JAMES DELINGPOLE: Red Pill, Blue Pill. “Let me give you an example of what taking the red pill entails. It’s a report from last year by the Boston Consulting Group showing that the amount of household, corporate and government debt which needs to be eliminated stands at $21 trillion. The cost of dealing with this ‘debt overhang’ will entail the loss (ie confiscation by the government) of one third of the wealth of the asset-owning classes. Some time in the next few months, weeks or years, we’re all going to be taking a 30 per cent hair cut.” Well, the asset-owners, anyway.

Related: What’s In A Name? “Recent events have shown that not only banks and insurance companies with their presumed ‘money good’ guarantees, but sovereign nations as well cannot all be counted on to guarantee a return of principal, let alone a return on investment that comes anywhere close to matching 7% in nominal terms. What does Greece tell us if not that money, credit and financial investments dependent on ever expanding growth of credit are sometimes subject to buzz cut defaults with scalp level clippers, as opposed to a trimming of the bangs with haute couture scissors.”

WE HAVE ALWAYS NEVER VIGOROUSLY ENFORCED IMMIGRATION LAWS: Homeland Security deletes immigration enforcement success stories from website.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is not a fan of a big part of the 287(g) program, which allows state and local police to enforce federal immigration laws — but until Thursday her department’s website didn’t get that message.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the part of her agency that handles the 287(g) agreements with states and localities, had a Web page dedicated to success stories from the program, pointing to many of the dangerous criminal aliens who had been taken off the streets after local authorities nabbed them for another offense.

But after Rep. Bob Goodlatte, Virginia Republican, pointed out the contradiction during a House Judiciary Committee hearing Thursday, Ms. Napolitano wasted little time in removing it.

“I would tell the people who are working on the website, take it down,” she said during the hearing. And even before the hearing gaveled to a close, the page was gone.

Hey, they don’t call her “Big Sis” for nothing.

IT’S THUGGERY, BUT IT’S PATHETICALLY INEPT THUGGERY: Pelosi Threatens Media: ‘Maybe The People Writing These Stories’ Should Release Their Tax Returns.

Seems like that whole tax-return issue the Dems were flogging has kinda . . . returned on ’em.

STACY MCCAIN: Did Someone Say ‘Beandogs’?

YOU KNOW, I’M BEGINNING TO THINK I CAN’T TRUST THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA: Media fail: So, Ann Romney never said ‘you people’ after all.

So I guess another apology is due, to go with the horsey one.

CLAYTON CRAMER has to evacuate.

VULNERABILITY: GPS Hijacking Catches Feds, Drone Makers Off Guard.

UPDATE: Here’s a paper from 2011. More here.

INSTAPUNDIT READERS MAY BE INTERESTED IN THIS BOOK: Back to Basics: A Complete Guide to Traditional Skills. This is the third edition; I have the previous edition and it’s quite good. I imagine the newer edition is, too.

HE CHOSE . . . POORLY: Bill Nye, The Obama Guy.

FROM PROFESSOR JACOBSON, a list of businesses you may wish to patronize.

TWITCHY: Left attacks Jon Lovitz for criticizing Obama; Lovitz doubles down: ‘I hate blatant pandering and lying’; Update: Lovitz hits Occupiers, capital gains tax.

CHANGE: New Army Manual On Preventing Harm To Civilians.

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Fort Hood report shows FBI ignored warning signs on Hasan, lawmaker says. “The FBI was too concerned about political correctness and did not launch an investigation into a man who was later charged with killing 13 people in a 2009 attack at the Fort Hood military installation in Texas, despite significant warning signs that he was an Islamic extremist bent on killing civilians, according to a lawmaker briefed on a new report about the terrorist attack.”

BILL QUICK: The Coming Republican Depression.

What these numbers describe is an ongoing depression. We may not technically be in a recession (although who knows, given how thoroughly the statistics get cooked these days), but we are most certainly in a depression.

It probably won’t be actually identified as such until it is long over, though. Well, unless the GOP takes congress and the White House this fall. Then the fellating tools and hack propagandists of the DNC media will line up to wail about the “Republican Depression” we are enduring.

True, but that matters less with each passing month.

MATT WELCH: Could Obama’s Pot Crackdown Cost Him Colorado?

NICK DENTON: First Comes The Dream.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: 4 Surprising Facts About Sex & College Women.

FASTER, PLEASE: Nanoparticle Completely Eradicates Hepatitis C Virus. “Researchers at the University of Florida (UF) have developed a nanoparticle that has shown 100 percent effectiveness in eradicating the hepatitis C virus in laboratory testing. The nanoparticle, dubbed a nanozyme, consists of a backbone made from gold nanoparticles and a surface with two biological components. One biological component is an enzyme that attacks and destroys the mRNA, which provides the recipe for duplicating the protein that causes the disease. The other biological part is the navigator, if you will. It is a DNA oligonucleotide that identifies the disease-related protein and sends the enzyme on course to destroy it.”

INSTAVISION: My interview with David Horowitz about the shady world of nonprofits is now on YouTube. Horowitz’s new book is here.

Plus, some related thoughts from Prof. Donald Douglas.

A PICKUP ARTIST’S PERSPECTIVE: Internet porn provides a vague glimpse of what a world with Sexbots will be like. “Is porn turning men into lazy bums? Might explain the effects of supernormal stimuli. Money won’t much help them get a girl, the women in porn are hotter than anything they could get in the real world anyway, and it seems to have bad effects on motivation overall. Why should men do anything? Not the recipe for a healthy society. Assuming porn is making men lazy, apathetic and demotivated, imagine what life-like sexbots who resemble Emma Stone will do to men! . . . Sexbots will only have an indirect effect on women, for women are by nature less visual creatures than men, and won’t be drawn to the corporeal pleasures offered by rudimentary AI Jude Law model #3,465. What sexbots will do is widen the already growing chasm between the sexes, until only the fittest of the fit — and fitness is whatever gets one’s genes to the next generation, whether beneficial to civilization or not — can successfully leap across it to woo a human companion in the way that our genetic overlord intended.” (Via the Insta-Wife, who has some thoughts.)

COMPARISON: Krugmenistan vs. Estonia. “In his blog post, Krugman started his graph—and his logic—when Estonia’s GDP had reached its peak, in 2007. Wages were high, and unemployment was low. Good for most citizens, and for most citizens now things are still worse than they were then. But if you move Krugman’s graph all the way back to 2000, you see slow, steady growth in GDP, then a short boom, then a hard crash, and now growth leveling back off to where it would have been without the boom. In the boom years, says Varblane, ‘GDP growth was not real. It was artificial,’ fueled by cheap debt from abroad. The peak, Krugman’s point of comparison, was not ‘real,’ he says. That Estonia has not reached it again is a good thing, Varblane and Ligi say. It never should have been there in the first place.”

WHY IS WHOOPING COUGH raging in Utah? “The overwhelming majority of pertussis cases in 2010 and in 2012 are in the 21 states that allow a personal belief exemption from immunizations. Thirteen of the eighteen states with incidence rates greater than the national rate are personal belief states.”

HOUSING RECOVERY: Bank of America has one million customers who missed at least two payments.

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: New online game to design RNA molecules: advancing nanotechnology? “Could games like Foldit and EteRNA represent new crowd-sourced paths to the more rapid development of atomically precise manufacturing?”

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR JOHN MCCAIN, THE COUNTRY WOULD BE OVERRUN BY PRUDERY. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! CNN puts blurry dots covering the breasts of a woman in a Matisse painting. “The clip is hilarious.”