WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: DNA Sequencing Of IVF Embryos.

MCARDLE AND TARANTO REJOICE: 2014 Is Going To Be The Best Year Yet For Home Sous Vide.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: 15 Ways To Fix Everything With Vinegar.

EVEN WITH HAYEK DEAD FOR DECADES, DIONNE IS STILL OVERMATCHED: E.J. Dionne vs. Hayek. “Dionne’s column is problematic in two ways. First, he completely misrepresents the central argument of Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, which seems to be his central target. Second, he fails to accurately reflect the debate over the historical record of Keynesianism during the Great Depression and in particular the ‘stagflation’ episode of the 1970s, which shattered the Nixon-era consensus on the wisdom of Keynesian economics. . . . it isn’t evident from the column that Dionne has actually read The Road to Serfdom itself, as opposed to just reading commentators on the book who have also fundamentally misunderstood the book).” So, a pretty typical Dionne effort.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 282.

THAT’S WHY IT’S SO POPULAR WITH THE INTELLIGENTSIA, WHO THINK THEY SHOULD BE HIGHER UP IN THE CLASS SYSTEM: Downton Abbey Is Downright Un-American. “In a certain sense, Downton Abbey is quite realistic: It portrays the lives of the servants as the upper class imagined them. But I would almost rather they had ignored the servants entirely instead of erecting this Potemkin village of happy servitude. . . . Americans of all people ought to know better. After all, the reason most of us are here is that our ancestors were the sort of people who became servants, rather than employed them — and they didn’t like it one bit.” Ah, but the people who rule us now feel differently.

TRAIN WRECK UPDATE: Your Hospital Bill Is About to Get a Lot More Expensive: Doctors are fleeing private practices for the security of hospitals, and the exodus will be a disaster for U.S. health care.

Absorbing private practices is just one more way hospitals can make themselves bigger and more powerful. The market power of hospitals relative to insurers is already one of the most pernicious market imbalances in U.S. health care. This trend will only make it even less balanced. The bigger hospitals get, the more they can jack up their prices—up to 44 percent higher according to one estimate. . . . The more doctors start working in hospitals, the less sustainable our current health care system looks in the long term.

To be fair, this trend — driven, I think, largely by increased paperwork requirements that make the minimum efficient scale of a medical practice rather large — has been underway for decades.

“THAT’S NOT FUNNY!” “Yes, indeed, it is telling. It tells us that people would rather be absurd and to laugh and that they invited you — on this social occasion, in a bar — to dance and laugh, and even when you did not laugh, they lavished upon you even more invitations to laugh, to give up your abrasive noncompliance, but you didn’t. You held onto it, you thought and thought, until they were all wrong, and the wrong that was done to you fit a whole template of wrongs done constantly, everywhere hurting everyone. Look! Everyone! See it now!”

AT AMAZON, deals on Most-Wished-For Items.

Plus, coupons galore in Industrial & Scientific.

Also, today only: LG Venice Prepaid Phone with Boost Mobile Service, $69.99 (61% off).

CHANGE: United Auto Workers Union Stunned by Devastating Defeat in Tennessee. “Workers at a Volkswagen factory in Tennessee have voted against union representation, a devastating loss that derails the United Auto Workers union’s effort to organize Southern factories.” Judging by twitter, the UAW thought they had this one in the bag, which isn’t surprising given that VW wasn’t fighting them. They underestimated how toxic their brand has become.

Or maybe it was this: “The rejection of a key Democratic Party ally occurred despite President Barack Obama’s personal support for the unionization drive.” Speaking of toxic brands. . . .

WAPO: Ed Rogers: The IRS, The Democrats’ Cat’s Paw.

Encouraged by the lack of a public backlash, an uninquisitive press, cover from the White House and an eager-to-please bureaucracy, the Democrats are boldly counting on the IRS to be their political and policy enforcer.This statement isn’t an overreach by the “vast right-wing conspiracy” or a phony crisis created by hecklers (like me) on the right — it goes back to the early stages of President Obama’s reelection campaign. Remember the case of Romney supporter Frank Vandersloot? Before the 2012 campaign, he was publicly accused of having a “less-than-reputable record” by Team Obama and then found himself the target of IRS and Department of Labor audits. This was just one example of an individual who was persecuted because of his donation to a pro-Romney super PAC, but it served as a sufficient warning and no doubt had a chilling effect on others who were inclined to support the Republican nominee for president in 2012. And we now know that while this was going on, the IRS was actively suppressing conservative organizations seeking tax-exempt status because they opposed the president and the Democrats’ policy positions.

Lois Lerner, the government official at the center of the IRS scandal, took the fifth amendment in a high-profile congressional hearing, then quietly retired from the agency with a taxpayer-funded pension. She hasn’t been heard from since. The Obama administration has gone into overdrive since the scandal broke to avoid any accountability, with the president famously telling Bill O’Reilly of Fox News only a few weeks ago that there was “not even a smidgen of corruption” in the IRS targeting of conservative groups. Comically, this is still an active and ongoing investigation by the Obama Department of Justice, so you would think the president wouldn’t be able to come to that conclusion quite yet. Of course, no one in the administration can comment on an active and ongoing investigation, so it is the perfect cover for self-preservation and is reassuring to those doing the Democrats’ bidding in the IRS and elsewhere. Let’s also remember that the Justice Department’s farce of an investigation into the IRS targeting scandal is now being led by trial lawyer and Obama donor Barbara Bosserman. It’s so brazen, I almost admire their audaciousness. In politics, gall pays off.

Hit ’em where it hurts. Zero out their travel budget.

IT’S LIES ALL THE WAY DOWN: Did CIA official suppress Benghazi narrative? Accounts raise new questions.

According to the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report on Benghazi, on Sept. 15, four days after the attack and one day before Rice’s appearance, the CIA’s most senior operative on the ground in Libya emailed Morell and others at the agency that the attack was “not/not an escalation of protests.”

Fox News has confirmed that three days earlier, the CIA Chief of Station and the agency’s team in Libya also sent situation reports, known as sitreps, to Washington.The raw intelligence reporting described a coordinated attack by extremists, not an out-of-control protest. . . . Fox News is told that after an update from personnel on the ground, Washington’s singular focus on the video left participants in Libya baffled, angry and dismayed that Morell seemed to dismiss their on-the-ground reporting.

Just not very persuasive lies.

JAMES TARANTO: Opposites Attract: Science confirms obvious facts about human nature. It ain’t fiction, just a natural fact:

Journalism ensued when Gottlieb looked into the social-science research. It turned out to confirm, in general terms, the boyfriend’s hypothesis. A study published last year in the American Sociological Review found, as Gottlieb sums it up, that couples had less-frequent sex if husbands performed “what the researchers characterized as feminine chores like folding laundry, cooking or vacuuming” than if they did “what were considered masculine chores, like taking out the trash or fixing the car.” The researchers also reported a correlation between a “more traditional . . . division of labor” and the wife’s sexual satisfaction.

Julie Brines, one of the study’s authors, sums up the findings to Gottlieb as follows: “The less gender differentiation, the less sexual desire.” So sex differences are sexy: Once again, science confirms the obvious. . . . Society has become vastly more accepting of adults with unusual sexual identities. More tolerance of the usual–including ordinary differences between men and women–would do a lot to promote human flourishing.

We celebrate our differences, but only when they are in support of the Narrative. Meanwhile, here’s a blast from the past, proving that everything old is new again.

J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS: The American Bar Association: Captured By The Left. “Notice how the ABA throws itself all-in with the anti-Second Amendment left and the voter fraud deniers who seek to erode election integrity, all the while claiming that they aren’t acting in a partisan way.”

STUFF BUSH DIDN’T DO, ILLUSTRATED. Pretty powerful.

DAVID HARSANYI: Ted Cruz Is Winning. “What’s Cruz’s sin here? That he forced the GOP to be transparent about its position — a position that seems pretty reasonable considering the political realities of the situation. According to Betsy Woodruff’s reporting, most Republicans had no interest in voting for an increase. It’s preposterous to claim, no matter how often the Tea Party does, that moderate GOPers are ‘no better’ than liberals simply because they’re losing on this issue. But if the debt ceiling isn’t a hill worth dying on – and it certainly isn’t – leadership should have explained this explicitly rather than leading on the base. . . . But life’s not fair. McConnell and Boehner don’t lead, they manage. And they’re about to lose the party. Any new conservative ideas in the Senate are coming from Mike Lee, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio (who’s on thin ice, I know). They, like Ted Cruz, and like Senator Barack Obama before him, understand the appeal of idealism over pragmatism to those out of power. Obama voted against what is the now-sacred debt ceiling hike because he had nothing to lose and everything to gain. If you’re going to surrender, at the very least don’t make it look easy. And don’t try to cover up the terms of surrender.”

“IRISH DEMOCRACY” UPDATE: Kevin Williamson: Civil Disobedience In The Suburbs.

What’s happening in Connecticut may be passive resistance (possibly even slothful resistance), but it strikes me as a good thing, and I hope that the state’s rifle owners will continue to decline to comply with this intrusive and unjust law. And if 30 million Americans should refuse to pay their taxes one year, it would make me smile.

It’s less unthinkable than it was.

VERONIQUE DE RUGY: IRS scandal merely tip of iceberg of agency’s problems.

MILITARY JUSTICE: Prosecutor quits Sinclair sex assault case.

The lead prosecutor in the sexual assault trial of Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Sinclair — amid misgivings over the most serious charges — has abruptly left the case.

Lt. Col. William Helixon’s departure comes less than a month before Sinclair’s scheduled court martial and weeks after the prosecution’s lead witness found an iPhone with messages from Sinclair she had not previously disclosed.

Defense attorneys say Helixon believed Sinclair’s accuser, a 34-year-old captain, was not a credible witness and that he had made efforts to persuade his superiors to drop sexual assault charges.

Hmm. Awful lot of iffy discipline cases among the military brass lately.

CIVIL RIGHTS NEWS: 8th Circuit Oral Argument in Unsuccessful Faculty Candidate’s Suit Claiming Discrimination by Iowa Law School Due to Her Conservative Views. “Wagner tried her case before a jury. The jury foreman told the Des Moines Register that ‘everyone in that jury room believed she had been discriminated against.’ However, the jury could not agree as to whether the law school dean was exclusively responsible. The jury was thus declared ‘hung,’ which should have meant a new trial. However, through manipulation described by Peter, the court contrived to convert this into a ruling in favor of the dean on the First Amendment count. It later dismissed the Fourteenth Amendment claim. Let’s hope that the Eighth Circuit reverses and grants Wagner’s request for another trial.”

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: “The suddenness of Venezuela’s collapse should have come as no surprise because downfalls are inherently abrupt.” Take note. Plus: “Welcome to Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, a country with the fifth largest oil reserves in the world and absolutely broke. It’s a remarkable achievement for Chavismo. A just-wow moment. Socialism is useless at everything except for smashing things in record time. There it excels. It’s hard to imagine that as late as the 1980s Venezuela had the highest standard of living in Latin America. But then in 1960 Detroit was the richest city in the world in per capita income. Now it’s well … Detroit. . . . One reason why Japan recovered relatively quickly after the Second World War was while the massive aerial assault leveled Japan’s cities it did not destroy the cultural and social institutions of Japan. When the smoke cleared the Japanese were still there and they rebuilt. By contrast destroying culture is so much more lethal. Detroit was untouched by the war. Not a bomb fell on it. But years of public education worked their magic. It dismantled the culture and social institutions which once built its factories.”

MARK RIPPETOE: The 1 Reason You Aren’t Getting Stronger.

TAMMY BRUCE: Barack Obama is the ‘Mrs. Fletcher’ of politics: Wherever the president goes, trouble follows.

GET RID OF MARGARINE, GO BACK TO GRASSFED BUTTER: What’s Wrong With The Modern Diet.