ROGER SIMON: Who Could Dethrone Teflon Trump? It’s not so much Teflon as reactive armor.

BILL WHITTLE ON Hiroshima And Today’s Revisionists.

Related: Thank God For The Atom Bomb.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Obama White House Gets It Right On Occupational Licensing.

ON TWITTER, #Mattis2016.

Well, better that than this: General Mattis Crosses Potomac With 100,000 Troops; President, Senate Flee City.

OBAMA’S LEGACY: Salena Zito: Making Environmentalism Divisive.

WAS AMERICA MORE DIVERSE IN THE 1950s?

There is greater visibility for minorities, and interracial marriage has produced younger generations that tend to see people and personalities and not color. This is a singular accomplishment, the great social leap forward of the last half century,

Yet further down on the scale of moral importance, in the areas of music, books, general knowledge, cars, conversation, and fashion, the United States was far more diverse in the 1950s. The racial progress in America has led to a reflexive dismissal of everything else the culture produced prior to the civil rights victories of the 1960s. Marinating in self-regard for our progress, we reject previous eras as bland black-and-white prisons, a patriarchal matrix of Mad Men-style sexual harassment, racism, bland pop music and TV dinners. We now measure our ethical stature by our propinquity to “people of color,” forgetting that by every other measure Americans in 2015 have become one undifferentiated blob of bland sameness.

Everyone follows Taylor Swift on Twitter. We all know who Kim Kardashian is (but not Kurt Elling). We dress alike, in our jeans, t-shirts, yoga pants and cargo shorts. We go to the same superhero movies, slurp our coffee from Starbucks, use iPhones, and lunch at Chipotle. We know pop music and political correctness, but not symphonies, great visual artists, philosophers or challenging novels.

Read the whole thing.

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And shop the Amazon Emergency Prep Store. Plus, Emergency & Long-Term Storage Food Deals. When bad things happen, it’s good to have food.

Plus, Generators and Portable Power for Storm Season. Though the Insta-Wife was a generator-skeptic when we installed ours, a couple of outages have turned her into a believer.

HE WAS A SMART MAN: Alexis de Tocqueville Predicted the Tyranny of the Majority in Our Modern World. Our Constitution, of course, was not originally designed to be majoritarian.

GOOD: Family to Pay Price for Trying to Sue Ammo Dealers. As the judge noted, it was a dumb, politically motivated action. The Brady folks should have to foot the bill, but I expect they’ll be scarce when that subject comes up.

UPDATE: Agreement at Popehat: “Family has to pay, but suit was brought by lawyers from @Bradybuzz. Those lawyers should pay, or Brady should. Unethical to advise suit.” Someone should complain to the bar.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Plaintiff actually works for the Brady Campaign.

CHARITY BEGINS AT HOME: 99% of Hillary’s Charitable Contributions Went To Clinton Family Foundation. Which, as we know, spends only a tiny fraction of donations on actual charity.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Syracuse University is scrambling to offer retirement buyouts after an audit discovered that the university employs hundreds of administrators who only oversee one or two employees. “Tuition is scheduled to increase again at Syracuse next year—to $41,974 per student—as is room and board. At least now students know why their education is so expensive: they are quite literally paying for edu-crats to sit around doing nothing. When these stories arise, I usually point out that a bevy of bored administrators is an existential threat to students’ free speech rights. This time, I will simply redirect to the Bias-Free Language Guide, a project born of idle bureaucracy if ever there was one.”

Do tell.

ELIANA JOHNSON: Inside the Koch Brothers’ Southern California Confab.

It’s a lavish three-day affair. So it was surprising to hear Charles Koch on Saturday evening, surrounded by some of the wealthiest men and women in the nation, take the stage to assail big bank bailouts and government handouts for the rich. Charles Koch is the more press-shy of the Koch duo, who together run one of the country’s largest privately held companies, Koch Industries. Doing away with crony capitalism might hurt some of the individuals in attendance, Koch said, and it would certainly hurt Koch Industries, but over the long term, doing away with crony capitalism would revitalize the economy and benefit all parties. Bailing out the big banks, he said, had not only created a culture of dependency at the top, but crushed small community banks at the bottom.

“We need to start by eliminating welfare for the rich,” he said. “Physician, heal thyself.”

I agree.

FOR SECURITY REASONS, A GOODBYE TO ANDROID: “This is the fundamental difference between Android and iPhone. When there’s a bug on iOS, Apple patches it and can push an update to all iPhone users as soon as it’s ready, no questions asked. When the same thing happens with Android, Google patches and then… god knows when the AT&Ts, Verizons, HTCs, and Sonys of the world will decide it’s important enough that they should care and send you the update with the patch (though to their credit, they’re starting to care, mostly because having an updated OS is now seen as a competitive advantage). Hell, even Google-owned Nexus phones, which the company has full control over, haven’t been patched for Stagefright yet.”

THE MORE YOU INCREASE AND CENTRALIZE GOVERNMENT POWER, THE MORE YOU INCREASE THE VALUE OF CLOUT: The Clintons, the Ex-Im Bank, and the aristocracy of pull.

Is there a single person alive who believes that corporations, trade associations, NGOs, unions, and the like pay the Clintons enormous sums for speeches because they believe their members actually want to hear the Clintons say the same tedious talking points they have been spewing for years? If that were the only value received no profit-minded enterprise would pay the Clintons these vast fees because they would earn, well, a shitty rate of return.

No, the Clintons are not paid to speak. Businesses and other interest groups pay them for the favor of access at a crucial moment or a thumb on the scale in the future, perhaps when it is time to renew the Ex-Im Bank or at a thousand other occasions when a nod might divert millions of dollars from average people in to the pockets of the crony capitalists. The speaking is just a ragged fig leaf, mostly to allow their allies in the media to say they “earned” the money for “speaking,” which is, after all, hard work.

We have such people as the Clintons (and the tens of thousands of smaller bore looters who have turned the counties around Washington, D.C. in to the richest in the country) because they and their ilk in both parties have transformed the federal government of the United States in to a vast favors factory, an invidious place that not only picks winners and losers and decides the economic fates of millions of people, but which has persuaded itself that this is all quite noble. Instead, the opposite is true: This entire class of people, of which the Clintons are a most ugly apotheosis, are destroying the country while claiming it is all in the “public service.” It is disgusting. We need to say that, at least, out loud. . . .

Tear down the aristocracy of pull. This may be our last chance.

Ropes and lampposts optional, but increasingly appealing.

INNOVATION PROBLEMS: We are too quick to chase wild and crazy innovation and too slow to implement obvious, practical ideas.

AT AMAZON, take 25% off on Golf Gear.

Also, 50% off Luggage.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: China building 40000 ton super large amphibious assault ship similar to USA Wasp Class helicopter carriers.

SPYING: Warrantless mobile phone location tracking heads to Supreme Court. “The case has big privacy implications for anybody who carries a mobile phone. According to the government, that device may be tracked at will without the Fourth Amendment’s probable cause standard being met. What’s more, the petition to the high court from defendant Quartavious Davis comes as cell-site tracking has become a choice surveillance tool in the aftermath of a Supreme Court ruling that said the authorities needed a warrant to affix GPS trackers to vehicles. In that 2012 decision, the high court declared that the government’s act of affixing a GPS device on a vehicle was the equivalent of a search usually requiring a warrant.”

The two cases seem more similar than distinct to me.

FINISHED HARRY TURTLEDOVE’S Bombs Away. Pretty good, but very much according to his formula. If you like the formula, you’ll like it okay, but it’s pretty formulaic.

SOUNDS LIKE HUSBAND MATERIAL TO ME: N.C. man knocks out attempted robber who interrupted marriage proposal.

STEVE RATTNER: We’re Making Life Too Hard For Millennials:

Americans between 18 and 34 are earning less today (after adjustment for inflation) than the same age group did in the past. A typical millennial averaged earnings of $33,883 (in 2013 dollars) between 2009 and 2013. That was down 9.3 percent (after adjustment for inflation) in just a decade and is the lowest since 1980. Older Americans have fared considerably better; earnings of all full-time workers were roughly flat between 2000 and 2011.

Still more striking is that millennials have endured falling earnings even though they have attended college in record numbers. . . .

Another huge drag on the finances of younger Americans is the mountain of student debt that has been piled up in recent years. Members of this year’s graduating class left their campuses owing an average of $35,051, about twice the levels borne by their counterparts two decades earlier (after adjusting for inflation). That’s in large part because college is becoming less affordable even as it has become increasingly necessary. Since 1993, average tuition has risen by 234 percent, far above the 63 percent overall inflation rate.

Saddled with debt and thin paychecks, millennials are delaying purchasing cars and new homes, low mortgage rates notwithstanding.

Do tell. Someone should write a book on this.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 815.

BRUCE/CAITLYN JENNER being encouraged to become more liberal as part of the transition:

The quoted dialogue comes from a trailer for the show, as does Jenner’s expression of conservatism. I think what’s going on is more that show needs dramatic tension, so something was set up, and the show needs a narrative arc, and there will be one. Thus, early on, Jenner expresses the view that people can get “totally dependent on” government, because they think “they can make more not working with social programs than they actually can with an entry-level job,” and they start thinking “Why should I work?” and they “get in trouble.” Later, I’m betting, Jenner will become more aware of social problems and the value of government programs. Narrative arc achieved. Quite boring of course.

The narrative is all, and social-justice values must prevail. Those who disagree must be not simply beaten, but changed.

DENVER DA: Passing out leaflets informing jurors of their legal right to nullify convictions is “jury tampering.” No, it’s free speech.

UPDATE: Eugene Volokh wrote about a similar case a few years ago.