into a single Progressive uber-State is a pair of deuces that thinks itself a royal flush. Something that builds upon ideas, e.g. Barnett’s Bill of Federalism, that redistribute power, not wealth.”

UPDATE: Randy Barnett writes:

Why doesn’t the collapse of Plan B not *increase* Boehner’s negotiating stance for a better deal? If he can’t deliver his caucus for this deal, the President will need to offer a better deal or get none. And if he wants no deal (as many assume) then there won’t be a deal anyway, unless it’s a bad deal for Republicans. Why aren’t the conservatives in the caucus not functioning as the “bad cop.” What am I missing here?

That’s a plausible strategy. But proper execution would have involved Boehner saying in advance that he wasn’t sure he could bring the Tea Party folks along, rather than being blindsided at the last minute.

KARL DENNINGER: Obama’s Hypocrisy Problem On Guns.

You may choose to delegate this responsibility to others, as Mayor Bloomberg and President Obama have, but your right to life is not inferior to theirs. It is equal. President Obama has no more right to live than you do. You are his equal from the standpoint of what your creator, and his creator, endowed both of you with.

So we have established that you have the right to live, as does the President. And if the President has the right to defend his life with deadly force, and indeed the responsibility to do so, then, should it be necessary, so do you.

This debate should end right there. Up until all of these people in political office disband their police forces, their Secret Service details, throw down their own arms, armored cars, body armor and other defensive means of interdicting assault they have nothing — not even a moral argument — behind them in their demand that you disarm and become an intentional victim — no matter who you are.

Still waiting to hear what kind of guns Rupert Murdoch’s and Mike Bloomberg’s security teams use. We pretty much know what Obama’s have to hand — and it’s a lot more than private citizens are permitted.

But there’s more:

But in truth it gets worse than that.

You see, our government has been running guns. Illegally running guns. Jaime Avila, in just one of many examples, purchased two rifles that were found at the scene of a federal agent shot near the Arizona-Mexico border. Our government knew Mr. Avila was illegally trafficking weapons to the Sinaloa drug cartel. Nonetheless, when his purchases were called into the BATFE for clearance the government intentionally approved the transactions despite knowing they were illegal.

Two of those hundreds of weapons came back over the border and were used to murder Brian Terry. Hundreds of Mexican citizens have been murdered with these guns in total — guns that our government illegally, intentionally and maliciously allowed to be delivered to this murderous cartel.

Mr. Avila’s sentence? 57 months in prison, or just under 6 years.

When?

Two days before the Newtown Connecticut shootings.

Media outrage? Zero.

They feign independence, but they’re basically courtiers.

THEY TOLD ME THIS WOULD HAPPEN IF I VOTED FOR MITT ROMNEY. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! Scandal Alert: Congress Is Quietly Abandoning the 5th Amendment. “Don’t let the dearth of attention fool you — this is a scandal. Congress has turned its back on safeguarding a core Constitutional protection and a centuries old requirement of Western justice.”

See, this is why you should always vote for a Republican for President. If the GOP controlled the White House, this would be a civil-liberties scandal of the first order.

LAST CHANCE TO APPLY TO BE A THIEL FELLOW. It’s a sweet gig if you’re 19 or under.

MICKEY KAUS: Sell Rattner! “Does Rattner keep up with the industry he didn’t quite save? If so he’d know this is the month it became clear that GM has a massively bloated inventory and is once again resorting to heavy sales incentives to move unsold product. That’s true for pickup trucks, and also, apparently, for cars. . . . Rattner also refers optimistically to a ‘passel of shiny new models’ from GM that are ‘about to hit showrooms.’ Which models are those? The screwed-up new Malibu, which is already such a flop that production has been curtailed? The BMW-fighting Cadillac ATS? (I live in West L.A. BMW-land and have seen exactly one ATS in the last month. It’s been on sale since August. GM now plans to cut production of the bigger CTS to give the ATS ‘breathing room.’) The Chevy Impala, which is already boring automotive writers even though it won’t be on sale until next year? Meanwhile, Honda’s redesigned Accord (which competes with the Malibu) is looking like a huge critical and sales hit.”

MUST-READ CUSTOMER REVIEWS: The Hutzler 571 Banana Slicer.

FIRST THE HORSE, NOW THE BARN DOOR: State Dept. focusing on ‘deteriorating security’ at diplomatic posts.

State Department officials on Thursday said the department is evaluating all high-risk posts in the wake of a report that found systemic security problems were to blame for the deadly Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources Thomas Nides told panels in the House and Senate that the department would focus on a troubling pattern of “deteriorating security” at U.S. diplomatic posts. . . . An independent report released Wednesday found State should have been paying more attention to broad political changes that were affecting security.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, sidelined by a nasty case of athlete’s foot, was unavailable for comment.

AT AMAZON, there’s two-day shipping until 7 pm ET today. Today is the last full day for one-day shipping.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Roll Call: Ethics Committee Finds Berkley Broke House Rules. “Outgoing Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., broke House rules, laws and standards of conduct related to conflicts of interest when members of her office assisted her husband’s medical practice with Veterans Affairs, Medicare and Medicaid claims, the House Ethics Committee announced late Thursday.”