BERGDAHL WHITEWASH: DESERTER TO GET LITTLE OR NO JAIL TIME, Rick Moran writes at the PJ Tatler:

Bergdahl is an embarrassment to the army, but more to the point, he’s an embarrassment to Barack Obama. This case was never going to end up with Bergdahl having the book thrown at him, giving him serious jail time. After all, the narrative must be maintained. The president made a great deal to get Bergdahl released — five terrorist leaders for a deserter — and that desertion in the face of the enemy is “honorable service.”

All hail the bloody narrative.

The Eastasia/Eurasia flip-over in reporting on the Middle East will make for jaw-dropping reading if the president has an (R) after his or her name in January of 2017.

OUT: BLOOD BANKING. IN: STOOL-BANKING:

By last August, my 1-year-old son had taken five courses of antibiotics for recurrent ear infections. That was alarming. By age 10, the average American child has had about 10 courses, and some microbiologists argue that even one course a year is too many — that it might damage our native microbial ecosystem, with far-reaching consequences.

My son was off to a worrisome start. Why, I wondered, didn’t doctors work harder to prevent this collateral damage, not with store-bought probiotics, but with “microbial restoration”? Why didn’t we reinfuse patients with their own microbes after antibiotics?

The scientific term for this is “autologous fecal transplant.” In theory, it could work like a system reboot disk works for your computer. You’d freeze your feces, which are roughly half microbes, and when your microbiome became corrupted or was depleted with antimicrobials, you could “reinstall” it from a backup copy. . . .

The “self-transplant” isn’t a new idea. In the late 1950s, a medical technologist named Stanley Falkow practiced what he called “fecal reconstitution.” Gut troubles often plagued surgery patients during recovery. They’d received antibiotics prophylactically, depleting their native gut microbes. So Mr. Falkow, working with an internist, began giving these patients capsules containing their own feces, collected and frozen before treatment. It helped tremendously. But when the hospital administrator found out — patients didn’t know what they were swallowing — he fired Mr. Falkow. (Mr. Falkow, now Dr. Falkow, an emeritus microbiology professor at Stanford, was rehired soon thereafter, but had to abandon the project.)

Almost 60 years later, the “fecal transplant” is a cutting-edge treatment for the pathogen Clostridium difficile, a bug that kills 29,000 yearly and infects nearly half a million. “C. diff” tends to strike after antibiotics deplete the microbes that naturally inhabit the gut, leaving us vulnerable to invasion. So far, fecal transplants seem to be more than 90 percent effective at curing these infections.

As currently practiced, however, the transplant material usually comes from someone else. Even with careful screening, that presents some risk. It’s theoretically safer to receive one’s own microbes.

The 21st century isn’t turning out as I’d expected. That said, this seems like a good idea, and one that’s been shamefully ignored (or suppressed) because of people’s childish “yuck” reactions.

CRACKED.COM EDITOR TEMPORARILY BANNED FROM REDDIT:

Little wonder then, that so many Redditors accuse [Jason “David Wong” Pargin’s] comedy site of becoming little more than a knockoff version of Salon or Gawker. 

Once upon a time, the site knew few comedic boundaries. For example, this “Star Wars” parody, created by former contributor John Cheese contains racial stereotypes, rape jokes, and intensely vulgar language. It specifically advises the easily offended to stay away.

Today, things are different. In his AmA, Wong proudly proclaimed that his writers “try really hard to walk through the reasoning behind our criticism” and explain “why seemingly innocuous things can be toxic.” Readers waiting for a punchline were disappointed: Wong was being serious.

In one viral image, the website’s former content is compared to its current fare. On one side of the image is the site’s front page as it appeared in 2010, featuring articles about superhero identities, historical identities, and writing tips. On the other is the site as it appears today – plastered with headlines like “5 ways men are trained to hate women,” “The 5 weirdest things that can cause you to be racist,” and “5 shocking realities of being transgender.” Widespread accusations that the site has transitioned from comedy to identity politics appear to have a solid basis in reality.

In July of 2010, Kathy Shaidle wrote “It’s come to this: Cracked.com is the ‘paper’ of record.”  At the end of that same year, Aaron Worthing of Patterico praised their surprisingly evenhanded coverage of CNN’s distorted Tea Party reporting, in article titled “Cracked.com Sets the Record Straight on the Tea Party (And Eight Other Major Stories).”

Based on the above article at Big Journalism, it sounds like Cracked has since jettisoned any effort at maintaining a bipartisan audience — and not at all coincidentally, replacing humor with angry left SJW proselytizing.

DNA EVIDENCE: not as simple as it looks on CSI.

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CHANGE: Cheap Fast Powerful Gene-Editing Will Soon Change the World. “CRISPR does indeed pose ethical challenges. But these bioethicists oddly think that the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the European Food Safety Administration, the European Medicines Agency, and similar bureaucracies are somehow qualified to resolve them.”

I don’t think bioethicists have anything especially useful to say anyway.

HOW RED WAS MY HOLLYWOOD: Timothy Stanley reviews Hollywood Traitors: Blacklisted Screenwriters—Agents of Stalin, Allies of Hitler, by Allan H. Ryskind:

Ryskind succeeds in three regards. First, he conclusively proves that each of the Ten was guilty of having been a Communist at some stage and that the degree of Communist subversion of Hollywood was substantial. The lying was extraordinary. In the case of the writer Lillian Hellman, it lasted a lifetime: obfuscating the details of her support for Communism until her death and, along the way, gaining plaudits for her supposedly noble resistance to false charges. Entertainment professionals joined cells so secret that each could operate quite separately from the others. These men and women put into their movies Marxist messages ranging from the subtle to the overt. MGM’s 1944 film “Song of Russia” stars Robert Taylor as an American conductor who visits the USSR in 1941. His love affair with a beautiful pianist in a surprisingly prosperous socialist republic is ruined by Operation Barbarossa. Ayn Rand, testifying before HUAC, described the Nazi invasion as depicted in “Song of Russia.” Border guards are shown listening peacefully to a Tchaikovsky concert:

Suddenly there is a Nazi attack on them. The poor, sweet Russians are unprepared. Now realize—and that was a great shock to me—that the border that was being shown was the border of [Soviet-occupied] Poland. That was the border of an occupied, destroyed, enslaved county which Hitler and Stalin destroyed together. That was the border being shown to us—just a happy place with people listening to music.

Ryskind’s second success is to remind us of the moral ghastliness of the Nazi-Soviet pact. One of the frequent excuses made for Communist sympathy in the 1930s is that it was a form of opposition to fascism. Yet between 1939 and 1941, Stalin carved up Eastern Europe with Hitler, allowing the German dictator to wage war uninterrupted in the West. Ryskind shows how faithful Soviet agents fell in line, switching overnight from advocating an anti-fascist front to urging America to stay out of the war. It is upsetting to see included on the list of guilty people the names of some the century’s greatest writers: “Lillian Hellman, Donald Ogden Stewart, Langston Hughes, Dashiell Hammett, and Erskine Caldwell backed [the antiwar effort], which savaged the parties resisting Hitler and the nations overwhelmed by his armies as ‘imperialist’. Caldwell, author of Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre, sent greetings from Moscow.”

And all largely airbrushed out of history, or remembered if at all, as the inspiration for Orwell’s “Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia/Eurasia” pitch black running joke throughout 1984. But then, as Daniel Hannan wrote last year in the London Telegraph, “The greatest cultural victory of the Left has been to disregard the Nazi-Soviet Pact.”

(Via Orrin Judd.)

CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM PRODUCES UNANTICIPATED CONSEQUENCES:

Successive waves of campaign finance regulation have been designed to limit the influence of money in politics. What these regulations have actually done is quite different. In Better Parties, Better Government, Joel Gora and Peter Wallison observe that today’s campaign finance regulations limit the extent to which candidates can coordinate their fundraising and campaigning efforts with central party organizations, so candidates have to build their own fundraising networks. Building such a network is fairly easy for those who’ve spent their lives around the very wealthy or who are very wealthy themselves. But it is much harder for less wealthy individuals who have dedicated their lives to public service or who for whatever reason aren’t skilled in the art of wheedling money out of strangers.

But remember, if you oppose various campaign-finance “reforms,” you’re a tool of the rich.

ANDREW MALCOLM: GEE, THAT FELT GOOD TO DUMP BOEHNER, MCCARTHY AS SPEAKER, BUT NOW…

Our smart colleagues on IBD’s Editorial Board argue, accurately here, that this is a great opportunity to elect a genuine conservative House leader to seriously confront the destructive runaway executive branch of liberal B. Obama.

They have much more confidence in this bickering bunch of political clowns to look beyond tonight’s Happy Hour. Like most events every election, public or within a political caucus, is about opportunity. Losing a leg is an opportunity to learn about walking again. That doesn’t make it desirable.

So, lets examine the mechanics of this “change.” Last January as part of the transition to a newly-enlarged GOP House majority, conservative members disgruntled with John Boehner’s less-than-consultative leadership style could have staged their coup. Start a new session with a new leader for the run-up to 2016.

But they didn’t. They dithered, spent 10 months grumbling and pouting. Boehner for his part was seemingly deaf in an old-fashioned speakerly way to the simmering tribal dissatisfaction. Politics would be so much simpler without people.

Just ask any politician, who takes as his personal motto Bertolt Brecht’s famous quip, “Some party hack decreed that the people had lost the government’s confidence and could only regain it with redoubled effort. If that is the case, would it not be simpler, If the government simply dissolved the people and elected another?”

(And of course, SMOD stands ready to dissolve all the people — and the politicians.)

THIS PIECE IS A BIT OVERWROUGHT, but it’s interesting that the concept of “the Deep State” has migrated from Turkey to the United States. And the Deep State is certainly real, as events in Wisconsin demonstrate.

THE BEHAVIORAL “SCIENCES:” Making It All Up.

LARRY CORREIA ONLY NEEDED THIS: Update! Modern Manhood ACHIEVED!

DOES IT EVER: It Burns!!!

SAME AS IT EVER WAS: Malthusian Monkeys Screech of Doom.

AND VERIZON WANTS TO: Verizon to Track Users Through “Supercookies”.

RESEARCH?  WHY: They cooked up a play about the only man to win the Pillsbury Bake-Off. But they didn’t tell him.

YOU’RE THE PRODUCT: Yes, Facebook is stalking you.

NOT SURPRISED: SWAT team descends on CO school over student’s Halloween costume.

UNEXPECTEDLY: University of Toronto Dumps Transgender Bathrooms After Peeping Incidents.

WILL? NO.  SHOULD? YEAH: Will the Supreme Court gut unions’ power?

INSOMNIA THEATER (DIRE STRAITS EDITION): This week’s post features my recent interview with Ginni Thomas, columnist for The Daily Caller and wife of Justice Clarence Thomas. Ginni and I discuss how “The international situation for free speech is dire,” covering everything from blasphemy laws to the new wave of campus political correctness that Jonathan Haidt and I examine in our article “The Coddling of the American Mind.” Check out the video below or over at The Daily Caller.

BUT THE WAR IS INTERESTED IN US: Ukrainians are still alone in their heroic fight for freedom.

COURAGE: In Israel, they’re defying terror by living their lives.

ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS NO ONE ASKED: Keeping up with the Kardashians’ pubic hair.  (Shouldn’t that be keeping down?  Also ew.)

RUNNING OUT OF OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY: NHS faces biggest financial crisis ‘in a generation’.