WELL, IT IS THE 21st CENTURY: Cold War Spy-Satellite Images Unveil Lost Cities.

GORDON CHANG on China’s campaign against foreign words.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Why dance films and videos don’t really work all that well.

BESIDES, ITS JUST ANNOYING: How a popular two letter word is undermining your credibility

Beginning your sentence with “so” orients your message and subconsciously alerts your audience that what you’re about to say is different than what you’ve been talking about up until this point.

We business-types need to drop the “so” for three main reasons…

SARAH PIMPS MORE WRITER FRIENDS YOU MIGHT NOT HAVE HEARD OF: Yesterday I mentioned my friend Amanda Green writing as Sam Schall in Vengeance from Ashes which reads like David Weber, but has been living under her bed with the dust-bunnies for twenty years.  If you prefer fantasy adventure, my friend Cedar Sanderson has Pixie Noir and its sequel Trickster Noir out.  It’s sort of what would happen if Larry Correia and Georgette Heyer had a torrid love affair.  Then there’s the classic space opera of Peter Grant.  And so no one accuses me of too much altruism, have I mentioned A Few Good Men is a finalist for the Prometheus Award, and that I have had my first indie novel, Witchfinder, out for less than a month?

“NOBEL PRIZE WINNER GARY BECKER, one of the greatest economists of the last century, passed away today.”

ALEXANDER MOTYL on Vladimir Putin’s warlords in Ukraine: “Lacking popular support in Ukraine, Putin’s warlords will do what terrorists do: seize buildings, promote anti-Semitism, imprison and kill opposition leaders, attack Roma and other minorities, take neutral observers and journalists hostage, and abuse the population of whichever cities or towns they terrorize. One especially brutal terrorist, the warlord of the Sloviansk Putinstan, Vyacheslav Ponomaryov, recently told a female journalist the following: “We’ll adopt all necessary measures to prevent elections in the southeast from taking place. We’ll take someone prisoner and hang him by his balls. Got it?”

Yeah, we got it.

STATE-LED CALLS FOR CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENTS:  If you can’t get 2/3 of both houses of Congress to propose a constitutional amendment, you can bypass it and get 2/3 of the State legislatures to call for a constitutional convention.  While none of the 27 constitutional amendments have been enacted via a state-called convention, the possibility is increasingly intriguing to those on both the political left and right.

Liberals and progressives have begun an effort to get States to propose a convention focusing on amending the First Amendment– yep, you heard that right.  Vermont’s uber-liberal legislature on Friday just called for such a convention.  They are furious over the Supreme Court’s decisions to uphold free speech via political spending in Citizens United and McCutcheon v. FEC.  So they want to restrict the First Amendment by somehow trying to insert language that prohibits spending in political campaigns.

Conservatives and tea party supporters are considering calling a state-led constitutional convention to ponder amendments relating to balanced budgets, limiting federal power, and even repealing the Sixteenth Amendment (federal income tax).  There is a large planning meeting for this possibility taking place in Indianapolis this June. 

Hmmm…. let’s consider the themes here:  The liberals/progressives want to amend the Constitution to limit one of our most fundamental freedoms.  The conservatives/tea partiers want to amend the Constitution to limit government power.   But somehow the average American–even prominent Republicans themselves– thinks of the GOP as the “Party of No”?

OF COURSE NEVER MENTION THAT ALL THE “EXPERTS” LEARNED MARXISM IN SCHOOL: Review: ‘The Tyranny of Experts’ by William Easterly, on global development’s errors.

A MARSUPIAL TIGER WOODS?:   The male of this cute little Australian marsupial apparently goes on an incessant mating spree.  But it isn’t as good as it seems:

Males relentlessly bound from partner to partner, as massive hormone releases in their bodies cause their immune systems to crash and their fur to fall out. They bleed internally. Some males even go blind, yet still stumble around the leaf litter hoping for one last tryst. In a few short weeks, every single male lies dead, leaving the females to raise their offspring.

I guess there can be too much of a good thing?

THE QUESTIONABLE LINK BETWEEN SATURATED FAT AND HEART DISEASE: This Wall Street Journal article is simply another mile marker on the road to the Sleeper diet becoming a reality:

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DEVELOPING: Pilot killed in plane crash at Travis AFB Air Show in Northern California, Sacramento’s KFBK reports:

It is being reported that during the Thunder Over Solano Air Show at Travis Air Force Base, one of the small planes crashed, killing the pilot. No other injuries are reported. There is no word yet on what caused the plane to crash.

More links to early reports at Twitchy.

LIBERAL RACISM:   It’s been fascinating to watch the ultra-liberal MSM work overtime to portray LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling as a Republican, which is necessary to fit with their Republicans-are-per-se-racist (and Democrats are not) narrative.  But as Derek Hunter points out in this Townhall piece, the liberals/progressives are overtly– and unapologetically–racist toward any minority that disagrees with their position.  Witness the recent characterization by U.S. Rep Bennie Thompson (D-MS) of Justice Clarence Thomas as an “Uncle Tom.”  Says Hunter:

Democrats have locked up the black vote for generations not because they’ve solved any problems in the black community – those they’ve attempted to address have done nothing but get worse – but because they’ve cynically, and diabolically injected race into every issue and labeled with “otherness,” anyone who strays from the orthodoxy they’ve deemed “acceptable thought” for black Americans.

The liberal/progressive PC police for African-American thought are ruthless indeed.  So this is Obama-led, post-racial America?

CUTTING OFF OUR NOSE: Clapper’s gag order could hurt intelligence analysts more than journalists.

GEE, I WONDER WHO’S GOING TO WIN? Assad to Face 2 Others in Syrian Presidential Poll.

IT NEVER WORKED ANYWHERE, LET’S GIVE IT ANOTHER TRY: In Great Britain Ed Miliband suggests re-nationalizing railways.

JOHN EDWARDS WAS RIGHT, THERE ARE TWO AMERICAS: Liberals Eat at Au Bon Pain, Chipotle; Conservatives Eat at Cracker Barrel, Whataburger.

Cracker Barrel nearly alienated a wide swatch of their customer base, when they initially appeared to give in to the anti-Duck Dynasty hysteria in December. But when will corporations in general learn not to respond to the flash mob du jour?

AT AMAZON, Mother’s Day Gifts Galore.

Also, last day to get 25% off on select baseball gloves from Rawlings.

VITAMIN D UPDATE: Vitamin D deficiency may be linked to aggressive prostate cancer. Just to be safe, I’m going to sit in the sun, sipping red wine.

DE BLASIO CONTINUES BLOOMBERG NANNY ASSAULT AGAINST BIG SODAS:  Don’t these progressives have anything better to do than spend our tax dollars fighting sodas they think are “too big”?  Apparently not.  NYC  Mayor De Blasio vows to defend the soda ban on appeal and, if necessary, re-enact it.  (And yes, despite the “R” that appeared after his name on the ballot, Bloomberg was a progressive. They lurk in the political crevices of both parties.).

RELATED:  Will nanny state progressives tax evil “sugar” the way they have tobacco?

HOLLYWOOD’S SEX ABUSE COVER-UP: From Mark Judge at Real Clear Religion, who quotes screenwriter (and PJM columnist) Andrew Klavan.

Read the whole thing.™

READER BOOK PLUG: From Michael Oates, Wade In The Water.

FROM SKIN CELLS TO STEM CELLS TO SPERM:  Stanford scientists have successfully converted skin cells cultured from infertile men and created early stage sperm, using stem cell therapy.

The research is at an early stage, but scientists suspect that the converted skin cells might have grown into mature sperm cells if they had been transplanted into the infertile men’s testes.

If further work confirms the suspicion, it may be possible to restore male fertility by taking men’s skin cells, turning them into stem cells, and injecting these into their testes. The same might be done for men who are left infertile after having chemotherapy for cancer.

IT MIGHT WORK BETTER IF OUR “BEST AND BRIGHTEST” BELIEVED IN IT: As is what we’re promoting abroad is not exactly democracy but hatred of America/Western civilization.  Note the thing about the so called Arab Spring.  But of course what they ask is Is Democracy Promotion a Failed Policy?   (Also, democracy as such was always a bad idea. Maybe we should try a democratic republic.  Let’s start here.)