FASTER, PLEASE: Nanotechnology May Provide More Effective Cancer Treatment.

A EULOGY FOR SkyMall.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Law Firm at Center of Silver Scandal Donated Huge Sums to Dems. “The plaintiffs law firm Weitz and Luxenberg, which employed Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, is said to have provided Mr. Silver with $5.3 million in referral fees, despite his having ‘never performed any legal work whatsoever,’ according to the prosecutors. If millions of cash for no work sounds like a generous arrangement, it’s not the first time the firm has shown its generosity.”

DON SURBER: Charles Curtis, the Indian who became vice president.

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THE DEATH OF MUSIC SALES: If CDs are “dead,” so is iTunes.

WHY STATES LIKE SIN TAXES.

THOUGHTS ON HISTORY, PROGRESS, and being wrong.

HMM: Is the Noose Closing Around Andrew Cuomo? New York governor is “obsessed with fear” over feds’ investigation.

READER BOOK PLUG: From Francis Owen Drewrey, Mascots.

DISPLAYING ADAPTABILITY: Reverse Flows Shore Up Ukrainian Gas Supplies. “After the gas crisis of 2008 to 2009, during which Russia cut off gas supplies to Ukraine for nearly two weeks, Europe resolved to beef up its energy infrastructure to help prevent such an event in the future. By building out so-called ‘reverse flow’ capabilities, European countries could increase their ability to supply one another in the case of crisis. Now, as Reuters reports, Europe’s reverse flow capacity looks set to jump nearly 27 percent this weekend.”

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Global Home Cleaning Robots Markets Worth $9 billion by 2020.

FAMILIES ADVOCATING FOR CAMPUS EQUALITY: Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand Should Apologize To Student She Smeared.

JOAN HEMINWAY: Women in the Crowd of Corporate Directors: Following, Walking Alone, and Meaningfully Contributing.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Obama Goes Where The Money Is: Middle Class Savings Like Blood In The Water.

DREW CURTIS OF FARK.COM: So I’m running for Governor of Kentucky in 2015. Kentucky could do worse — and probably will, unless he’s elected.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 627.

BLUE-ON-BLUE: Andrew Cuomo Rebukes Teachers Unions: ‘Don’t Say You Represent the Students.’ “The fact that this fiery anti-union tirade passed the lips of a blue state Democrat tells you everything you need to know about just how thoroughly teachers union have alienated many of their natural political allies. And this isn’t merely some quirk of New York politics, as the same thing has happened on a local scale in numerous cities such as Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles. Democratic politicians everywhere are more willing to take on teachers unions than ever before.”

It’s as if there’s some sort of K-12 Implosion going on or something.

JAKUB GRYGIEL: Know Thy Enemy: The modern Western penchant for trusting in the equal rationality of all is strategic folly. Aeschylus understood this well.

Good strategy requires a sound understanding of one’s rivals. A rival in any walk of life is, in a sense, an interlocutor. To engage him effectively in debate one must understand his speech and reasoning patterns. Without that knowledge, conversation is at best pointless, at worst self-defeating. So it is in strategy. It is futile to engage in competition with a rival power without having at least an inkling about his thoughts, fears, and desires.

The modern Western penchant for trusting in the equal rationality of all suggests otherwise. According to this conceit, there is no reason to plumb the nature of an enemy’s thinking because it is no different in essence from one’s own. But this is wrong. A rival’s response to one’s strategy is not predictable as a simply rational and universal reaction that can be generalized and grasped with relative ease. Rival states or groups respond to similar actions in different ways based on their culture, worldview, history, and the proclivities of their leaders. Good strategy, as Bernard Brodie once put it, “presupposes good anthropology and good sociology.”

Despite their superficial attachment to multiculturalism, our elites don’t really want to think of other cultures as, you know, thinking differently, for fear that it might somehow be racist to take that into account.

MARK HEMINGWAY: The American Sniper Freakout: Why The Left Can’t Tolerate This Movie. “The film is primarily about the heroism of soldiers who, thrust into battle by larger forces, do their best to protect each other and innocent Iraqis. Clint Eastwood, often described as one of the few prominent right-wingers in Hollywood, opposed the invasion of Iraq and questioned the invasion of Afghanistan. Even so, the film’s lack of left-wing politics has been treated in some quarters as an unpardonable sin.” Gleichschaltung!

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Obama Goes Where The Money Is: Middle Class Savings Like Blood In The Water.

WAR ON MEN: Amherst College settles suit filed after diploma withheld over rape allegation.

A lawsuit filed by an Amherst College student who argued the school unfairly held up his academic career over an old, unproven allegation of an on-campus rape has quietly settled. . . .

Doe filed the lawsuit last year after the college decided to revive a 2009 allegation a week before he was set to earn his diploma in 2014 – and after the college had disciplined him for excessive drinking and acting out sexually. His accuser, identified only as “Student A” in court records, said he complained to school officials at the time of his alleged encounter with Doe but never filed a formal complaint.

The original demand was for $2 million. Expect to see more lawsuits, as universities are terrible at handling these kinds of cases and — as with this case, it seems — are often more concerned with looking tough to their PC critics than with being fair to individual students.

UPDATE: Sunday Morning, When Facts Don’t Matter.

I admit it: I’m a sucker for a well-played French horn. And I’ve been a fan of CBS’ Sunday Morning since Charles Kuralt held the reins. That his fellow Charles, the Osgood one, wears a bow tie is a bit dated, but still, the French horn intro is magnificent. It’s very hard to blow a good French horn.

But a segment yesterday morning was shockingly bad. Not because it took an ideological position with which I disagree, but because it was factually vapid. The website write-up began with the discredited “According to the U.S. Justice Department, one in five college women will experience some kind of sexual assault while in school.” Would it be too much to expect that a news organization like CBS be aware that these numbers, which don’t come from the DoJ, have been so thoroughly and utterly debunked that not even the most radical feminist organization will use them anymore?

Apparently not.

It’s all about boosting Kirsten Gillibrand, and the “war on women” theme. Facts are optional.

Related: How To Lie And Mislead With Rape Statistics: Part 1. Zerlina Maxwell is mentioned.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A vital correction from reader Bob Strauss: “Sorry to email you at your academy, but the Sunday Morning fanfare is trumpet. Wikipedia has a whole explanation of the piece and who plays it (Wynton Marsalis, currently).”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: CBS News: Are Law School Admission Standards Slipping?

According to an analysis by Jerome Organ, a professor at the University of St. Thomas, 33 percent of law school entrants had median LSAT scores of 160 or higher in 2013, compared with 40.8 percent in 2010 (the LSAT is scored on a scale between 120 and 180). Conversely, first-year students with scores of 149 or lower rose from 14.2 percent to 22.5 percent.

“Not all law schools are lowering admission standards,” wrote Wendy Margolis of the Law School Admissions Council in an email. “If some of them are, you would need to ask them about their individual reasons. …

In recent years, some law schools have cut the number of people they admit and the ranks of faculty that teach them. Given the economics, experts expect some of the nation’s law schools to close and the quality of students to keep slipping.

It’s a shakeout.