GEORGE W. BUSH: “Outsider Artist.”

ALL IS PROCEEDING AS SPENGLER HAS FORESEEN: Egypt Inflation Climbs Most in Two Years as Pound Weakens.

Related: Hyperinflation Baked Into Egypt’s Future.

STEPHEN L. CARTER: What Abraham Lincoln Liked About Richard III. “Rather than abuse great literature by trying to twist it to our purposes, we should sit at its feet and partake of its wisdom. Unfortunately, as Shakespeare’s masterpiece drops from school reading lists, its themes and language will probably become less resonant.”

CHARLIE MARTIN: The Thirteen Weeks Method: This isn’t just about losing weight.

MEGAN MCARDLE: Department of Awful Statistics: Income Inequality Edition. “To put it another way, the apparent clustering of income along the rich right tail of the distribution is just an artifact of the way that the Census presents the data. If they kept running through $5,000 brackets all the way out to A-Rod, the spreadsheet would be about a mile long, and there would only be a handful of people in each bracket. So at the high end, where there are few households, they summarize. Meanwhile, there’s no evidence that the middle class is getting poorer.”

COOLIDGE FOR PRESIDENT: A review of Amity Shlaes’ new book, Coolidge. Excerpt:

At the end of World War I, the national debt stood at $27 billion, nine times its level before the war. But Coolidge, and Harding as well, slashed the country’s credit obligation to just $17.65 billion. They did it by cutting taxes, generating economic growth and, in the process, flooding federal coffers with surplus dollars. This accomplishment merits attention today, with the national debt exceeding $16 trillion—more than 70% of gross domestic product. If that number hits 90%, some economists warn, it will squeeze the national economy inexorably.

And if that crisis hits, the country will face a binary choice. It can return to a free-market system of lower taxes, smaller government and the curtailment of the Federal Reserve’s promiscuous fiat monetary policies—in short, abandoning Keynesian sensibilities and the trend toward European-style social democratic governance. Or it can opt for what energy-industry executive Jay Zawatsky has called “increasing financial repression”—further federal spending and intrusion into the economy, rising tax rates on the wealthy, ever greater federal debt financed by Fed money creation and, eventually, rising inflation.

To understand the first option, it is necessary to understand the 1920s. And we can’t understand the 1920s without peering into the life and politics of Calvin Coolidge—”principally a man of work,” as Ms. Shlaes describes him, “a minimalist president, an economic general of budgeting and tax cuts.” Her biography is thus both timely and important.

Indeed.

I REMEMBER WHEN “SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER” WAS AN UNQUALIFIED GOOD: CNN Panel: Was Doctor’s Conservative Speech In Front Of Obama ‘Offensive,’ ‘Inappropriate’? Of course, that was back when protest was patriotic.

SOMETHING TO REALLY WORRY ABOUT: Guatemala declares national coffee emergency. “Coffee rust, which can kill plants by withering their leaves, also is affecting plantations in El Salvador, Honduras, Panama and Costa Rica.”

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REMEMBER, ONLY POLICE CAN BE TRUSTED WITH GUNS: Police seeking Dorner opened fire in a second case of mistaken identity.

Torrance police say the man was driving a pickup resembling the fugitive’s. The incident happened just after the LAPD fired on women delivering newspapers nearby. . . .

His pickup, police later explained, matched the description of the one belonging to Christopher Jordan Dorner — the ex-cop who has evaded authorities after allegedly killing three and wounding two more. But the pickups were different makes and colors. And Perdue looks nothing like Dorner: He’s several inches shorter and about a hundred pounds lighter. And Perdue is white; Dorner is black.

“I don’t want to use the word buffoonery but it really is unbridled police lawlessness,” said Robert Sheahen, Perdue’s attorney. “These people need training and they need restraint.”

If his goal was to make them look like trigger-happy losers, he’s succeeded.

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Millenials: The Most Stressed-Out Generation in America.

“Millennials,” those aged 18-33, are the most stressed-out generation in the country, according to the American Psychological Association’s annual Stress in America survey. The results were discussed at a press conference on Thursday.

1 in 2 College Graduates are Jobless or Underemployed

In a survey of 2,000 Americans, Millennials report a stress level of 5.4 out of 10, much higher than the Boomers’ 4.7 and the Matures’ 3.7, and 39 percent of Millennials said their stress levels had risen in the past year. This comes as a surprise, as many might expect that Boomers, who were hit-hard by the recession, to have the highest stress levels.

In fact higher stress levels were reported amongst every generation, most likely because of the economy, “but the expectations of Millennials are especially high. There’s a huge emphasis placed on school, and once they get out into the workplace Millennials discover that their academic achievements don’t translate,” Dr. Lynn Bufka, one of the psychologists who developed the Stress in America report, told Yahoo! Shine.

There’s kind of a Higher Education Bubble Update angle here, too . . . .

DONALD SENSING: Why is DHS buying billions of rounds of ammunition?

Plus, Who bought all that Walmart ammo?

IRAN’S NEWEST WARPLANE something from GI Joe?

COSMO GIRLS HAVE SMARTPHONES, so Cosmopolitan is dying.

WAR ON SCIENCE: CNN Anchor Blames Asteroid on Global Warming.

HOPEY-CHANGEY: Currency Wars.

D.C. SCHOOLS CONTINUE TO SHED STUDENTS:

Are the regular public schools in DC on life support? And could they soon disappear?

These are questions actually being posed out loud, and not just by anyone, but by community and political leaders of DC’s status quo. Why? Well, after the flight of more than 40 percent of students from traditional district schools to charter schools over the last decade, not to mention the voucher program, the DC School District was forced to announce yet another round of traditional public school closings.

Fifteen underutilized schools will close under the new plan, which could save $8.5 million, or about 1% of the District’s $800 million school budget. The board says it would use the savings to improve programming in the remaining schools within the system.

The goal would be to make the remaining traditional schools more attractive to parents who increasingly flock to charters or using private school vouchers. The Washington Post quotes David Catania, chairman of the city council’s education committee, saying the flock to charters may make traditional public schools, “a thing of the past.”

It’s like they’re facing some sort of K-12 Implosion or something.

BRIDGET JOHNSON: Incompetency: An Easy Way for Obama to Deal with the USS Cole Case?

NOAH FELDMAN: Obama’s Drone Attack On Your Due Process. “The biggest problem with the recently disclosed Obama administration white paper defending the drone killing of radical clerk Anwar al-Awlaki isn’t its secrecy or its creative redefinition of the words ‘imminent threat.’ It is the revolutionary and shocking transformation of the meaning of due process.”

THAT HAPPENED HERE, UNTIL WE BLOCKED THE NETWORK: Malware warnings ripple across the web just five days after last major incident.

LARUE TACTICAL TAKES A STAND FOR SECOND AMENDMENT RIGHTS. “Effective today, in an effort to see that no legal mistakes are made by LaRue Tactical and/or its employees, we will apply all current State and Local Laws (as applied to civilians) to state and local law enforcement / government agencies. In other words, LaRue Tactical will limit all sales to what law-abiding citizens residing in their districts can purchase or possess.” This should be the rule everywhere.

SPEAKING TRUTH to Gender Studies power.

MENTAL HEALTH ADVOCATE: Don’t Stigmatize Crazy People, Stigmatize Gun Owners.

So first Bonavia implies that we ought to make policy based on the percentages. But then she says, make a pervasive law that applies to everyone, without mentioning the very small percentage of perpetrators of gun violence within the truly vast category of Americans who buy guns. And by the way, the category “gun violence” lumps things together. Gun control has become a hot issue because of a few massacres. If you make a category out of the set of incidents that has inflamed present-day opinion, people suffering from mental illness seem to be 100% of the perpetrators! You only get your very small percentage if you throw in other types of incidents, such as gangsters wiping each other out. Wake me up when 90% of Americans want to do something about that. And explain to me how background checks have any curative power over that problem.

The appeal to statistics and reason falls flat when you shape it to suit the policy you already want.

It’s true that only a small minority of crazy people commit violent crimes. But that small minority is gigantic compared to the percentage of gun owners who commit violent crimes. Follow the link for some sharp questions.

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