NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Parallel to protein folding improves DNA origami process.

I WONDER WHY THEY DON’T TARGET RUSSIAN AND CHINESE SPIES? This New Campaign Wants To Help Surveillance Agents Quit NSA or GCHQ.

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TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 873.

A SPIDER THREATENING MY CHILD BROUGHT OUT THE KILLER IN ME: “I have arachnophobia… sometimes. But threaten my kids, you wretched beasts of field and rafter, and I will pounce on your creepy butts like a rabid feral cat or something equally scary. There will be blood (if that goopy stuff that comes out of spiders is blood, I don’t know… but there will be lots of that).”

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Couples who earn six figures for having sex on webcam.

DOGS AND CATS LIVING TOGETHER: A Vox piece by Ezra Klein on the unpredictability of the 2016 race is praised by Mark Hemingway of the Weekly Standard, who notes that “With Trump leading the race, the base is holding the donor class hostage because we have finally reached a moment where the media are so splintered and people are so ticked off that the normal campaign rules don’t apply. GOP donors can no longer coalesce around a preferred front runner, buy millions in ads in Iowa in August, and set the narrative though the caucus in January.”

Read the whole thing — if only for its Col. Jessup-inspired conclusion.

THE FREE MARKET: It’s like Uber, but for everything! “Uber has been hit with complaints that it’s running ‘an Objectivist LARP,’ a live-action role playing of a capitalist utopia from an Ayn Rand novel. That’s pretty much what it is doing, and the results are awesome. And the benefits don’t stop with more drivers and lower rates. Uber is ploughing a fair portion of its profits into another wave of technological innovation—self-driving cars—that promises to offer even greater improvements in the future. All of this should counter some of the despair about how to promote free markets, especially among urban elites who have been programmed by their college educations to embrace the rhetoric of the Left. Give them half a chance, and they will flock to capitalist innovations run according to the laws of the market. The problem is that they don’t want to admit it. That’s where the euphemism ‘ride-sharing’ comes in.”

CATHY YOUNG: “When you look at the way feminists have responded to men’s issues it’s a pretty bad record.”

OCEANIA HAS ALWAYS BEEN AT WAR WITH EASTASIA: Soviet Union or no, when it comes to Russians and airbrushes, you can pry them from their cold dead, history revising hands: Poles furious after Russia blames them for starting WWII.

Related: “The greatest cultural victory of the Left has been to disregard the Nazi-Soviet Pact,” Daniel Hannan wrote in the London Telegraph last year.

WHEN POSTMODERNISM AND PREMODERNISM COLLIDE: Europe’s Migrant Crisis Is Simply Muslim History vs. Western Fantasy. Raymond Ibrahim writes. “Progressive Europe erased or rewrote its own history. Now they can’t recognize an invasion by people to whom history is everything.”

SPACE WEATHER: Strong Solar Flare Triggers Brief Radio Blackout.

MATT DRUDGE: GENIUS OF JUXTAPOSITION:

● Michelle O and Colbert laugh at Bill Clinton’s philandering past…

● Lewinsky launches anti-bullying campaign…

(Headline via Roger Kimball.)

QUERCETIN UPDATE: So I mentioned a while back that I was taking Quercetin and that it seemed to help my sinuses. Quite a few other people (Rand Simberg, for example) reported similar experiences. After several months, I still think it does. I measure this semi-objectively by the drastic reduction in Sudafed consumption that I’ve experienced since taking it. Anyway, you might give it a try if you have sinus issues and don’t want to gobble decongestants. It seems to help.

FASTER, PLEASE: Neural Implant Enables Paralyzed ALS Patient to Type Six Words per Minute.

FIREARMS HISTORY: What If the M2 Browning Had Become a Tank Killer? Love the pics.

WALTER OLSON: “In light of President Obama’s (quite admirable) recent comments on college as a place for the open exchange of ideas, could his administration call off its rules pressuring colleges to adopt unconstitutional speech codes?”

BLACK LIVES MATTER, EXCEPT IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS: William McGurn observes in the Wall Street Journal:

When Bill de Blasio was elected mayor of New York in 2013, he came in riding two progressive narratives.

The grand narrative was his “Tale of Two Cities,” a New York where elites grow rich while millions of others are left struggling for basics. Running through this tale was the subtheme of race, especially of young African-Americans being unfairly deprived of their rights. So when the #BlackLivesMatter movement exploded in New York last year, Mr. de Blasio naturally embraced it. . . .

Today, however, the mayor is finding that his progressive measures are being turned against him. For nowhere in New York is the divide between haves and have-nots—or between black and white—as stark as it is on equal access to a decent education. It is this divide the pro-charter Families for Excellent Schools will highlight on Wednesday as mothers and fathers march across the Brooklyn Bridge to demand “school equality,” i.e., great schools for all children.

In the run up to this march, the group has released a powerful new TV ad designed to drive home the human costs of the existing inequality by showing a white boy and an African-American boy on their way to school. As the camera follows the white child, a narrator says, “Because he lives in a wealthy neighborhood, this 6-year-old will attend a good school.” It points out he’ll “likely go on to college.”

The black child is also walking to school. “Because he lives in a poor neighborhood, this 6-year-old will be forced into a failing school,” says the narrator. The narrator adds this child will probably never make it to college.

“Mayor de Blasio,” the ad ends, “stop forcing kids into failing schools. Half a million kids need new schools now.”

One measure of the ad’s power is how vehemently the mayor’s black allies have denounced it. “Racist to the core,” charged Bertha Lewis, an activist who ran the left-wing community organizing group Acorn until it was disbanded. Likewise the head of the state’s NAACP, Hazel Dukes, who calls the ad “an insult to our communities.”

To the progressive left, advocating for better education for minority students is “racist.” Because, you know, #BlackLivesMatter, but one shouldn’t actually try to do anything about it, other than march in the streets, hold signs, get on TV, and condemn white people as racist– well, at least white people who aren’t Democrats.

When will black Democrats wake up and realize they’re being played? Democrats’ policies–including a ridiculous refusal to give parents meaningful educational options other than failed public schools (that resemble prisons more than schools)–are antithetical to the interests of most blacks. But hey, those conservatives are all just whiteys who can’t be trusted, so whatever they propose must be racist in some way, right?

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: How Keith Richards became everyone’s favorite Rolling Stone.

Not yet answered: How is this man still alive?

(Via Maggie’s Farm.)

MASS RAPES AND SEXUAL SLAVE-MARKETS IN THE MIDDLE EAST, BUT the United Nations has decided to devote its resources to studying “just how rough it is being a woman on the Internet in North America.”

There’s no doubt that internet harassment, threats and bullying are real and persistent problems. But online nastiness is a problem for both genders: While women may be subjected to particularly vile types of harassment, a Pew survey suggests that men are targeted just as much, if not more. And no matter how severe the problem is, it is absurd to suggest, as the report does, that online harassment of women in the West is comparable to the actual, physical brutality inflicted on women regularly in many parts of the world. (For example, the UN body that issued the report includes commissioners from China, where sex-selective abortion and female infanticide are notoriously widespread; from India, where the rape rate is rising so quickly that several countries have issued travel advisories for their citizens; and from the United Arab Emirates, where women who violate provisions of Sharia can be subjected to flogging or stoning).

The UN report, while surely well-meaning, represents a typical moral panic—a sense of crisis and fear blown far out of proportion. As with most propagators of panics, the authors of the report want to crack down on civil liberties.

The UN report is not “well-meaning.” It’s an effort to use the hysteria of privileged Western women to slip through global censorship in service of autocrats and oligarchs at home and abroad. The people pushing it are not good people who are going too far. They’re awful, horrible people exploiting useful idiots.

PUTTING IDEOLOGY BEFORE ART IMPOVERISHES THE IMAGINATION: Consider, for instance, this piece at BuzzFeed by Shannon Keating, entitled ‘Movies I Loved Before My Feminism Made Me Love Them Less,’ Sonny Bunch writes at the Washington Free Beacon. “If Keating’s list is a satirical examination of the excesses of those who live the politicized life, it’s genius. A-plus work. The radical, almost purposeful, misreading of Fight Club is almost enough to convince me she’s doing something clever here. And if she isn’t? Well, that’s not too surprising. But it is a little sad. And a handy reminder that we’re all worse off when we let our ideology dictate what we can enjoy.”

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: When Schools Overlook Introverts.

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WAR ON WOMEN: Biden Is Democrats’ Best Hope For President, Says Poll. Every time it looks as if Hillary has a shot, the patriarchy yanks it away!