WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Military Funds Brain-Computer Interfaces to Control Feelings.

FIRST-WORLD PROBLEMS: The psychology of Soylent and the prison of first-world food choices.

FIRST-WORLD PROBLEMS: We got a champion barista to rank the sub-par coffee your parents drink. We won a world war on sub-par coffee. But people were made of sterner stuff back then. Now sipping Folger’s counts as intolerable suffering.

SO WHO SHOULD REPLACE SHINSEKI AT THE VA? My candidate is Phil Bredesen. He’s smart, he understands healthcare, and he’s dealt with broken systems before. And he’s a Dem. Trouble is, he’s probably too smart to take the job.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 387.

I WANT ONE THAT’S STEPHEN GREEN APPROVED. Would You Pay $84,000 For A New Liver?

As always in the development of pharmaceuticals, we have once again washed up on the shoals of marginal versus average cost pricing. Drug development has a very high fixed cost, thanks to all the research needed to find drugs and bring them to market. The cost of actually making the pills, on the other hand, is trivial. So the optimal pricing strategy — for everyone, not just pharmaceutical companies — is to charge rich countries a lot and sell the drug at near-marginal cost in poor countries. If the rich countries insist that they should also get the drug near-marginal cost, then they benefit in the short term. But over the long run, the company loses money on its products, and then we don’t get any new drugs.

That gets the drug in as many hands as possible while still providing the incentive, and the cash flow, to research new drugs. This is one reason we shouldn’t be that unhappy that the U.S. shoulders a disproportionate share of the cost of drug development.

Yet when I look at it, Sovaldi seems like a bargain. Here’s a drug that likely cost hundreds of millions to develop and bring to market. It has a 10-year patent life to recoup its costs and make some money for the developers. It’s better than earlier treatments and, according to LaMattina, 20 percent cheaper; it largely negates the need for liver transplants, which cost a few hundred thousand a pop. It also, of course, means longer and healthier lives for people infected with hepatitis C.

Why does this make us so angry?

Because inequality!

PUNCHING BACK TWICE AS HARD: Targets in secret probe of Wisconsin conservatives sue state board. “The targets of a politically charged investigation in Wisconsin are now targeting the state’s Government Accountability Board, alleging in a lawsuit the agency that oversees election and campaign finance law has created a ‘Frankenstein monster’ out of its enforcement authority.”

I believe it’s more a conspiracy to deprive people of their civil rights under color of law. More people should respond this way. Litigate without pity. They have a lot to hide.

HOPEY-CHANGEY: IRS Eyes New Ways To Tax Miles of Frequent Fliers.

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SHE’S HIDING BEHIND THEM INSTEAD: Hillary self-refutes: “I will not be a part of a political slugfest on the backs of dead Americans.”

UPDATE: Charles Hoskinson: Blaming the video for Benghazi highlights Hillary Clinton’s weak defense of American values.

By repeating — and defending — the now-debunked claim that the video was to blame for the attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Clinton risks a renewed focus on the shameful manner in which she and President Obama handled the Benghazi disaster.

The war against Islamist extremism is as much a war of ideas as it is one of special operations raids and drone strikes, and in this case the administration surrendered unconditionally.

After the attacks, Clinton and Obama fiercely condemned the video multiple times, and even spent $70,000 on television ads in Pakistan condemning it.

The maker of the video, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, was arrested on a probation violation and jailed for a year. A pastor of a small church in rural Florida got a phone call from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff urging him to withdraw his support for the film.

But what they didn’t do was make clear why the First Amendment protections of religious freedom — including freedom from religion — and free speech are so important to Americans.

Their vague lip service to the values on which those freedoms are based never even came close to explaining why Americans are willing to tolerate harsh, offensive, even deliberately deceptive criticism of ideas — and why people in the Islamic world should do the same.

That’s because they don’t believe it themselves.

THE IRONY, IT BURNS: Ezra Klein in 2009: Does The Government Run Health Care Better? “If you ordered America’s different health systems worst-functioning to best, it would look like this: individual insurance market, employer-based insurance market, Medicare, Veterans Health Administration.”

This was demonstrably untrue at the time. Ezra either doesn’t know what he’s talking about, or is happy to lie to advance an agenda. And at this point, what difference does it make?

Related: Ezra Klein in 2011: When socialism works in America. “The thing about the Veteran’s Administration’s health-care system? It’s socialized. Not single payer. Not heavily centralized. Socialized. As in, it employs the doctors and nurses. Owns the hospitals. And though I think there’s some good reason to believe its spending growth is somewhat understated — it benefits heavily from medical trainees, for instance — accounting for that difference still means a remarkable recent performance.”

And yet the predictable new spin will be: Don’t blame Obama. The VA has always sucked.

PHOTO FUN: That Awkward Moment When Obama Bro-Hugged Carney Compared With Other Legendary Bro Hugs in History.

IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: Courts Open Window On IRS Political Litmus Tests.

JAMES TARANTO: Two Cheers For Bloomberg: A liberal politician denounces leftist “McCarthyism.”

Michael Bloomberg has never been this columnist’s favorite politician, but he gave a speech yesterday at Harvard’s commencement that we can’t help but applaud. The generally left-liberal three-term former New York mayor forcefully defended the old-fashioned liberal values of free expression and inquiry against the postmodern left’s relentless attacks. . . .

“Great universities must not become predictably partisan,” Bloomberg said–though it’s a little late for that. Widespread leftist campus censorship has been going on at least since the mid-1980s, when Bloomberg, now 72, was but a quadragenarian.

The problem has received a flurry of attention of late because a series of commencement speeches have been canceled. As Bloomberg observed: “This spring, it has been disturbing to see a number of college commencement speakers withdraw–or have their invitations rescinded–after protests from students and–to me, shockingly–from senior faculty and administrators who should know better.

“It happened at Brandeis, Haverford, Rutgers, and Smith,” he noted. “Last year, it happened at Swarthmore and Johns Hopkins.” None of these are Ivy League schools, suggesting that National Review’s Kevin Williamson might have been on to something when he observed: “Anybody else notice that the trend here is hysteria among students at pretty good but not that good colleges? I suspect that there is some intellectual overcompensation at work here.”

Read the whole thing.

OBAMA’S PRESIDENCY now in the “Killer Rabbit” phase.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Who Wants Free Love Anyway?

WHY WAS THIS EVEN A QUESTION? Police must ID officers in on-duty shootings, court rules. “The 6-1 ruling by the state’s highest court is expected to end blanket police policies against disclosure and reverse a statewide trend toward keeping officer names private. The court said the California Public Records Act does not permit police agencies to cite general concerns about officer safety to justify withholding names.” You get a badge, a gun, and qualified immunity. Putting anonymity on top of that is a bit much.

GIVEN HOW THEY’VE DONE UNDER HIS REIGN, IT SHOULD BE THE OTHER WAY AROUND: Is Obama Abandoning Young Voters?

DAVID BERNSTEIN: Why aren’t there more black libertarians? Libertarian opposition to big government.

Since the 1930s, well before an organized libertarian movement existed, African Americans–whose politics once tended toward the individualistic–have thrown their lot in with, and tied their political and economic aspirations to, the growth of government, especially the federal government, and the government’s willingness to treat African Americans as one of many interest groups deserving of government assistance Not all African Americans bought into this, of course (Zora Neale Hurston was an early critic), but it’s sufficiently mainstream that many African Americans believe that any attack on “Big Government” is, implicitly, an attack on them and their collective aspirations. That is not an easy barrier for libertarians to overcome, no matter how sincerely we believe that everyone, including and perhaps especially African Americans, would be better off with a more limited government, and no matter how sensitive we might be to the way libertarian rhetoric is sometimes tone deaf to the history of racism in the U.S. In short, the problem is more the substance of libertarian beliefs than the style of how they are presented.

Read the whole thing.

HISTORY: ‘America Never Came’: Tiananmen Student Leaders on Massacre 25 Years Ago, Abuses Today.

WHEN REALITY STRIKES: Not the Media Narrative: School Lunch Standards A ‘Rolling Fiasco’ of ‘Cuisine Central Planning.’

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DO “TRIGGER WARNINGS” HAVE A PLACE IN ACADEMIA? Greg Lukianoff Says No. You can vote in the U.S. News online poll.

UH OH. GOOD THING WE’RE HEADING INTO ANOTHER RECOVERY SUMMER! Consumer Spending Sees First Fall in a Year.