LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Disconnected!

Really, for a second I did think I can’t get instant access to whatever I might want right now. Of course, it was 1:21 AM, but still. Then I realized my phone would default to the cellular network. Then I realized this was nuts. This used to be called “ordinary life.” You were always disconnected from everything else that wasn’t in your immediate vicinity. It all seems so boring in retrospect, to be honest; you were stuck with what you had. At best you could order a movie, but that cost money and seemed like a tremendous commitment.

So we went to the bar and didn’t talk to strangers. As opposed to staying home now with your magical glowing rectangle and talking to strangers.

Such an improvement!

WELL, YES: How Weight Training Can Help You Keep the Weight Off. “Exercise may help people avoid regaining weight after successful dieting, according to a new study. It shows that exercise can crucially alter the body’s response to weight loss and potentially stop unwanted pounds from creeping back on.”

THE FEATURE I REALLY WANT WOULD SEND A PAINFUL, NEAR-FATAL SHOCK TO THE HUMAN BEHIND IT ALL: This Guy Found a Way to Block Robocalls When Phone Companies Wouldn’t.

FROM MUSCLE AND FITNESS, a Q&A with Mark Rippetoe.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Taking Up Obama’s Challenge: Three ways to ‘do something’ about poverty.

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FIGHTING PARKINSON’S DISEASE WITH EXERCISE. There aren’t many things that aren’t helped by exercise. “On days Quaglia boxes, he doesn’t need to take medication for six hours afterward — twice as long as usual. His depression has lifted, and he has more self-confidence. Boxing, he says, ‘doesn’t cure, but it helps.'”

I WANT TO GO 200 MPH WHILE SIPPING CHAMPAGNE AND BLOGGING: Germany’s Autobahns Say “Willkommen” To Robocars.

THE RISE, AND FALL, AND RISE of the ukulele.

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: A tunable hinge joint for DNA nanotechnology.

THE DEA WILL PROBABLY STEAL THE DATA: U.S. to Develop DNA Study of One Million People: An Obama initiative seeks to channel a torrent of gene information into treatments for cancer, other diseases.

THE AMERICAN SNIPER WORKOUT: How Bradley Cooper Transformed Into Chris Kyle. “Walsh added that Cooper didn’t just use his workouts to create the right look for the role. He used them as a springboard to transform into Chris Kyle. The intensity of the workouts got him into the right frame of mind. Cooper would often place a picture of Kyle on the wall of the gym and he blasted Kyle’s personal playlist during workouts, listening to the kind of music that defined Kyle, everything from Metallica and Slipknot to Toby Keith. . . . Bradley Cooper started the program at 186 pounds and ended at 225 with roughly the same percent body fat. By the end of the program, he was performing rack pulls with 425 pounds for 10 reps.”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 634.

WELL, AS IT SHOULD BE: Hillary Clinton’s Late Start Won’t Stop the Punches.

The advantage of being the front-runner is that she has all the money locked up, and she won’t need to run to her left in the primaries in order to placate the base. The disadvantage is that she has no idea who she is running against, while everyone else knows exactly what they will be fighting. They’ll have over a year to lock in their message — no, better than that, they’ll be able to start their campaigns against her during the primaries, while she can’t mount an effective response until she knows who her opponent will be. Any rejoinder she makes before then will only serve to raise the profile of the people making the most effective criticisms.

Meanwhile, she’ll need to spread her opposition research across multiple candidates, while all of theirs is laser-focused on her. To be sure, she’ll also benefit from the research they do on each other. But of course, the winning candidate will also have the benefit of everyone else’s anti-Hillary research operations — and they’re more likely to pool their research for the general campaign, while they probably won’t be sharing any unused tidbits with the Democrats.

A late start is helpful, though, if you aren’t really sure that your’re running — or if you’re really sure that you aren’t running, but want to maximize political leverage and money. Then there are possible health issues.

AGREED: Every Teenager Should Be Required to Work a Grubby Job.

I talk about this very topic here, but I also note that rules, and schools, make that much harder than it used to be, which is bad. I should note that the Insta-Daughter worked 3 days a week from age 14 until she left for college at 16. Some of the work was semi-glamorous, but most of it involved making coffee, alphabetizing files, and dealing with job applications. I think it was as valuable to her as anything she did. She has a job in college, too, and likes working.

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VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: What Are the Metaphysics of Islamic Denial? “So why the elaborate façade about the Islamic roots of global terrorism and spreading instability in the Middle East? There are a few possible explanations.” The Islam-Deniers are more numerous than the vaccine-deniers, and do much more damage.

YA THINK? New York Post: ABCs of IRS mess: Justice Department is tainted, too.

YA THINK? Sen. Kelly Ayotte: ‘Alarm ringing’ in Middle East.

Sen. Kelly Ayotte, (R-N.H.) is criticizing the Obama administration for what she sees as a lack of a cogent strategy to fight militants from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), warning that it could hurt American efforts to build a strong coalition.

“There is a fire alarm ringing, Chris,” Ayotte said on “Fox News Sunday.”

“I think there is a real concern out there not only about a lack of strategy, but in order to be a leader, to bring everyone together and work together, you have to be able to be counted.”

Ayotte serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee, which heard from military leaders last week as well as former secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and Madeline Albright. New Hampshire’s junior senator said that her takeaway from the hearings was that a “disjointed” strategy fighting ISIS is leading to “more outgrowth of these extremist groups in the region.”

The U.S. military has spent months launching airstrikes with a coalition of countries from Europe and the Arab world, while President Obama and others have reached out to create and keep that broad coalition of countries. The president’s plan is to support Arab fighters on the ground without bringing in U.S. troops, but outgoing Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel admitted to CNN on Friday that some American ground troops might be necessary.

Just a reminder: As late as 2010, things were going so well in Iraq that Obama and Biden were bragging. Now, after Obama’s politically-motivated pullout and disengagement, the whole thing’s fallen apart. This is near-criminal neglect and incompetence, and an awful lot of people will pay a steep price for the Obama Administration’s fecklessness.

Related: National Journal: The World Will Blame Obama If Iraq Falls.

ROGER SIMON: 2016: The Search for a Commander-in-Chief Begins.

SHOCKER: Harvard Study: Lawyers, Legal Academics Well To Left Of General Population, Judges Less So.

Lawyers on average are much more liberal than the general population, a new study has found. But judges are more conservative than the average lawyer, to say nothing of the graduates of top law schools.

What accounts for the gap? The answer, the study says, is that judicial selection processes are affected by politics.

Judges are, of course, almost without exception lawyers. If judges reflected the pool from which they were selected based on politically neutral grounds like technical skill and temperament, the bench might be expected to tilt left.

But something else is going on. . . .

Eric A. Posner, a law professor at the University of Chicago, said the paper might have drawn the wrong conclusion from the right data. “The authors argue that a court is politicized if the judges deviate from the ideology of the underlying ideological distribution of attorneys,” he said. “Maybe.”

But an equally powerful case could be made, he said, for viewing courts as politicized if they failed to reflect the ideology of people generally. “On this view,” Professor Posner continued, “we should congratulate rather than condemn Republicans for bringing much-needed ideological balance to the judiciary.”

Diversity!

SEXUAL INTERCOURSE BEGAN IN 1963. (WHICH WAS RATHER LATE EARLY FOR ME.) BETWEEN THE END OF THE “CHATTERLEY” BAN, AND THE BEATLES’ FIRST LP. Florida Supreme Court To Decide Definition Of “Sexual Intercourse.”

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Texas boy suspended for saying he could make classmate ‘disappear’ with Ring Of Power. “Kermit Elementary School officials called it a threat when the 9-year-old boy, Aiden Steward, in a playful act of make-believe, told a classmate he could make him disappear with a ring forged in fictional Middle Earth’s Mount Doom.”

Plus: “‘I assure you my son lacks the magical powers necessary to threaten his friend’s existence,’ the boy’s father later wrote in an email.”

Principal Roxanne Greer is too dumb to teach elementary school. Heck, she may be too dumb to attend it. Even most kindergarteners know the difference between make-believe and reality. . . .

SO, PRETTY MUCH LIKE ALL OF OBAMA’S OTHER JOB GAINS, THEN: WaPo:The Obama administration’s illusionary job gains from the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Asked about the statistic on 650,000 jobs, the White House referred us to the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. USTR spokesman Matthew McAlvanah directed us to page 58 of the book. “They do not provide an estimate on jobs,” he acknowledged. “However they do provide a methodology that one could use.”

Essentially, the book suggests that an income gain of $121,000 would be “roughly equivalent to creating an extra job.” So the Obama administration took the figure of $77.5 billion and divided it by $121,000, which yields 640,000. Rounded up, that becomes 650,000.

There’s just one problem: This is the incorrect way to use Petri’s research, especially when officials such as Kerry combine the jobs figure in the same sentence as the income prediction: “The TPP could provide $77 billion a year in real income and support 650,000 new jobs in the US alone.”

That’s because the calculation on jobs can only be done if one assumes that wages have been frozen and there is no income gain. So it’s completely misleading to suggest there would be both a gain in income and a gain in jobs.

It’s Potemkin Villages all the way down. And it’s no surprise if a crony-corporatist insider trade deal was bad for workers.