NAVAL TRADITION: Don’t Wash That Coffee Mug! “You may not be able to embrace your loved ones while you are gone, but at least you can still taste the same coffee you drank the day you left.”

IF YOU’RE AN AMAZON STUDENT MEMBER, you can save $234 on Rosetta Stone language software.

IF MORE PEOPLE RESPONDED TO CRIME THIS WAY, THERE’D BE MUCH LESS CRIME. WHICH MAKES THIS A SELFLESS, VIRTUOUS ACT. ‘She was a fighter. She shot him’: Defiant 76-year-old woman dies in shootout with gang of three who tried to rob her of bingo money.

TEST-DRIVING THE 2015 Audi A3 e-tron Prototype.

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HEALTH: The Power Of A Daily Bout Of Exercise.

The results were striking. After only a week, the young men who had not exercised displayed a significant and unhealthy decline in their blood sugar control, and, equally worrying, their biopsied fat cells seemed to have developed a malicious streak. Those cells, examined using sophisticated genetic testing techniques, were now overexpressing various genes that may contribute to unhealthy metabolic changes and underexpressing other genes potentially important for a well-functioning metabolism.

But the volunteers who had exercised once a day, despite comparable energy surpluses, were not similarly afflicted. Their blood sugar control remained robust, and their fat cells exhibited far fewer of the potentially undesirable alterations in gene expression than among the sedentary men.

Hmm. I wonder what Gary Taubes would say about this?

FASTER, PLEASE: Human stem cells converted to functional lung cells.

READER BOOK PLUG: From reader Rick Zalon, Coyote Point Casino, which he describes as “a reality-based satirical take on Indian gaming, identity politics and the modern university.”

SCIENCE: Raising Children Together Makes Husbands And Wives Less Loved. And the effect is more pronounced for unmarried, but cohabiting, parents.

QUANTITATIVE EASING: US and European governments gained $1.6 trillion from low interest rates on the backs of over 50 year old savers and pensions.

STEPHEN GREEN NOT HAVING MUCH LUCK with the new and “improved” Healthcare.gov site.

PUERTO RICO: The Next Detroit? “The implications are serious for Americans outside Puerto Rico both because a taxpayer bailout would be expensive and a default would be far more disruptive than Detroit’s record bankruptcy filing in July. Officials in San Juan and Washington are adamant that a federal bailout is not on the table, but the situation is being closely monitored by the White House, which recently named an advisory team to help Puerto Rican officials navigate the crisis.”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 207.

MICKEY KAUS: Eddie Murphy in Reverse.

The ultimate extension of this principle is a sort of reversed image of the world Eddie Murphy memorably sketched on Saturday Night Live, in which white people don’t have to pay for newspapers or food etc. the way anyone else does. In this reverse-Murphy world, the affluent pay more for everything. Every individual good is means-tested.** They pay more for health care–why not also for auto licenses and parking violations and pet tags and meals and newspapers? They aren’t taxed–if they stay home and count their money, they’re safe. They’re just punished for their income classification every time they venture out into the community. Redistribution gets turned into a pervasive, day to day form of social inequality and disrespect–an effect multiplied by the apparent assumption by Democrats that the semi-affluent don’t really have a right to bitch about it. They’re supposed to be unseen and unheard–almost non-citizens.

What was it Obama said? You can come along, but you’ll have to ride in the back and shut up?

SAY, THIS SOUNDS SORT OF FAMILIAR: ‘It Feels Like Education Malpractice:’ What one woman learned from 10 years of teaching in a New York City public school.

I went in as an idealist. I’d seen all the movies, seen all the poor kids and heroic teachers. But those movies were fake. They started out with a real story but turned it into a happy ending when there wasn’t one. It was grueling. You had to save these kids, but if one was running around the room or dancing on the tables or beating another kid up, you had to deal with it yourself. They’re unhappy kids and they’re going to look for fights to express their frustration. . . .

I saw that no matter what I wanted for the kids, it wasn’t going to happen. The system purported to be supporting students just wasn’t there. They need remediation, tiny class sizes, one-on-one attention—they need parenting, basically. Their parents are affected by the same Toxic Stress that they are, and it repeats itself in a cycle from parent to child. In America, the wealthiest school is going to get ten times more funding than the lowest one. For every dollar my school was getting, one in the suburbs was getting ten dollars. That’s huge. The kids come in disadvantaged, and they’re subjected to this disadvantaged school. My school was completely third-world.

Reading the whole thing, though, I don’t think she learned as much as she should have. Maybe she’ll read my new book when it comes out next month. . . .

WAIT, I THOUGHT THEY WERE ON THE RUN? Al Qaeda spreading like Kudzu in Syria.

GREG MANKIW RESPONDS TO THE POPE’S HALF-BAKED IDEAS ON ECONOMICS. I think the key factor here is that he’s from crony-capitalism-capital Argentina, and that he has mistaken what goes on there for the operation of free markets.

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PETER SUDERMAN: Has Obamacare Been Rescued by the Administration’s ‘Tech Surge’? Don’t Bet On It.

Related: Democrats Look For Someone Other Than Obama To Blame For ObamaCare.

UPDATE: Insurance Companies Say Health Care Website Is Still Flawed. “The problem is that so-called back end systems, which are supposed to deliver consumer information to insurers, still have not been fixed.” So while they’ve been pointing at the front, there’s still no backend. It’s a Potemkin website.

YA THINK? IRS Targeting of ObamaCare Critics Should Be A Bigger Story.

THIS SEEMS MORE LIKE GOOD NEWS FOR REPUBLICANS: More liberal, populist movement emerging in Democratic Party ahead of 2016 elections.

JAMES TARANTO: No Uncertain Terms: You’ll never believe the latest excuse for Obama.

Last week Frank J. Fleming, one of the funniest bloggers around, tweeted: “At this point in the Obama presidency, we were supposed to be talking about how we needed to repeal the 22nd Amendment,” which limits presidents to two terms.

We laughed and gave Fleming a retweet. On Wednesday we observed that it’s hard for a political humorist to keep up with the real-life absurdities of the Obama crowd. To illustrate the point, along comes Jonathan Zimmerman, a historian at New York University, with an op-ed in the Washington Post arguing that we need to repeal the 22nd Amendment.

Now of course the way this was supposed to work was that Obama would be such an amazing president that he would come to seem indispensable. There were people who felt that way about Reagan and Clinton in their last years in office. Probably someone somewhere would still stake that claim on Obama’s behalf, but we doubt even Slate would publish such a far-fetched argument, never mind the Washington Post.

So Zimmerman doesn’t argue that Obama deserves a third term to continue his great success, only that “Barack Obama should be allowed to stand for re election [again]” and that “citizens should be allowed to vote for–or against–him.” Where it gets funny is in Zimmerman’s resort to the 22nd Amendment as an excuse for the failures of Obama’s first and second terms.

In fact, Obama’s abuse of the IRS and other government agencies to get re-elected in 2012 is the single best argument for the 22nd Amendment.

YA THINK? Chuck Todd: White House ‘Private Sector Velocity’ Claim ‘Indictment of Government As a Solution.’

IF YOU HAVE TO SAY IT: David Plouffe: I think Americans still trust Obama.