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INSTAVISION: My interview with Marc Levin is now on YouTube.

AN INCONVENIENT BOOK: Praise for Max Holland’s book on Watergate “Deep Throat” source Mark Felt — who, remember, turned out to be a disgruntled bureaucrat trying to advance his career, not a high-minded whistleblower.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Report Calls for Refinancing Student Loans.

It is odd that student loan interest hasn’t fallen as much as mortgages, given that student loans are non-dischargeable. On the other hand, their default rate is pretty high. But the real problem isn’t interest rates, it’s the excessive tuition and fees.

SETTING THE BAR PRETTY LOW: The president needs a comprehensive aid plan that’s just as good as his K-12 education strategy.

HOW THE DOOMSDAY SCENARIO WOULD PLAY OUT if an asteroid hit the Earth.

In this case, let’s imagine that the conclusion is a truly bad one—that our football-field sized rock would be targeting a populated area. And for the sake of doomsday pizzaz, let’s make that populated area New York City.

An 830 sq. mi blast ring has a radius of 14.4 mi. (23.2 km). Position that over New York City and you’d have destruction reaching deep into Queens in the east and Staten Island in the South; west to Paterson and Montclair, NJ; and north to Yonkers and New Rochelle, NY. Manhattan, the Bronx and Brooklyn would be swallowed whole. Evacuation in advance of the blast would be a massive challenge, since the array of bridges and tunnels that connect the boroughs are natural choke points. The many months of notice the residents would have before the big day arrived would make things a bit easier, but fleeing from an asteroid is very different from fleeing from other kinds of disasters. People evacuating in advance of, say, a hurricane can usually just load up their cars and go, since even after a superstorm like Katrina, most of them will simply be turning around and coming home. After a Tunguska-like blast, most people would not have any home left at all.

The bigger risk, of course, is that we get hit by one we don’t see coming, and that it’s bigger than the so-so Tunguska impact.

Meanwhile, reader Curt Johnson writes:

With asteroid hunting back in the news with the latest close approach, I thought you might be interested to know that after the Shoemaker-Levi event, I (with the support of TRW, for whom I worked at the time) designed a satellite mission we named IRASMES that would have detected every asteroid capable to threatening the Earth greater than 50-m in mean diameter. The mission would have taken about ten years from launch and would have cost less than $150 million. (Compare the cost of a single NASA or DOD launch in those days.) The mission would been completed around 2007.

My concept used American multispectral sensors and electronics on a Russian bus, and would have launched on a Russian booster. The Russian partner was Lavochkin. I presented to paper on this concept at a UN conference on the asteroid threat that was held in the wake of Shoemaker-Levi.

Of course, Congress would not fund the concept. Looks like others are starting to pick up the slack, almost 20 years on. So yes — faster, please.

Indeed.

EXPLORING THE IMPACT OF online commentary.

BYRON YORK: Obama caught between friends in fight over Keystone XL pipeline.

WAIT, I THOUGHT PEOPLE HAD A “RIGHT TO DIE,” SO WHY IS preventing suicide a reason for gun control? Oh, who am I kidding — at the NYT, anything is a good reason for gun control. It’s like discovering reasons for martinis at Stephen Green’s place.

PEJMAN YOUSEFZADEH: Drones and the Law: Restoring Checks and Balances.

WELL, TO BE FAIR, BY “NATIONAL CONVERSATION” THEY GENERALLY MEAN “SHUT UP WHILE WE YELL AT YOU.” MN Democrats Abandon ‘National Conversation’ on Guns — Literally. “At a meeting, elected officials simply get up and leave during a gun expert’s presentation. . . . It certainly does appear that elected officials left the room to avoid expert testimony that would have better educated them about the issues they intended to legislate on.”

REMEMBER, PEOPLE IN GOVERNMENT ARE SMARTER THAN YOU AND ME: Ex-San Diego mayor who gambled away $1 billion remorseful.

METEORITE FALLS IN WESTERN URALS. “A meteor flew across the sky above Russia’s Ural Mountains Friday morning, causing sharp explosions and injuring more than 400 people, many of them hurt by broken glass. . . . Interior Ministry spokesman Vadim Kolesnikov said more than 400 people had sought medical treatment after the blasts, and at least three were hospitalized in serious condition. Many of the injuries were from glass that was broken by the explosions.”

SMART DIPLOMACY: White House Confirms: Obama Did Nothing on Benghazi.

MIKE BLOOMBERG wants to ban styrofoam.

MICHAEL BARONE: It wasn’t just redistricting that gave Republicans their House majority.

Plus: “In an election in which Obama won the popular vote 51%-47%, a politically neutral division of the nation into 50 equal-population states would have given Romney 58% of the electoral votes and Obama 42%. Equal-population districts work against the Obama Democratic coalition.”

AT AMAZON, coupons galore in Health & Personal Care.

AT THE NEW YORK TIMES, DIGITAL TROLLING.

PUNCHING BACK TWICE AS HARD: Because of recent legislation passed by the New York legislature, Olympic Arms will no longer sell to Empire State or local officials, including police and other first responders.

IT’S GOOD TO BE THE GOD-KING: Bryan Preston: Obama Is Always Either Campaigning Or Vacationing.

GOVERNMENT: Confidential, expensive USDA sensitivity training: ‘The Pilgrims were illegal aliens.’

Footage of the United States Department of Agriculture’s compulsory “Cultural Sensitivity Training” program reveals USDA employees being instructed to refer to the Pilgrims as “illegal aliens” and minorities as “emerging majorities” — at “a huge expense” to taxpayers.

The video clips were made public Thursday evening by the conservative government accountability group Judicial Watch, which obtained them through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request made on May 18, 2012. . . . At times in the video, Betances poked fun at “white males.”

Beyond parody.

UPDATE: Eugene Volokh:

I think, though, that the “Pilgrims = Illegal Aliens” equation illustrates the exact opposite. The whites immigrated to America — and took over the place. (I’m glad they did, but I can surely understand why the Indians might have disagreed.) Likewise, Jews immigrated to Palestine (adding vastly to the numbers already present), sometimes illegally — and eventually there were more Jews in some parts than Arabs, so Jews started running the place. Now Israelis are sensibly objecting to Palestinians’ asserted “right of return” to their and their parents’ homes, because if enough Palestinians are allowed to immigrate into Israel, they’ll start running the place.

The bottom line is that for all the good that immigration can do (and I’m an immigrant to the U.S., who is very glad that America let me in, and who generally supports immigration), unregulated immigration can dramatically change the nature of the target society. It makes a lot of sense for those who live there to think hard about how those changes can be managed, and in some situations to restrict the flow of immigrants — who, after all, will soon be entitled to affect their new countrymen’s rights and lives, through the vote if not through force. . . .

Letting in immigrants means letting in your future rulers. It may be selfish to worry about that, but it’s foolish not to.

Indeed. They’re “emerging majorities.”

SENATORS PUSH BRENNAN ON MISLEADING TESTIMONY. “Brennan, in an exchange with Rubio, had said of Harzi that the U.S. government ‘didn’t have anything on him.’ The claim is almost certainly false. The U.S. government provided evidence of Harzi’s involvement in those attacks to the governments of Turkey and Tunisia, which had both held Harzi as the U.S. tried to gain access to him for questioning. In fact, the U.S. government not only has evidence of Harzi’s involvement, we shared that intelligence with the governments of Turkey and Tunisia, both of which held Harzi after he was detained en route to Syria. FBI Director Robert Mueller was involved in those high-level negotiations.”

JOEL POLLAK: Hagel Delay: A Conservative New Media Victory. He’s damaged goods regardless — and the White House’s plan to have a token “Republican” at DoD to deflect blame isn’t looking so good now.

KINDA LIKE STROM THURMOND, ONLY NOT INTERRACIAL: It turns out, Rep. Steve Cohen was tweeting to his secret daughter. “Cohen admitted that he discovered that 24-year-old Victoria Brink was his daughter about three years ago.”

CHRISTINE PETERSON interviewed on nanotechnology.