J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS ON LOU DOBBS: Holder Lying, DOJ Doesn’t Think They Can Charge Wilson. “Holder wants his base to continue to believe there might be federal charges. … It won’t happen.”

VIDEO: Explore the Creepy Ruins of Chernobyl Through the Eyes of a Drone.

HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE: An Immune-System Disorder?

EBOLA: Despite Aid Push, Ebola Is Raging in Sierra Leone.

FASTER, PLEASE: “A relatively simple circuit invented by researchers at the University of Texas could let smartphones and other wireless devices send and receive data twice as fast as they do now.”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 569.

WHY HARVARD’S ASIANS ARE INVISIBLE:

When New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio muses about reforming the city’s technical high schools to include more subjective criteria to balance out the advantages of students with “certain backgrounds,” for example, there doesn’t seem to be much consideration of the effect that might have on the Asian Americans who now dominate the system, particularly the poor ones.

And when advocates bemoan the lack of diversity in Silicon Valley, citing white and Asian American dominance, they seem to ignore the problems that Asians face in career advancement there. “Most of their employees are white and Asian men,” wrote The New York Times’ editorial board, as if Asians were not so much a contributor to diversity as a problem to be solved. The presence of Asians as a challenge to diversity obscures the problem we face in Silicon Valley: As The Washington Post’s Brian Fung notes, we’re unable to break past a “bamboo ceiling” to ascend to higher, leadership positions.

Even worse, Asian Americans are overlooked entirely when some advocates or politicians speak about minorities. There’s a deep intellectual laziness afoot when people talk about “minorities” but are referring only to Hispanic or African Americans.

It’s not so much intellectual laziness as it is political opportunism.

TO BE FAIR, ROLLING STONE IS PRETTY GULLIBLE: William Shatner gives funny insights on real Star Wars trailer while Rolling Stone falls for bogus version.

NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: James Watson selling Nobel prize ‘because no-one wants to admit I exist.’

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WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Piece By Piece, The Blue Model Sickens And Dies.

The old regulated taxi system was one of the classic examples of the blue model system: a regulated, quasi-monopoly that seemed to many people to be the best and indeed the only way to combine the ideals of protection for consumers and a decent living for providers of services. Over time the taxi system everywhere tended to become less effective if only because of a tendency toward regulatory capture by crony capitalists—often, owners of companies who owned many of the artificially limited taxi medallions—who channeled campaign contributions and other sources of influence into focused efforts to limit the supply of medallions, raising prices for consumers and, often, leading to low incomes for the drivers who had to lease medallions at high prices from the handful of sources.

Consumer discontent with the old system, plus driver discontent (many drivers report better earnings and more flexible incomes from the internet-empowered dispatch services), plus the technological advancements and creative entrepreneurial thinking that mades it possible for Uber and Lyft to replace both Manhattan style street taxis and the car dispatching services found in many other cities, is now driving the destruction of the old system. . . .

This is only one illustration of the wave of creative destruction now sweeping through American life. We shouldn’t be naive about it—change always brings problems, and change this big and this complex isn’t going to be easy. Not all the experiments will work out well, and companies that start out sleek and cute could well morph into gargantuan, market distorting monopolies of their own in time. But none of that changes the reality that more and more elements of the blue model have reached their sell by dates.

Yep.

JOEL KOTKIN: Legal But Poor: The Economic Consequences of Amnesty.

This workforce is being legalized at a time of unusual economic distress for the working class. Well into the post-2008 recovery, the country suffers from rates of labor participation at a 36 year low. Many jobs that were once full-time are, in part due to the Affordable Care Act, now part-time, and thus unable to support families. Finally there are increasingly few well-paying positions—including in industry—that don’t require some sort of post-college accreditation.

Sadly, the legalization of millions of new immigrants could make all these problems worse, particularly for Latinos already here and millions of African-Americans.

African-American unemployment is now twice that of whites. The black middle class, understandably proud of Obama’s elevation, has been losing the economic gains made over the past thirty years.

How’s that hopey-changey stuff workin’ out for ya?

ED DRISCOLL: Monty Python’s Flying Emotional Support Pigs.

A HEARTWARMING STORY: Black Residents Armed With Assault Rifles Stand Guard Outside White-Owned Business During Ferguson Riots.

SPENGLER ON THE NEW STAR WARS FILM: May The Farce Be With You.

ASHE SCHOW: Five things to be thankful for as a woman in America.

TEACHING LITTLE GIRLS TO HATE BOYS, one Barbie at a time.

ED DRISCOLL: Nobody Covers a Story From Start to Finish Like NBC!

TERROR: 900 Austrian Cops Raid Mosques in Terrorist Search. “About 900 police officers raided mosques, prayer rooms and homes across Austria early Friday in an operation against suspected jihadi recruiters and alleged financiers of the ISIS terror group, local media reported. Prosecutors confirmed to NBC News in a statement that 13 people were arrested in the raids. The raids were the culmination of a two-year investigation into people suspected of recruiting young people to fight in Syria.”

MICHAEL BARONE: The Diminished Minority Leader: Pelosi’s grip seems to have weakened.

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MEN DON’T LIE ABOUT RAPE: Shia LaBoeuf Says He Was Raped, Piers Morgan Rape-Shames Him.

SO AT THE RECOMMENDATION OF MY BROTHER, I’ve been reading Nathan Lowell’s Solar Clipper books — here’s the first one — and they’re kind of unusual because, by the standard of science fiction not much happens. No alien attacks, no space pirates, just running a ship and trading. But they’re still interesting and good! And while Lowell’s style isn’t much like Ayn Rand’s — more like a Heinlein junior — this passage from Captain’s Share is pretty pro-commerce:

He looked at me curiously. “What was your main objective, Skipper? Improve the ship’s reputation?”

I shook my head. “You can’t improve reputation by focusing on reputation, Avery. You always earn it by your actions.” I stopped to think for a couple of heartbeats. “I almost didn’t take the berth because of the Agamemnon’s reputation on the docks, but once I was here, my main goal was simple. Make money.”

He cocked his head to one side. “Isn’t that rather cold, skipper? Make money?”

“Maybe,” I shrugged. “But it’s why we’re out here. It’s why the ship exists. We’re all out here because we make money. If we didn’t make a living at it, we couldn’t do it.”

I wish more people understood that basic point.

BRIAN HUGHES: Bad Obamacare month could haunt White House.