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HMM: Dietary Experiment Claims to Successfully Extend Human Vision Into Near Infrared.

THIS ISN’T SURPRISING; I’VE SCUBA DIVED WITH GROUPERS THAT LOOKED BIG ENOUGH TO SWALLOW ME: Video: Goliath Grouper Swallows 4-Foot Shark In One Bite.

MATH WARS: Rote memorization plays crucial role in teaching students how to solve complex calculations, study says. “Memorizing the answers to simple math problems, such as basic addition or the multiplication tables, marks a key shift in a child’s cognitive development, because it helps bridge the gap from counting on fingers to complex calculation, according to the new brain scanning research. The progression from counting on fingers to simply remembering that, for example, six plus three equals nine, parallels physical changes in a child’s brain, in which the hippocampus, a key brain structure for memory, gradually takes over from the pre-frontal parietal cortex, an area of higher order reasoning.”

AT NEVER YET MELTED, a review of C.S. Forester’s The General.

THE LONELY LIVES OF SCIENTISTS: Getting To Know Whale Vaginas In 7 Steps.

IF SHE REALLY WANTS “EDGIER” SHE SHOULD HIRE DANA LOESCH TO HOST: NBC News President Wants An Edgier ‘Meet The Press.’

I KNOW DE BLASIO HAS NEW YORK ON THE WRONG TRACK, BUT THIS IS RIDICULOUS: A subway operator on the A line recently piloted an express train uptown — on a downtown track — for several minutes before coming to a stop, according to sources. “She could have had a head-on collision. That’s the only way to say it. There’s no nicer way to put it.”

STANLEY KURTZ: How The College Board Politicized U.S. History.

ADVICE: Preparing For The California Mega-Quake.

You can always shop the Amazon Emergency Essentials Store, for a start!

MOLLY BALL: Inside the Democrats’ Plan to Save Arkansas—and the Senate: The party’s desperate bid to hang onto the majority rests on an unprecedented political organizing effort in red states like this one. Also a lot of drama designed to encourage the base to turn out — like the Ferguson saturation-coverage, which is designed to energize black turnout the way the Trayvon Martin soap opera was used in 2012.

ACCOMMODATING DISABILITY: My colleague Bradley Areheart has a piece in the University of Chicago Law Review on this subject, written with Michael Ashley Stein, Anita Silvers, and Leslie Pickering Francis.

LAWFARE: A Disturbing Pattern: Eight Times that Democrats Used Court Shenanigans Against Republicans They Couldn’t Beat at the Ballot Box.

RICHARD EPSTEIN: Lessons From Ferguson.

TAXPROF: The IRS Scandal, Day 473.

THEY’RE ONLY DIRTY IF YOU LOSE: America Entering New Era of Dirty Wars?

All wars are of course dirty, and many episodes of conventional warfare (for example, both World Wars) in fact saw their fair share of irregularity and dirtiness. During World War II, German soldiers at times pretended to surrender before firing on the apprehending Allied soldiers. American and British bombing missions deliberately targeted urban civilian populations to terrorize the collective German psyche.

America’s self-identity is that we are a reluctant nation when it comes to starting wars, but when forced we fight total wars regularly and successfully—and sometimes even leave behind the defeated societies better than they had been before. In his remarks at the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings, President Obama explained to his audience that following victory in this total war American deeds were noble: “We claimed no spoils of victory…we claimed no land other than the earth where we buried those who gave their lives under our flag and where we station those who still serve under it.” As Obama’s remarks reinforced, we etched D-Day into our national memory as a battle that represented the pinnacle of our selfless fight for the “survival of liberty.” Yet despite our desire to fight the good fight against a foe who will play by our rules, America’s history is overwhelmingly one of fighting opaque and incomplete dirty wars—from the American Revolution through Afghanistan.

America’s dirty wars have come in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes it is maximalist involvement such as the Philippines after 1898, Vietnam, and Iraq. In others, like Greece in the late 1940s or El Salvador in the 1980s, it is by proxy—essentially military aid and training with a miniscule American military combat presence. It is worth nothing that Afghanistan started out as a minimalist dirty war but wound end up being a maximalist one, which by definition tend to be costlier and controversial. Rarely has the United States fought dirty wars on the insurgent/guerrilla side, with one key exception being the fight against British and Loyalist forces during the American Revolution. Another departure occurred in the 1980s, when the Reagan Administration backed the insurgent anti-communist contras against the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.

I’m thinking that a useful paradigm for dealing with ISIS is, what would Gen. Curtis LeMay do if he were serving under President Andrew Jackson? But I could be mistaken.

WHAT JAWBONE FITNESS TRACKER DATA SHOWED about the Napa earthquake.

ELIMINATIONIST RHETORIC: Dana Milbank: A Welcome End To American Whiteness.

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WHICH IS WHY WE PROBABLY SHOULDN’T EMULATE THEIR POLICIES: Unemployment In Europe Is A Disaster: Two Charts.

YEAH, I DON’T THINK HE MUCH CARES: WaPo: ‘Disconnected Obama’ needs to change conversation to help party in midterms. Nice golf pic. I remember when it was racist to publish those.

Plus: “After Ebola, ISIL, Ferguson and earthquakes, people start wondering if locusts are next.”

CALLING OUT THE “OLD BOYS” FOR SEXISM: Durbin’s “pay gap” problem the focus of additional radio ads. Turns out he pays women 77 cents for every dollar he pays male staffers. No wonder Democrats believe that number — for them, it’s true!

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: George Washington Tells Faculty Not to Inform Students of Cheaper Textbook Alternatives to Protect Campus Bookstore, Then Relents. Note the chart of textbook prices vs. inflation generally — and, even more damningly, against the falling prices for “recreational books.”

IF THEY WERE WHITE AND REPUBLICAN, THEY’D BE A DANGEROUS REDNECK MILITIA WITH PARANOID BELIEFS ABOUT THE GOVERNMENT. INSTEAD: Citizen Patrol Aims to Defend Against Police Shootings. “A new group calling itself the Huey P. Newton Gun Club launched armed self-defense patrols Wednesday with one stated purpose: to protect Dallas neighbors from police. . . . At one point, the march went to Elaine’s Restaurant on Martin Luther King Boulevard, where demonstrators piled rifles on tables as they ordered cold drinks and food. A Dallas police lieutenant and deputy chief were eating lunch in the restaurant at the time. They politely spoke to the demonstrators as they paid their bills.”

What, nothing about how scary “open carry” is? Or about how the carriers must be compensating for small penises?