EXECUTIVE ACTION: Obama pushes to extend gun background checks to Social Security.

CALL ME CRAZY, BUT I DOUBT this New York Magazine article will recruit many men to the cause:

As I write this, my children are asleep in their room, Loretta Lynn is on the stereo, and my wife is out on a date with a man named Paulo. It’s her second date this week; her fourth this month so far. If it goes like the others, she’ll come home in the middle of the night, crawl into bed beside me, and tell me all about how she and Paulo had sex. I won’t explode with anger or seethe with resentment. I’ll tell her it’s a hot story and I’m glad she had fun. It’s hot because she’s excited, and I’m glad because I’m a feminist.

Before my wife started sleeping with other men, I certainly considered myself a feminist, but I really only understood it in the abstract.

Here’s a clue, champ: Paulo’s not a feminist. Count on it.

WITH HILLARY, OF COURSE: Flashback: Politico: Where Birtherism Began. “The answer lies in Democratic, not Republican politics, and in the bitter, exhausting spring of 2008. At the time, the Democratic presidential primary was slipping away from Hillary Clinton and some of her most passionate supporters grasped for something, anything that would deal a final reversal to Barack Obama.”

LIFE IN THE AGE OF OBAMA: Is It Right for a Publisher to Accept Only Women’s Books? No, but if you believe in collective victimhood, you also believe in collective punishment. Actually, for most lefties I think the “punishment” part is their favorite.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Carly Fiorina, The Other Woman.

SHOCKING TO SEE THIS IN THE WASHINGTON POST: It’s Not Dixie’s Fault.

These crude regional stereotypes ignore the deep roots such social ills have in our shared national history and culture. If, somehow, the South became its own country, the Northeast would still be a hub of racially segregated housing and schooling, the West would still be a bastion of prejudicial laws that put immigrants and black residents behind bars at higher rates than their white neighbors and the Midwest would still be full of urban neighborhoods devastated by unemployment, poverty and crime. How our social problems manifest regionally is a matter of degree, not kind — they infect every region of the country.

In fact, many of the racial injustices we associate with the South are actually worse in the North. Housing segregation between black and white residents, for instance, is most pervasive above the Mason-Dixon line. Of America’s 25 most racially segregated metropolitan areas, just five are in the South; Northern cities — Detroit, Milwaukee and New York — top the list. Segregation in Northern metro areas has declined a bit since 1990, but an analysis of 2010 census data found that Detroit’s level of segregation, for instance, is nearly twice as high as Charleston’s.

The division between black and white neighborhoods in the North is a result of a poisonous mix of racist public policies and real estate practices that reigned unchecked for decades. Until the mid-20th century, federal homeownership programs made it difficult for black Americans to get mortgages and fueled the massive growth of whites-only suburbs. Real estate agents openly discriminated against black aspiring homeowners, refusing to show them houses in predominately white communities.

When all else failed, white Northerners attacked blacks who attempted to cross the color line, using tactics we typically associate with the Jim Crow South. They threw bricks through the windows of their black neighbors’ homes, firebombed an integrated apartment building and beat black residents in the streets. In Detroit, to name one example, whites launched more than 200 attacks on black homeowners between 1945 and 1965. In Levittown, Pa., hundreds of angry whites gathered in front of the home of the first black family to move there and threw rocks through the windows. Racists burned crosses in the yards of the few white neighbors who welcomed the new family. That violence occurred in 1957, the same year whites in Little Rock attacked black students integrating Central High School, yet it’s that story — of racial bias in the South — that dominates our narrative of America’s civil rights struggle.

Yeah, it’s almost like they’re deflecting or something.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Off Duty Sheriff Deputies and Ordinary Citizens Guard Armed Forces Recruiting Centers in Ohio. “We are happy to report that in Wayne County such radicals not only must consider encountering armed law enforcement, but armed citizens as well.”

Via Facebook, I hear that civilians showed up to guard the recruiting center in Maryville, TN, too — a suburb of Knoxville — but I haven’t seen anything on local media about it. I’m of two minds about this. On the one hand, I like it that civilians are self-organizing to respond to the federal government’s manifest inability to deal with a problem. On the other hand, there’s the federal government’s manifest inability to deal with a problem. . . .

STUNNING PHOTO TAKEN DURING BATTLE FLAG PROTESTS AT SC STATEHOUSE, where the KKK and the New Black Panther Party held separate protests for and against the Confederate battle flag:

The two sides hurled insults and racial epithets at each other for about an hour. And then, a state trooper was snapped assisting an elderly neo-Nazi wearing a shirt with a swastika on it, who was apparently overcome by the heat, up the stairs of the statehouse.

The trooper — Leroy Smith — is black.

What do you suppose those two men were thinking?

The KKK and the New Black Panthers — as Rick Moran writes, “This is one protest where no decent soul had a rooting interest.” Don’t miss the photo in his post.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Drilling 10 times faster than ever before with hypervelocity projectiles from ram accelerators.

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SPACE: A Pluto Slide Show. Plus, love Pluto, but couldn’t keep up?

And, some background: The Long, Strange Trip to Pluto, and How NASA Nearly Missed It. That’s a somewhat similar story to this one about Voyager that I wrote about for the Wall Street Journal. That was a review of Stewart Pyne’s book.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How to Print Great-Looking Photos.

HOW YOUR IPHONE REPLACES $3000 OF TECH STUFF FROM THE 1990s.

PLANNING TO CARRY MORE OFTEN? Amazon has holsters. (Bumped).

POWER: Diesel-Powered Fuel Cell Produces Clean Electricity. “Although several options to store hydrogen as a fuel for cars have been investigated, a practical and affordable way to store and distribute hydrogen is still the biggest hurdle to the wide deployment of green, CO2-emission-free cars. Now researchers in Europe have built a demonstration system that might be a first step in circumventing the limitations on hydrogen distribution and storage; they simply extract hydrogen from diesel fuel on the go.”

VULNERABILITY: Vandals keep snipping fiber optic cables in California with impunity.

IF YOUR GOAL IS FOR YOUR KID TO LIKE YOU, YOU HAVE ALREADY FAILED: “No one respects a kiss-up. Not even your kids.”

THE GREAT DOWNLOADABLE CONTENT…WELL, NOT ‘WARS.’ ‘SQUABBLES,’ REALLY: Is it just a way for computer game developers to scam their clients, or do both sides benefit, Moe Lane asks in his latest PJM Media Lifestyle column:

From the players’ point of view, DLC often appears as a way to scam more and more money out of the fans. The most infamous iteration of this, according to some, is “Day One DLC”: that’s when a game company sells you the basic game for price X, and lets you know that there are additional adventure/character packs that you can instantly buy alongside of it for price Y (or else just buy the Deluxe Game for X+Z). Players naturally suspect that the DLC is not actually extra, but instead necessary for properly gameplay; and they also naturally suspect that they’re being ask to effectively pay more than the listed retail price for a game. But even the DLC that shows up later in a game’s sales-life cycle suffers from a mildly poor reputation: either the DLC is necessary for gameplay, in which case it should have been included; or it’s not necessary, in which case it’s just trying to squeeze more money out of a stone.

The game designers, on the other hand, have a slightly different opinion on the matter. First off, many of them do DLC seemingly fairly reluctantly, and apparently mostly because the fan base expects it. One thing to remember that while people may make games sometimes for the sake of the art, they typically sell them in order to make enough money to live on. A company that spends years on elaborate computer game worlds does it largely for that sales payoff at the end of the process; after which, they typically want to start on a new multi-year project, not spend six months making ever-more baroque versions of horse armor. There’s more money and buzz in new, rather than in old; and DLC is the epitome of “old.”

If computer games are your métier, read the whole thing.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 801.

MICHAEL WALSH: Eternal City May Not Be So Eternal After All: Rome Is Falling Apart.

Rome’s problem, like so many other places in Europe, is that it has essentially become a theme park, heavily dependent on tourism but contributing next to nothing to the sum total of human knowledge or prosperity these days. Far too many Europeans are content to snooze the rest of their lives and cultures away; meanwhile, beasts like ISIS are licking their chops.

Human nature abhors a power vacuum.

YES. NEXT QUESTION? Could a Catastrophic Earthquake Really Destroy Seattle?

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IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: How the IRS, FBI and Justice Department Are Agents of Modern American Tyranny. “Imagine being awakened in the middle of the night by a gang of police, shouting and waving their weapons at you. They turn your house inside-out, steal your laptop and phone, then order you not to tell anyone they were there. All this happened because your political beliefs landed on the wrong side of those officials in power. This is not a scenario from China, Russia, or Iran. Welcome to the very real tyranny of modern America.” Just ask a lot of folks in Wisconsin. But my advice: Punch back twice as hard. Because these putzes are just as lousy at tyranny as they are at everything else.