HE’S A SMART GUY: How Elon Musk Taught Himself Rocket Science.

LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Transgender At The Cancer Clinic.

RUSSIA HAS DEMANDED THAT AMERICAN WARPLANES EXIT SYRIAN AIRSPACE IMMEDIATELY, a US official told Fox News on Wednesday.

As Roger Simon writes, “Memo to The Donald: Vladimir Is Not Your Friend.”

FASTER, PLEASE: How a Microscopic Supercapacitor Will Supercharge Mobile Electronics; Laser-etched graphene brings Moore’s Law to energy storage.

THE SCIENCE OF GROWING POTATOES ON MARS.

THIRD AMENDMENT: A redcoat solution to government surveillance.

This meshes well with some of my own work.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 874.

‘SEVERELY TRAUMATIZED’ CLOCK KID AHMED MOHAMED WILL GO TO QATAR FOR SOME REASON: “I scoffed at this at first,” Jim Treacher writes, “but I’m starting to warm up to the idea. I really want to see Obama and Clock Kid smiling and posing with… this.”

“This test run succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of Clock Kid’s dad. I look forward to the next one. When a guy in traditional Muslim garb is detained by TSA for joking about a bomb on a plane, what will the White House serve at his banquet?”

AT THIS POINT, ISN’T THE REAL QUESTION WHAT PRESIDENT BIDEN WOULD DO? Hillary Clinton’s Plan to Mess Up Prescription Economics.

Hillary Clinton thinks drug development should be riskier, and less profitable. Also, your health insurance premiums should be higher. And there should be fewer drugs available.

This is not, of course, how the Clinton campaign would put it. The official line is that Americans are just paying too darn much for drugs, and she has a plan to stop that. . . .

Eliminating the side payments seems eminently sensible. (Yes, yes, you can strip my libertarian card, but market-rigging contracts shouldn’t be enforced.) It also seems reasonable to require some sort of comparative effectiveness research. Other provisions will certainly drive down drug prices, at the risk of also driving down innovation.

Still other provisions, however, are simply bad economics. In what other market do we worry about having a second product available that’s merely just as good as the first? Should we really only have one antidepressant, one statin, one blood pressure medication, and so forth? Might there be variation among patients so that drugs that are statistically about equally effective in large groups are nonetheless individually more or less effective for different people? Might one drug’s side effects be better tolerated by some patients than another’s? Might having two drugs in the category help keep prices down?

Then there is notion that we should force pharmaceutical companies to spend a set percentage of their revenues on R&D. This seems to me to be … what’s the word I am looking for? Ah, I’ve got it: “insane.”

For one thing, compared to virtually any other industry, pharmaceutical companies already spend an enormous fraction of their revenues on R&D. Why assume that it ought to be higher? Or even more risibly, exactly the same at every company?

Because you’ve never run a business in your life? Related: Obamacare’s Nonprofit Insurers Are Failing, Predictably.

ISIS PLANNING ‘NUCLEAR HOLOCAUST’ TO WIPE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS FROM FACE OF THE EARTH’, CLAIMS REPORTER WHO EMBEDDED WITH EXTREMISTS:

The terror group allowed Jürgen Todenhöfer to embed with the group because he has been a high-profile critic of US policy in the Middle East.

The German journalist claimed the terror group wants to launch a ‘nuclear tsunami’ against the west and anyone else that opposes their plans for an Islamic caliphate.

See, this is all just extremist crazy talk. If there’s one thing the American people know for certain, the president is committed to preventing violent Islamofascist extremists from acquiring nuclear weapons in the Middle East. I mean, just ask him, or his diligent Secretary of State.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: If You #StandWithAhmed You Should Be For School Choice.

AT AMAZON, fresh deals on bestselling products, updated every hour.

Also, coupons galore in Grocery & Gourmet Food.

Plus, Kindle Daily Deals.

And, Today’s Featured Digital Deal. The deals are brand new every day, so browse and save!

THE ISLAMIC THREAT IS PRESENT IN THE U.S.:

Three American women who have been branded as “anti-Muslim” by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) spoke out against the threat of Islamism in the United States at the Family Research Council’s Values Voter Summit on Saturday. Contrary to the rhetoric SPLC and others, these women are not “Islamophobes.”

“Americans need to know the threat is here. So many people, when I say ‘the Muslim Brotherhood,’ they say ‘that’s an Egypt problem.’ It’s not — it’s in every state of this country,” declared Cathy Hinners, a law enforcement instructor and founder of the website Dailyrollcall.com.

Hinners was joined by Clare M. Lopez, an intelligence expert with a focus on the Middle East, and Sandy Rios, director of government affairs for the American Family Association and Fox News contributor. All three women were attacked in the SPLC’s “Women Against Islam” pamphlet, which has been described by many conservative outlets as a “hit list.”

“This is dangerous because there is a basic principle of Islam which can turn every Muslim into a potential vigilante,” Lopez declared, citing the doctrine that Muslims must “forbid the evil and enjoin the good.” She, Rios and Hinners see the SPLC “hit list” as marking a target on their backs. When Rios declared, “By the way, we all carry,” the crowd erupted in applause.

Related: Obama Admin Granted Asylum to 1,519 Foreigners Tied to Terrorism.

BEFORE GLOBAL WARMING THERE WAS THE OIL PANIC: And that was after the Population Bomb/ZPG/Earth Day obsessions of the first half of the 1970s. Variations on this 1975 UPI article ran throughout the 1970s; a decade full of sky-is-falling news stories that can be nicely summed up in a single illustration.

ASHE SCHOW: Mandatory Reporting Already Exists On Some Campuses:

Some colleges already use a “mandatory reporting” system for sexual assault cases, but it’s not the one being vilified in the press by advocates.

Advocates have been pillorying the Safe Campus Act because it would prevent schools from using quasi-judicial campus discipline panels to investigate and punish students accused of sexual assault unless accusers first call the police. That seems hard to believe for those not familiar with the current campus climate, but police involvement is heavily disfavored by advocates. The reason is that law enforcement usually requires more evidence than a shifty accusation.

The mandatory reporting system mentioned in the headline is in reference to resident advisers (RAs) — usually students — who have to report incidents of school conduct violations to administrators. . . .

The Times also notes another issue for university RAs when determining whether or not to report: The current campus climate of “political correctness that instills in students a fear of offending others and that hampers open dialogue.”

Students are being taught to run to authorities for help instead of doing something as simple as saying “no” or “please stop.” And that’s not even in response to a potential sexual assault, it’s to everything, even if someone is texting you too much or doing any number of a million other things that are annoying.

We need some sort of toughness-test before students can enter college. Maybe modeled on Parris Island.

OCEANIA HAS NEVER BEEN AT WAR WITH JOHN BOEHNER: Democrats’ Sudden Embrace of John Boehner Is Infuriating.

But entirely predictable.

MARK STEYN: Wild Seadogs of the Øresund. “As Miss Ekland testifies, the Swedes are an attractive people. One of their least attractive qualities, alas, is a certain moral narcissism. They promote themselves as ‘the humanitarian superpower’, and appear to have fallen badly for their own publicity.”

JOHN HENRY COULD NOT BE REACHED FOR COMMENT: An NPR Reporter Raced A Machine To Write A News Story. Who Won?

To be fair, besting an NPR reporter isn’t going to allow any computer to claim it’s passed the Turing Test.

(Via SDA.)

IT TAKES A POTEMKIN VILLAGE TO PROP UP HILLARY’S CAMPAIGN: What Was a Member of Clinton’s ‘Secret Spy Network’ Doing While Working for CBS News?

According to WEEKLY STANDARD sources, Drumheller was active in shaping the network’s Benghazi coverage. His role at the network raises questions about what went wrong with the retracted 60 Minutes report on Benghazi that aired in October 2013. Despite his former life as a high ranking CIA official, Drumheller was laden with political baggage, making him a curious choice to be consulting with a major news operation—especially so given that he was working directly with Sidney Blumenthal, whose primary occupation appears to be manipulating media coverage on behalf of the Clintons.

And note that “David Rhoades, the current president of CBS News, is the brother of Ben Rhoades, a White House national security advisor. If Ben’s name sounds familiar, that is likely due to his reported role in the editing of the now infamous Benghazi talking points.”

Meanwhile, on a lighter ghost note: Hillary’s ‘Spontaneous’ Pumpkin Spice Latte Question Came From Former Staffer.

It’s Potemkin Villages all the way down, to coin a phrase. Or as Iowahawk quips, “DC media: more incest than Appalachia’s trashiest hillbilly trailer park.”

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: U.S. troops dispatched to Kunduz to help Afghan forces.

THE PRISON PROBLEM: A problem with prosecutors, or something else?

Pfaff’s theory is that it’s the prosecutors. District attorneys and their assistants have gotten a lot more aggressive in bringing felony charges. Twenty years ago they brought felony charges against about one in three arrestees. Now it’s something like two in three. That produces a lot more plea bargains and a lot more prison terms.

I asked Pfaff why prosecutors are more aggressive. He’s heard theories. Maybe they are more political and they want to show toughness to raise their profile to impress voters if they run for future office. Maybe the police are bringing stronger cases. Additionally, prosecutors are usually paid by the county but prisons by the state, so prosecutors tend not to have to worry about the financial costs of what they do.

Pfaff says there’s little evidence so far to prove any of these theories, since the prosecutorial world is largely a black box. He also points out that we have a radically decentralized array of prosecutors, with some elected and some appointed. Changing their behavior cannot be done with one quick fix.

Well, limits on overcharging and plea bargaining, and empowering juries, might help. I have some suggestions here.

Meanwhile, there’s another possible explanation:

In the 1970s, we let a lot of people out of mental institutions. Over the next decades we put a lot of people into prisons. But the share of people kept out of circulation has been strangely continuous. In the real world, crime, lack of education, mental health issues, family breakdown and economic hopelessness are all intertwined.

I wonder if Fox Butterfield has any thoughts on this?

HOW DO YOU SPELL HYPOCRISY? W-A-S-H-I-N-G-T-O-N P-O-S-T: Post Owner Makes $16.5B While Paper Whines 558 Times About ‘Income Inequality.’

IT’S ASTROTURF ALL THE WAY DOWN: Planned Parenthood Paid Protestors Who Threw Condoms at Carly Fiorina.

HILLARY, LIKEABILITY AND THE LENS: At City Journal, Matthew Hennessey writes, “even with a quarter-century of ‘public service’ under her belt, Hillary can’t seem to connect with the average American:”

All politics is performance, but presidential politics is performance art. The successful candidate adjusts each appearance—whether on stage or on camera—in order to come across as knowledgeable, sincere, reasonable, diplomatic, and, above all, presidential. An actor used to working on stage alters his performance when he appears before a camera. Auditoriums are big; they need big voices and oversize personalities to fill them. Like stage actors, politicians working a live audience need to play to the last row. When a politician speaks from a podium, hosts a town hall meeting, or presses the flesh, the goal is to have each member of the audience leave thinking the performance was delivered directly to him.

Television screens, by contrast, are smaller, and demand a different type of performance. You don’t have to work so hard to get someone watching you on television to think that you’re talking directly to him. Close-ups reward subtlety, honesty, and true emotion. A camera is like an X-Ray machine. “[T]he camera looks into your mind, and the audience sees what the camera sees,” writes the actor Michael Caine in his book, Acting in Film. You can’t lie to a camera; it will expose you. Ronald Reagan understood this better than anyone.

The good news for Hillary is that coming across as genuine on camera is a skill that can be taught. Of course, it helps if you have talent. It’s even better if you take the job seriously, which, according to Klein, she did not. “I decided I had enough with the camera and the recordings and the coaches,” Hillary allegedly said. “I got so angry I knocked the f- -king camera off its tripod. That was the end of my Stanislavski period.” (It’s perhaps worth pointing out that Constantin Stanislavski, the Russian actor and director credited with pioneering an approach to acting eventually known as “the Method,” worked in live theater, not in film.)

Of course, when it’s focused on politicians, the TV camera lies all the time — just explore how made-for-television Barack Obama was in 2008; his on-air skills will serve him well when he leaves office at the end of next year, but meant nothing in terms of allowing voters to predict that the global disaster of his presidency. The same could be said to a lesser extent with Hillary’s own husband, who was remarkably telegenic in 1992, and then preceded, at least for the first two years of his presidency until a Republican Congress could prop him up, to forget virtually all of his campaign promises.

But there’s no doubt that Hillary, like Al Gore in 1999, comes across stiff, robotic and elitist when on TV – even to the most sympathetic of interviewers. But then, maybe that’s the problem – Ronald Reagan knew he was in a hostile media environment virtually every time he walked into a TV studio, and yet had the skill to project his charisma past the interviewer, to the viewers at home. In contrast, as Nick Gillespie writes at Reason on Hillary’s interview with Time-Warner-CNN-HBO spokeswoman Lena Dunham:

The interview is worth reading in its entirety, especially against the backdrop of Hillary Clinton’s falling poll numbers and her obvious interest in mounting something like a charm offensive. Dunham is clearly a willing co-conspirator in humanizing the candidate, as when she brings up a favorite “cold shoulder” dress of Clinton’s:

It was a design of my friend Donna Karan. And like everything I do, it turned out to be controversial. I’m hardly a fashion icon.

In moments such as these, Dunham’s (and Clinton’s) starfucking side undercut any pretension to reaching the average man or woman. Beyond the utterly unconvincing humblebrag declaration that she’s not a fashion icon but only a beleaguered gal trying to make it in a heartless world, Clinton can’t not place herself in the world of New York couture and high fashion. These are precisely the sorts of moments when Clinton loses the little people.

That’s a far cry from how her (now vegan!) husband chose to present himself to the world when running for the White House against the patrician George H.W. Bush — as a sort of cigar smoking, pot-smoking (but not inhaling!) Big Mac chomping new age good ol’ boy in 1992.

But then it could be worse — Hillary could be crying poverty again.