WHAT DO YOU CALL 500 DEAD UNION BRANCHES AT THE BOTTOM OF AN ABYSS: Major threat to public-sector union membership.

DOOMED TO REPEAT IT: When pensions implode: Silicon Valley’s lesson for New York.

DEATH WISH: Jerry Brown Vetoes Right to Try and Live Bill.  Never any interest in “try and live,” never any rationing on assisted suicide.  So, pro death?

SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER, OR SOMETHING: Trump: Merkel ‘Insane’, Predicts German Riots, Says Migrants Look Like Prime Time Soldiers.

OBAMA DOESN’T SEEM HUMILIATED. HE SEEMS FINE WITH IT. Russia and Iran running neck-and-neck in Obama-humiliating sweepstakes.

HMM: Study finds that hidden infections may be real reason why people fall.

Around 2.5 million people aged 65 and older are treated in the ER for falls each year, but researchers who took part in a Massachusetts General Hospital study warn not to automatically assume that “older” means they took a tumble because they’re feeble, clumsy, or suffering from poor eyesight or dementia.

Instead, per the Telegraph, there may be a more surprising cause, scientists announced at the Infectious Diseases Society of America’s annual meeting: an infection. Urinary tract, bloodstream, and respiratory infections are the most common culprits when infections are involved—all of which can often lead to dizziness, low blood pressure, and other symptoms that may precipitate a fall, a press release notes.

The release adds that while it’s currently unclear how many falls are actually caused by infection—estimates based on previous research range from 20 to 45 percent —researchers wanted to find out what kinds of infections afflicted those who had fallen because of them.

How the study was conducted, per Forbes: Reviewing the hospital’s medical records from 2000 to 2014, researchers whittled its group of subjects down to 161 patients who had suffered a fall and been determined to have a coexisting systemic infection (CDI).

Of the 161, 44 percent had a UTI, almost 40 percent had a bloodstream infection, and 23 percent had a respiratory infection, the release notes; meanwhile, almost 6 percent had a heart valve infection.

What made the results of the study somewhat surprising: A majority of the subjects (56 percent) had few or no common symptoms of an infection, leading to 41 percent of them being misdiagnosed initially.

Interesting.

BECAUSE LEAVING YOU ALONE OFFERS INSUFFICIENT OPPORTUNITIES FOR GRAFT: Points And Figures: Why Can’t They Just Leave Us Alone? “We had Obamacare, now we have ObamaSave. It’s the proposed rules on retirement courtesy of President Obama. When you roll over a 401(k) to an IRA, you will have to be advised by someone acting in your best interest. Do you know who acts the best in your best interest? You. This is pure stupidity and just layers on another cost.”

HOMING IN ON THE SOURCE OF RUNNER’S HIGH. I’ve never experienced it, though I have started running again in a very mild way. I’m running a mile a couple of times a week, just for a change. Rippetoe is right that heavy lifting keeps you in good enough cardio shape that you can run a mile without getting winded. On the other hand — and this is one reason why I’m doing it — my form is terrible. I feel like a lumbering moose. I expect that will improve with practice.

UPLOAD YOUR MIND: Will You Ever Be Able to Upload Your Brain? Interesting piece, but it appears to embody Clarke’s First Law: “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”

AND WITH THAT, BERNIE LOSES THE REASON CROWD: All y’all understand that Bernie Sanders is not enamored of the marijuana, yes?

But Maureen Dowd may be having strange new respect, though.

A MODEST PROPOSAL FROM SCOTT OTT: SNL Just Made the Best Argument for Why We Need This One Gun Law.

SO, THAT DIDN’T WORK OUT WELL:

Thousands of conservatives and even some moderates have complained during my more than three-year term that The Post is too liberal; many have stopped subscribing, including more than 900 in the past four weeks.

It pains me to see lost subscribers and revenue, especially when newspapers are shrinking. Conservative complaints can be wrong: The mainstream media were not to blame for John McCain’s loss; Barack Obama’s more effective campaign and the financial crisis were.

But some of the conservatives’ complaints about a liberal tilt are valid. Journalism naturally draws liberals; we like to change the world. I’ll bet that most Post journalists voted for Obama. I did. There are centrists at The Post as well. But the conservatives I know here feel so outnumbered that they don’t even want to be quoted by name in a memo.

—The late Deborah Howell, the Washington Post’s then-ombudswoman, admitting on Sunday, November 16, 2008 just how badly her paper was in the tank to elect Mr. Obama.

Flash-forward to today: “Washington Post Reporter ‘Convicted’ of Espionage By Our Best Pals in Iran.”

—Headline, Ace of Spades today.

As Betsy Newmark adds, “This is what happens when a presidential administration doesn’t prioritize the lives of American citizens. With all that negotiating for a year with Iran, we couldn’t have made his release a condition of talking? Nope, because Obama wouldn’t let anything stand in the way of his dream of a deal.” And in their hatred of President Bush, the media were not prepared to properly vet Mr. Obama in 2008. As even CNN admitted by the end of November 2008, Americans “are putting a lot of faith in a man they barely know.”

The eight year experiment with the Obama administration will be a cautionary tale on multiple levels concerning America’s socialist elite and their palace guard stenographers. It will be debated for many years to come — no matter how badly the president and his acolytes leave America — and increasingly the Middle East — “fundamentally transformed.”

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: America’s Fading Footprint in the Middle East. “From shepherding Israel toward peace with its Arab neighbors to rolling back Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait and halting the contagion of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, the U.S. has long been at the core of the Middle East’s security system. Its military might secured critical trade routes and the bulk of the world’s oil supply. Today, the void created by U.S. withdrawal is being filled by the very powers that American policy has long sought to contain.” Well, you know, now Obama has more flexibility.

WELL, OKAY, BUT I ALREADY HAVE A SHOTGUN: British Companies Build Jamming System To Take Down Drones.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: Will Turkey crack next in crumbling Middle East? Growing Islamic State pressure on a key NATO ally poisons already toxic security situation.

NEW YORK TIMES SHILLS FOR MOVIE THAT CLAIMS TO EXONERATE DAN RATHER—AGAINST ALL EVIDENCE. At City Journal, Scott Johnson writes:

All of which raises a simple question: What is the New York Times doing promoting the film and Rather’s and Mapes’s discredited accounts? While Rathergate lacks the historical importance of Walter Duranty’s journalistic wrongdoing as the Times’s Moscow bureau chief in the 1930s, it nonetheless should serve as an uncomfortable reminder of that shameful episode. As the Times’s man in Moscow, Duranty covered up Stalin’s terror famine in the Ukraine. Reflecting in the first volume of his autobiography on his experience working for the Manchester Guardian alongside Duranty in Moscow, Malcolm Muggeridge wrote: “If the New York Times went on all those years giving great prominence to Duranty’s messages, building him and them up when they were so evidently nonsensically untrue . . . this was not, we may be sure, because the Times was deceived. Rather it wanted to be so deceived, and Duranty provided the requisite deception material.” History repeats itself; in its own way, the Times’s celebration of Truth represents a closing of this particular circle.

Read the whole thing.

Related: Michael Graham interviews Harry MacDougald, the Atlanta lawyer who’s initial questioning of the validity of the Killian documents exposed the flawed CBS report about George W. Bush’s National Guard Service.

DAVE, MY MIND IS GOING. I CAN FEEL IT:

Shot: A report in the New York Post claims that Hillary Clinton could have “a serious meltdown,” as the emotional pressure of a failing campaign is causing her to have “childlike tantrums” that “leave staffers in tears.”

—Rick Moran at the PJ Tatler, yesterday.

Chaser: Hillary Clinton: “I’m Really Not Even a Human Being.”

—Vanity Fair, today.

Suddenly all of those “Reboot Hillary Clinton” headlines over the past couple of years take on an entirely new perspective…

Related: David Axelrod on Hillary’s robotic nature: “She has to be very careful about not looking like she is not reading from a script…So I just think the biggest thing they have to do is filter everything they do through that authenticity lens. Because if she comes off as inauthentic, it’s going to just compound what seems to be the core problem facing her right now.”

That she’s having great difficulties passing the Turing Test?

Update: “Technically, it was still part of Spain.”

PHOTOBLOGGING: THE BLUE ANGELS IN SAN FRANCISCO.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How to Talk to Your Kids (and Yourself) about Christopher Columbus.

Related: “Columbus Day is the perfect gift for media: a whole day of outrage takes/countertakes that can be scheduled in advance on a holiday weekend.”

PRETTY SURE I DON’T: You Need to Build a Fire Pit out of an Old Tire.

ANCHOR DADDIES?: Why so many of Europe’s middle eastern migrants are men.

Many of the men I interviewed traveling solo told me they had left their families behind and intended to reunite with them once they’d been accepted by a safe European country.

This helps to clarify why so many of Europe’s newcomers are young men. Of 102,753 registered arrivals through Italy and Greece, the International Organization of Migration found that 68,085 were men, with only 13,888 women and 20,780 children. . . .

“They tell us, ‘We do this dangerous trip on our own, we get asylum, and there is a law in the European Union that the family can come,’” says Christof Zellenberg, the chairman of the Europa Institute, who has been heavily involved in volunteer efforts in Vienna. You see few newcomers over 50, he adds, because “this is a grueling trip, and you need to be young and strong.” . . .

But a future influx of families could another problem, as Zellenberg notes. Europe is already struggling to deal with the financial burden caused by today’s newcomers, who are pouring across European borders at levels not seen since World War II. If the majority of these men plan to bring families later, the current numbers are totally off. Multiply it by four or more, he says.

These anchor daddies will strain Europe’s resources and could fundamentally transform its culture.

OBAMA FIDDLED WITH THE THERMOSTAT WHILE THE WORLD BURNED: Steve Green on “President Nero:”

Maybe Putin will save Assad, maybe he won’t. But people and governments in the Middle East will long remember that Obama’s definition of leadership meant abandoning our allies in Baghdad, showing the back of his hand to our friends in Jerusalem, cozying up to the liars and killers in Tehran, waging an effete air campaign against ISIS, and dithering while Syria descended into an almost unimaginable humanitarian crisis.

In the broader region, Obama’s leadership left Libya in ruins and wide open to ISIS penetration, alienated Egypt, decreased our leverage in Pakistan, and accomplished almost nothing in Afghanistan except to turn it into a safe haven for pederasts.

Obama’s disastrous failure to lead in the Middle East has helped to flood Europe with refugees and potential terrorists, encouraging the rise of Putin-like far-right parties throughout NATO and the EU. Meanwhile, Moscow appears set to flagrantly violate Obama’s New START agreement, building up its arsenal of deployed nuclear warheads above the impending caps. Our own arsenal continues to shrink, already well under the 2018 limits.

However, the president does see an opportunity coming soon to turn all this around, telling Kroft that “my definition of leadership would be leading on climate change, an international accord that potentially we’ll get in Paris.”

Obama fiddled with the thermostat while the world burned.

Read the whole thing.

AT ALBION’S SEEDLINGS: Columbus, the Exit, and the Forge of Modernity.