SPYING: EFF Tells Court That The NSA Knowingly And Illegally Destroyed Evidence In Key Case Over Bulk Surveillance.

They told me if I voted for Mitt Romney, we’d see . . . oh, hell, what difference, at this point, does it make?

THE HILL: White House apologizes to Senate intel chief for prisoner swap secret.

INSULARITY: Why Team Obama Was Blindsided By The Bergdahl Backlash.

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Of course, you can also just buy this stuff for yourself.

SENATE DEMOCRATS fleeing from Obama on Bergdahl.

JOIN THE HUNT, OR BE AMONG THE HUNTED: “It is now considered not just to be a public declaration of support but indeed a very public declaration of support for someone to say ‘I decline to heed or to echo malign and false accusations against a man I hardly know, as it is none of my business, and I hate falsehoods’?”

Since most of those who engage in mobbing can’t imagine embracing a principle bigger than “hurray for my tribe,” it’s unsurprising that this sort of attitude is incomprehensible to them.

THE HILL: Prisoner Swap Blows Up On White House. Ya think?

TRADING PRIVATE BERGDAHL: A brutal spoof poster from Mad Magazine.

UPDATE: “If I’ve lost Mad, I’ve lost Middle America.”

They’ve been notably soft on Obama up to now. This isn’t soft at all.

ORAL HISTORY: The Making of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lotta Love.’

INCOME INEQUALITY NUMBERS NOT WHAT THEY SEEM:

The trouble with “market income,” he notes, is that it ignores taxes, most fringe benefits (mainly employer-paid health insurance and pensions) and government transfers (Social Security, Medicare, food stamps and the like). All these affect inequality and living standards. So does the slowly shrinking size of U.S. households. Smaller households mean that a given amount of income is spread over fewer people. Per capita incomes rise. Two people with $75,000 are better off than four people with $75,000.

Correcting for these shortcomings alters much of the conventional wisdom, says Burtless. The Congressional Budget Office makes many of the needed changes in its studies of income distribution and tax burdens. It finds that inflation-adjusted after-tax incomes have not stagnated for most groups. For the poorest fifth of Americans, they rose about 50 percent from 1979 to 2010. For the middle 60 percent of Americans, gains over the same period averaged about 40 percent. In any year, tiny increases may be barely detectable; there may even be declines. But over time, gains are significant.

Nor is today’s income distribution as skewed as in the 1920s, says Burtless. We have a welfare state now; we had none back then. “In 1929 government transfer payments to households represented less than 1 percent of U.S. personal income,” he writes. “By 2012 they were 17 percent of personal income. . . . Everything we know about the distribution of government benefits suggests they narrow income disparities.”

The Piketty-Saez estimates of “market income” may have reflected the 1920s’ actual income distribution, because the market was all there was then. Now, its role is tempered.

That’s by no means all — or even mostly — good, but it does make the “inequality” comparisons between now and then misleading at best.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Louie and his Hungarian quasi-girlfriend were perfectly happy drifting along, flirting, and enjoying their non-traditional relationship. Then they had sex. “If you don’t screw the cow, the cow is not yours!”

BRYAN PRESTON: The Saddest, Scariest Millennial Statistic You’ll See Today.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Never Say “I Kill White People Like You” When Asked To Turn Off Your Phone Post-Takeoff.

EDUCATION: The Wrong Way To Treat Child Geniuses.

Plucking the great scientists of the future out of their scattered middle schools is hard, perhaps impossible. Dr. Lubinski’s report on the grown-up prodigies isn’t called, “What Happens to Child Prodigies as Adults?” It’s called, “Who Rises to the Top?” But it leaves the latter question unanswered.

Those of us who managed sky-high SAT scores at 13 were 20 times as likely as the average American to get a doctorate; let’s say, being charitable, that we’re 100 times as likely to make a significant scientific advance. Since we’re only 1 in 10,000 of the U.S. population, that still leaves 99% of scientific advances to be made by all those other kids who didn’t get an early ticket to the genius club. We geniuses aren’t going to solve all the riddles. Most child prodigies are highly successful—but most highly successful people weren’t child prodigies.

This can be a hard lesson for the prodigies themselves. It is natural to believe that the just-pubescent children on the mathletic podium next to you are the best, the ones who really matter. And for the most part, my fellow child stars and I have done very well. But the older I get, the more I see how many brilliant people in the world weren’t Doogie Howser-like prodigies; didn’t shine in Math Olympiad; didn’t go to the inner circle of elite colleges. I’m embarrassed that I didn’t understand at 13 that it would be this way. But when they keep telling you you’re the best, you start to believe you’re the best.

One of the most painful aspects of teaching mathematics is seeing my students damaged by the cult of the genius.

The cult of the genius exists as a way of avoiding the truth: That most worthwhile things in life that matter take hard work.

WOMEN ARE HARD TO PLEASE: The tech boom in Seattle is bringing in droves of successful, straight single guys — all of them insufferable.

Dilbert offers advice. (Via Christine Peterson on Facebook, who says her forthcoming book on dating and mating will explain all).

JUVENILE JUSTICE: State Senate leader reacts to Center report, urging counsel for truants.

FEMINIST FOUNDER KATE MILLETT’S SISTER MALLORY ON just how crazy her sister was. “At one point, in 1973, I found myself alone with her in an apartment in Berkeley, California where she did not allow me to sleep for five days as she raged at the world and menaced me physically.”

HMM: White House Overrode Internal Objections To Taliban Prisoner Release.

UPDATE: Bergdahl wrote of renouncing his citizenship, being ‘ashamed’ to be an American.

THE CURIOUS PHYSICS OF getting a train moving. If you’ve ever driven a train, you know that when the couplings are stretched, you reverse the locomotive enough to shove them back, then go forward so that the tension is released and you start one car at a time moving before the couplings pick up the slack.

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VIRGINIA POSTREL ON ROBOCALLS: Let’s Charge Politicians For Wasting Our Time.

PROGRESS ON THE HONDAJET. I wrote about it for Popular Mechanics here.

IN THE ECONOMIST, a review of Nina Teicholz’s The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet. “There is increasing evidence that a bigger culprit is most likely insulin, a hormone; insulin levels rise when one eats carbohydrates. Yet even now, with more attention devoted to the dangers posed by sugar, saturated fat remains maligned. ‘It seems now that what sustains it,’ argues Ms Teicholz, ‘is not so much science as generations of bias and habit.'”

I WONDER IF OTHER GOVERNMENTS WERE BEHIND THEM: Governments disrupt botnet “Gameover ZeuS” and ransomware “Cryptolocker.”

NOW OUT: The next volume in William Patterson’s Robert Heinlein biography. The first volume was superb.