SPEAKING OF SKILLED TRADES: Rare chance as city swordsmith seeks apprentices.

MARK RIPPETOE: Squats, Presses, and Deadlifts: Why Gyms Don’t Teach the Only Exercises You Need.

IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: Email: IRS’s Lerner, Treasury Department secretly drafted new rules to restrict nonprofits.

The Obama administration’s Treasury Department and former IRS official Lois Lerner conspired to draft new 501(c)(4) regulations to restrict the activity of conservative groups in a way that would not be disclosed publicly, according to the House Committee on Ways and Means.

The Treasury Department and Lerner started devising the new rules “off-plan,” meaning that their plans would not be published on the public schedule. They planned the new rules in 2012, while the IRS targeting of conservative groups was in full swing, and not after the scandal broke in order to clarify regulations as the administration has suggested.

The rules place would place much more stringent controls on what would be considered political activity by the IRS, effectively limiting the standard practices of a wide array of non-profit groups.

Gangster government, all the way down.

SPYING: New Zealand Spy Agency Deleted Evidence About Its Illegal Spying On Kim Dotcom. This was at the behest of the U.S. government, of course. ” As you know by now, the New Zealand equivalent of the NSA, the GCSB, illegally spied on Kim Dotcom and other New Zealand residents and citizens — and the New Zealand government then decided to try to hide that. While the police agreed that the spying was illegal, they declined to do anything about it, so Dotcom sued the government himself. The latest news in this: GCSB appears to have deleted key evidence in the case in a hamfisted attempt to cover up its illegal activities. Even more ridiculous, GCSB is trying to cover this up by claiming that the material had ‘aged off’ — implying that it was deleted automatically.”

IS PRIVACY “ABOUT TO COME ROARING BACK?”

ROGER KIMBALL: Al Gore vs. Wallace Stevens.

SO, PRETTY MUCH LIKE THE REST OF AMERICA, THEN: Congress hovers over commercial space like a vulture.

REASON NUMBER 173,321 FOR ABOLISHING OFFICIAL IMMUNITY: Scenes from a militarized America: Iowa family ‘terrorized.’

Watch this video, taken from a police raid in Des Moines, Iowa. Send it to some people. When critics (like me) warn about the dangers of police militarization, this is what we’re talking about. You’ll see the raid team, dressed in battle-dress uniforms, helmets and face-covering balaclava hoods take down the family’s door with a battering ram. You’ll see them storm the home with ballistics shields, guns at the ready. More troubling still, you’ll see not one but two officers attempt to prevent the family from having an independent record of the raid, one by destroying a surveillance camera, another by blocking another camera’s lens.

From the images in the video, you’d think they were looking for an escaped murderer or a house full of hit men. No, none of that. They were looking for a few people suspected of credit card fraud. None of the people they were looking for were inside of the house, nor was any of the stolen property they were looking for. They did arrest two houseguests of the family on what the news report says were unrelated charges, one for a probation violation and one for possession of illegal drugs.

A couple other points about this story. First, note that the police say they knocked and announced themselves before the raid. The knock and announce requirement has a long history in U.S. and English common law. Its purpose was to give the occupants of a home the opportunity to avoid property damage and unnecessary violence by giving them time to come to the door and let the police in peacefully. As you can see from the video, the knock and announce today is largely a formality. The original purpose is gone. From the perspective of the people inside, there’s really no difference between this sort of “knock and announce” and a no-knock raid.

I think I’m building an AI-directed facial-recognition taser setup that will tase anyone whose face is obscured. If the police knock and identify themselves, I’ll turn it off, of course.

IN LIGHT OF YESTERDAY’S POST ON USING “PARALLEL CONSTRUCTION” to launder NSA surveillance in DEA prosecutions, reader Eric Klaus writes:

The big unanswered question is… “Where else is Parallel Construction being used?”

Are there NSA insiders “tipping” off journalists at the National Enquirer as to potential political scandals involving political enemies?

Are there NSA insiders “tipping” off the Justice Department to the Political Contributions of Anti-Obama filmmakers such as Dinesh D’Souza?

Are there NSA insiders who’ve read the rest of the BridgeGate emails and are prepared to “tip” the necessary parties regarding Presidential Aspirant Chris Christie?

Are there NSA insiders who’ve already cataloged every single thing Ted Cruz has written and conversed about and gathering a dossier to “tip” off interested parties at the right time?

These are the big questions.

Just imagine the power there is in this database.

When you no longer can be sure that there are things the government wouldn’t do, you have to base your assessments on the things that it could do. As I’ve noted, making “crazy” conspiracy theories seem more-or-less sane is one of Obama’s toxic legacies.

DOESN’T OBAMACARE BELONG IN THE MIX SOMEWHERE? Learning From Iraq, Katrina and Other Policy Disasters.

SAMUEL TADROS: The Future Of Egypt’s Copts.

TAXPROF: The IRS Scandal, Day 272.

ADVICE FOR COLLEGE STUDENTS: Don’t Take A Course in “Politicizing Beyoncé.” Well, it’s possible to teach an interesting and educational course around almost any subject, but yeah.

If you were to ask today’s employers what new college graduates are lacking, the skills to create a “grand narrative” around one’s own life and persona wouldn’t make the list. And a hefty dose of Beyoncé-inspired narcissism won’t exactly help with that pesky “sense of entitlement” problem employers keep complaining about.

Lest you dismiss it as an outlier, the article also points to Georgetown’s course “The Sociology of Hip-Hop: The Theodicy of Jay-Z.” Add that to “Is Harry Potter Real?” and “How To Watch Television” on the growing list of courses it should probably be a felony for colleges to offer in exchange for student loan money.

In the meantime, young people, here’s some more advice on how to ruin your life: Enroll in a college you can’t afford. Take really easy, fun courses. Don’t worry about marketable skills. Blame society for the consequences (unemployment) of your attitude problem. Then demand the government (or your parents) bail you out. We guarantee you all the misery you could ever want.

Well, you might become the subject of study yourself.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Parent of dying boy has to prove her son can’t take standardized test.

#PANIC: Everything You Need To Know About the Emerging Market Currency Collapse.

You can always stock up. Though these might hold their value. . . .

AT AMAZON, deals on Fireproof Safes. From little to big.

Also, shooting supplies.

Plus, check out the Amazon Emergency Preparedness Store.

And, today only: Seinfeld: The Complete Series, $58.99 (61% off).

GIVEN THE UNITED NATIONS’ ENDLESS ARRAY OF SEX SCANDALS, I don’t think it should be throwing stones, here.

UPDATE: “The U.N. is talking about someone else’s sex scandals?!?!? I eagerly await their resolution condemning parking violations!” Heh.

JOHN PODHORETZ: Congressional Budget Office sends death blow to ObamaCare.

JAMES TARANTO: ‘Evidence Exists’: A reporter jumps to conclusions, and hilarity ensues.

You can see what happened here. Zernike (or perhaps her editor) didn’t pay close enough attention to Zegas’s weaselly wording. She got the impression one imagines he intended to convey–and it was a journalistically attractive impression. “He had evidence to prove it” is a more compelling claim than “evidence exists.”

That is for good reason, for they are two very different claims. Obviously one can know that evidence exists without possessing it oneself. Further, to assert that “evidence exists” is not necessarily a claim of knowledge. It could be a statement of belief or a mere surmise (or, for that matter, a bluff). And the awkwardly abstract description–“tying” Christie “to having knowledge”–suggests that the putative evidence being described is weak.

The Times’s overhyping of what now seems a minor development in the bridge scandal turned into a big journalistic kerfuffle. “Within the hour,” reports Margaret Sullivan, the Times’s public editor, the lead was rewritten accurately. But “there was no correction or note.” When she asked Metro editor Wendell Jamieson why, he answered defensively.

So the NYT’s reporters think the editorial page sucks. I wonder if the editorial page thinks the same thing about the NYT’s reporting? Hey, they could both be right. . . .

UPDATE: Contrast the rather weaselish behavior of the Times with this forthright behavior from Roll Call. Two points: (1) I tend to trust Roll Call and The Hill more than newspapers in general, because they have to work with both parties and thus have to be fairer — and are, though I very much doubt that the political leanings of their staff differ much from, say, the WaPo or the NYT; (2) A correction isn’t something to be ashamed of. Everyone makes mistakes. A mistake that’s corrected swiftly and transparently is actually a sign of a paper that’s trying to get it right, and makes me more, rather than less, inclined to trust their reporting in the future.

IT’S COME TO THIS: School Officials Object To “No Guns” Signs Because They Have A Picture Of A Gun On Them. “Some find the sticker image disturbing.” And yet they probably make fun of the Victorians for sexual prissiness.

I GUESS WE NEED ANOTHER RECOVERY SUMMER! Puerto Rico Bonds Downgraded To Junk.

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: New Details Emerge In Massive Army Financial Scandal.

ROLL CALL: Vote Studies Show Double-Sided Numbers for Senate’s ‘Red State Four.’

Both Begich and Landrieu can brag they are on the list of the 10 Senate Democrats who opposed Obama the most last year – even though each of them broke with the president on only 3 percent of the roll calls where he made clear in advance the outcome that he wanted.

So there.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Albany Law School Offers Buyouts to Eight Tenured Faculty.