WHEN MEN WERE MEN: Juggling Rifles — With Attached Bayonets.

PRIORITIES: Democrats Not Budging on New IRS Rules: Harry Reid is set to kill a compromise that would delay them in order to get a Ukraine bill passed.

PEOPLE NEVER SEEM TO LEARN: Watch Repairer Goes Legal Over Tame Yelp Review, Streisand Effect Takes Over.

AT AMAZON, up to 50% off on Spring Jewelry.

Also, Spring Deals on Pool Cleaning Supplies and Equipment.

#PROPAGANDAFAIL: Battleground Poll: Harry Reid More Disliked Than The Koch Brothers.

MARK RIPPETOE: 3 Reasons Why You Need to Lift the Barbell Over Your Head. Just as squats have helped my computer-caused lower-back pain, overhead presses have helped my shoulders. As my doctor says, a muscle that’s in spasm is a muscle that’s too weak. So make it stronger.

LAWS ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Business Software Alliance accused of pirating the photo they used in their snitch-on-pirates ad.

MALCOLM GLADWELL ON THE GOVERNMENT AND THE BRANCH DAVIDIANS.

There is a telling moment during the siege when Schneider is talking to an F.B.I. negotiator about an undercover A.T.F. agent who used the name Robert Gonzalez. The A.T.F. believed that the Branch Davidians—who ran a small business selling weapons at gun shows—had converted a batch of firearms from semiautomatic to automatic without the proper permits. Gonzalez’s job was to infiltrate the Davidian community and look for evidence. (He found none, a fact that—along with the A.T.F.’s bizarre decision to serve a warrant on Koresh by force, rather than arresting him on those numerous occasions when he ventured into town—loomed large in the many Waco postmortems.) Here is Schneider and a negotiator talking about what happened after the Davidians realized that Gonzalez was not who he said he was:

F.B.I.: Why didn’t you have a confrontation [with Gonzalez] and say look, l just . . . don’t appreciate you being here?
SCHNEIDER: Well . . . because here’s a possible guy, here’s a soul maybe, here’s someone like myself—
F.B.I.: Yeah. But he wasn’t there to have his soul saved, right?
SCHNEIDER: Well, who knows, though? You never can tell.
F.B.I.: Wait a minute. I know . . . I worked under cover years and years ago and I wasn’t there to have somebody save my soul.

The F.B.I. agent expected that the Davidians, like a fragile cult, would turn paranoid and defensive in the presence of a threat. He didn’t grasp that he was dealing with a very different kind of group—the sort whose idea of a good evening’s fun was a six-hour Bible study wrestling with a tricky passage of Revelation. It was a crucial misunderstanding, and would feed directly into the tragedy that was to come. . . . In the government’s eyes, the Branch Davidians were a threat.

On a related note, let me recommend David Kopel, et al., No More Wacos: What’s Wrong With Federal Law Enforcement and How to Fix It. It would be an understatement, however, to say that the advice contained therein hasn’t been much followed.

JUDGE TO PORN TROLLS: IP Addresses Aren’t People. “Finding that an IP address isn’t enough to get specific Internet users embroiled in a copyright suit isn’t a totally new concept. A New York judge made such a ruling in a case called K-Beech v. John Does in 2012. However, that was a shotgun-style lawsuit against dozens of BitTorrent users, several of whom hired defense counsel. Also, the judge simply ruled that the case must be re-filed against specific users; he didn’t throw out the case on venue grounds as Ungaro has done here. By contrast, the Malibu Media case was thrown out quickly, without either Comcast or the user behind the IP address expending any resources. Ungaro issued her order to show cause to Malibu before they were allowed to send a subpoena to Comcast. If other judges adopt such reasoning, it could put a major dent in the copyright trolling business model.”

ANOTHER self-publishing success story. Somebody should write a book on how technology is making this sort of thing possible. . . .

HERE’S A LETTER FROM THE FLORIDA STATE ATTORNEY on the FBI Todashev killing. (PDF).

FALSE PREGNANCY: Woman Faked Quintuplets for 9 Months: Boyfriend. “A Canadian woman who looked very pregnant and said she was carrying quintuplets wasn’t pregnant at all—and her boyfriend is devastated, ABC News reports. Only when Barbara Bienvenue, 37, showed up to deliver her babies at a Quebec hospital did doctors say there was no pregnancy. ‘She let me choose the names,’ boyfriend Paul Servat, 35, told the Toronto Sun between sobs. ‘I lost everything, it was my whole life.’ Now she’s receiving psychiatric care and he’s refusing to see her again, CTV reports.”

HOW TRAINS CAN BE SILENT KILLERS.

J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS: ObamaCare As Election Turnout Machine. “The politicization of health care has a GOTV component for the Democrat party. Whether the Republicans fully understand this architecture remains to be seen.”

AT REASON: Should Vaccines Be Mandatory? A libertarian debate on immunization and government.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Grad Students Driving The Growing Debt Burden. “The typical debt load of borrowers leaving school with a master’s, medical, law or doctoral degree jumped an inflation-adjusted 43% between 2004 and 2012, according to a new report by the New America Foundation, a left-leaning Washington think tank. . . . The increases were sharper for those pursuing advanced degrees in the social sciences and humanities, versus professional degrees such as M.B.A.s or medical degrees that tend to yield greater long-term returns.”

And why?

The foundation’s report also points to a 2006 law that removed a limit on how much graduate students may borrow from the federal government. Before the change, graduate students—excluding medical students—could borrow no more than $138,500 total for their education and were limited in how much they could borrow annually. Now they can borrow up to the “cost of attendance,” a figure that includes tuition, books, transportation and living expenses.

Bottom line: “”Graduate schools have essentially found a way to capture more of someone’s future income and future spending than what would probably occur if we had some sort of underwriting standards and loan limits.” Go figure.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 320.

BLUE MODEL GOES BELLYUP AS PUERTO RICANS FLEE FAILED GOVERNMENT:

Puerto Rico has lost nearly half a million people in the past ten years, a number greater than the total current population of its capital city. The government is now taking desperate measures to stem the tide . . . .

Too many citizens have lost faith in the government’s ability to provide even the most basic of services. One resident told USA Today: “There’s more opportunities if you move. People who live off government support here are doing better than those of us who work and pay taxes.” Another said: “You see what the government does with your money over there [in Florida]. Here, you contribute and contribute and contribute and nothing improves.”

When the blue model collapses, it takes a lot down with it.

Politicians take note. Except that they won’t as long as opportunities for graft remain.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: College Admissions Office Finds Ideal Applicant Capable Of Subsidizing Tuition Of 3 Low-Income Students. One of the weirdest things about the past few years is the way The Onion has gone from a parody site to hard-news. . . .

WHY SHOULD IT BE LEGAL FOR UNIONS TO STALK PEOPLE? Pennsylvania legislators eye ending union exception to stalker laws.

BROWSE AND SAVE: At Amazon, New Deals On Bestselling Products, Updated Every Hour.

Also, deals galore in the Spring Cleaning Sale.

INSTAVISION, NOW ON YOUTUBE: I talk with Mickey Kaus about Affirmative Action, Immigration Amnesty, and more.

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Free speech, right to bear arms, search and seizure, and due process claims based on gun seizure can go forward.

[Plaintiffs] allege that “[t]he actions taken against David Rhein … were done because of his political comments to a locally elected official some time before the illegal search and seizure that concerned David Rhein’s views about Americans’ Second Amendment rights that either the representative, someone in that representative’s office, and/or one of the Defendant Officers somehow construed (falsely) as evidence that David Rhein had a mental condition that made him dangerous”; that David “was unreasonably deemed mentally unfit based on the exercising of his free speech issues regarding the Second Amendment”; and that “[w]hile Coffman alleged in his letter that David Rhein had … a mental condition, this is totally without merit, [and] Coffman had no reasonable basis for making this conclusion.” These allegations are sufficient at this stage of the proceedings to support a claim that Defendants revoked David’s FOID card and took away his firearms in retaliation for his protected speech.

The Illinois Way.

AT BBC NEWS, Prof. Nicholas Johnson talks about his new book, Negroes And The Gun: The Black Tradition Of Arms.