THIS ISN’T GOOD: Malaysia Airlines passenger jet shot down over Ukraine, 295 dead.

UPDATE: Beware the fog of war. No, really.

AT AMAZON, the new LG G3.

Also, deals on Top Printers.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: 3 Things To Know About Niacin And Heart Health. “Recent studies published in The New England Journal of Medicine are adding to concerns about the safety and effectiveness of niacin, a popular drug for the prevention of cardiovascular disease. The studies reveal that although this B vitamin can reduce triglyceride levels, raise ‘good’ cholesterol levels (HDL) and reduce ‘bad’ cholesterol levels (LDL), it does not produce the benefits that patients and their doctors might expect. And the studies are revealing serious harms.”

UH OH: The DEEP SEVENS are starting to explore the surface. “A helicopter spotted this mysterious 80-meter (262-foot) diameter hole in Siberia yesterday. The video taken from above the Yamal Peninsula. It shows what could be the result of an explosion; there are signs of combustion around the hole and there is clearly a cavern inside.”

SOLIDARITY FOREVER: Black Church in Stockton Stages Mock Air Raid Drill in Solidarity with Israel.

IS SHAVING CREAM an evil corporate plot?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Disruption Ahead: What MOOCs Mean For MBA Programs.

FAMILY WITH FIRE: The Free-Market Telenovela.

TOP MEN: FDA found more than smallpox vials in storage room. “Federal officials found more than just long-forgotten smallpox samples recently in a storage room on the National Institutes for Health campus in Bethesda, Md. The discovery included 12 boxes and 327 vials holding an array of pathogens, including the virus behind the tropical disease dengue and the bacteria that can cause spotted fever, according to the Food and Drug Administration, which oversees the lab in question.”

THE FUTURE OF DRIVING.

SCOTT GERBER: 5th Circuit Thumbs Its Nose at U.S. Supreme Court in Racial Preferences Case.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 434.

INTERVIEW: Brad Thor talks to David Steinberg about his new book Act of War, and about the culture wars. “Number one: the biggest chink in our national security armor is political correctness.”

ED MORRISSEY: How Obama’s Lame-Duck Years Will Pan Out.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Moody’s Issues Negative Outlook For Higher Education.

MEGAN MCARDLE: We Don’t Need A Corporate Income Tax.

You can think of corporate taxation as a sort of long chess match: The government makes a move. Corporations move in response — sometimes literally, to another country where the tax burden is less onerous. This upsets the government greatly, and the Barack Obama administration in particular. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew has written a letter to Congress, urging it to make it stop by passing rules that make it harder to execute these “inversions.”

I’ve got a better idea: What if we made our tax system so attractive to corporations that they would have no interest in moving themselves abroad?

That would never fly. Insufficient opportunities for graft.

REMEMBERING A LOST ERA OF COMPETENCE: 45 Years Ago We Landed Men On The Moon. Now we can’t even launch a website successfully.

NEW AT AMAZON: 20% off Men’s & Women’s Contemporary Clothing.

Also, up to 50% off on select Outdoor & Athletic Clothing. For just a few more days.

INSTAVISION: I talk with Katie Pavlich about her new book, Assault and Flattery: The Truth About the Left and Their War on Women.

WISH I TRUSTED THEM TO DO THIS RIGHT: Justice Department Said to Be Probing Missing IRS E-Mails.

Related: House Votes To Block Bonuses At IRS.

SO LAST YEAR I HAD DINNER IN NEW YORK with an InstaPundit reader who’s a big donor to libertarian causes, and he asked me where he should be steering his money. Because I somehow failed to mention the obvious InstaPundit Private Jet Account, I instead suggested that he put some money into lawfare. Lefties are really good at it, but the right does much less, meaning that there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit. Groups like the Institute For Justice, FIRE, Landmark Legal, etc. do good work, but they’re vastly outnumbered by similar groups on the left. Now here’s a passage from Kurt Schlichter’s Conservative Insurgency, a sort of World War Z-style oral future history, on just that subject:

We started calling it “conservative lawfare,” and it drove the progressives nuts. What made them so vulnerable was not only the dubious legal grounds of their actions but their manifest pettiness and unfairness. You see, lawfare — as progressives themselves used to understand — was not just about winning on the merits of a particular lawsuit. It was theater — it highlighted and put in front of the public these big government actions that could not be swept under a rug. You got to court, and unless you dismiss the case following a settlement, the court has to rule one way or another. Something has to happen.

Most Americans are generally fair-minded, and they saw how essentially unfair many of these government actions were. And when the progressives doubled down — which they always did — they looked awful. It was not always a matter of winning or losing the case itself. We lost a lot of cases . . . . But what really mattered, what really helped the movement, was showing the injustice of progressivism. Lawfare let us do that . . . .

We call that “shaping the battlefield.” You look for where and when you have the edge, and then you make the enemy fight you there and then. That’s especially important for insurgents. Our conservative lawyers understood that instinctively. . . . I threw money at lawyers because we could win in court. We wanted to get the government and the progressives in court because that took away all their advantages. I was a big proponent of lawfare right from the beginning because I saw that was where we could draw blood. I funded a lot of lawyers. There was a glut of them, and I could get them cheap so I found some talented ones and created a public interest law firm. . . . It was great. No case was too big or too small. The government was constantly having to get up and publicly defend its nonsense. Win or lose, we won. . . . I used to say that conservatives had to harness the power of lawyers for good instead of evil. The left had been using the courts for generations to chip away at our Constitution; we needed to use it to rebuild our rights and our freedoms. And, along the way, to give the progressives fits.

Like I said, there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit out there, waiting to be taken advantage of. And, by the way, Schlichter sees a libertarian/conservative alliance as the key to success. I think that’s right.

I BELIEVE YOU MEAN “THE DO-NOTHING DEMOCRATIC SENATE.” Roll Call: Birth Control Legislation Stalls in Senate.

ALSO, NO GREEN M&Ms. University Contract Details Hillary Clinton Speech Demands. “On top of the $225,000 she is charging the UNLV Foundation to speak at an event in October, former first lady Hillary Clinton is requiring an additional $1,250 to pay for a stenographer to transcribe her speech and may request a teleprompter if she so chooses. . . . Clinton also agreed to a 30-minute photoline, which will take place before her remarks. But strict rules apply to it as well. It is ‘not to exceed 50 photos with up to 100 people,’ the contract reads. . . . Clinton’s press agency will also maintain strict control over the event’s optics.”

THE SCANDAL ISN’T GOING AWAY. IT’S GETTING WORSE. The surprising thing Veterans Affairs admitted while asking Congress for $18 billion more.

Even the Department of Veterans Affairs cannot trust its own numbers on delivering health care and processing disability claims, the acting secretary of the agency said as he asked for $17.6 billion in new funding Wednesday.

Sloan Gibson repeatedly acknowledged during a Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee hearing that serious problems with “data integrity” have been revealed though a series of investigations into falsified patient wait times at VA medical facilities.

Gibson also acknowledged similar concerns about the reliability of agency numbers that track backlogs and errors in claims for disability benefits, which were challenged recently in reports from the agency’s inspector general and the Government Accountability Office.

It seems that nowhere in this government can you trust the numbers. It’s Potemkin Villages all the way down.