ADVICE ON safe and effective tooth-whitening.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 681.

PROGRESS TOWARD A Constitutional Convention. Nice to see the Tennessee Law Review referenced.

BUT IN THE UNITED STATES, EVEN OBAMA HASN’T BEEN ABLE TO KILL IT: Why Shale Fails Abroad:

There’s been a fracking party raging for years now, but apparently the United States was the only one invited. Years after the shale boom took off here in America, the rest of the world is still woefully behind in developing their own shale reserves, which naturally raises the question: why is shale failing abroad? . . .

Earlier this week Royal Dutch Shell announced it would put its shale operations in South Africa on hold after delays in the permitting process and the drop in the global price of oil soured its initial hopes. Opaque regulations and bureaucratic snarls also helped kill shale proposals in places like Poland and Lithuania.

China is estimated to have nearly twice as much shale gas as the United States (it has by far the world’s largest reserves), but its formations are in remote regions that lack important infrastructure like roads and pipelines. Moreover, China’s rocks are more “crunched” than America’s relatively even-layered “wedding cake” geology, further complicating efforts there.

Local protests have also posed a large problem in virtually every country with significant shale reserves, from the UK to Poland to China. Unlike the rest of the world, America affords property owners the rights to what’s underneath their property as well as what’s on the surface. These mineral rights have helped overcome the kind of not-in-my-backyard thinking that has stopped operations elsewhere in the world.

Well, good. A world in which the US is the biggest petroleum producer sounds good to me.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: Breaking a decades-long trend, the world gets more violent. “That’s a pretty disturbing spike by anyone’s terms. And if you look at the first few months of 2015, the violence doesn’t seem to be waning. What’s even more worrying is that this seems to be part of an ongoing trend that now goes back eight years. According to the Australia-based Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), global violence — as defined by a range of measures from conflict deaths, to displaced persons, to homicide rates — has been rising since 2007. This news is in many ways surprising because up to 2007, the data suggested the world was becoming a much safer place.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Campus “consent” wars: Expelled male student sues Cornell Univ.

MICHAEL WALSH: Good Thing Britain Banned Guns, Otherwise There Could Be Muslim-Anglo Violence. Actually, the gun ban is there to prevent Anglo-Muslim violence. I predict that if it fails, it will fail catastrophically.

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

Also, coupons galore in Grocery & Gourmet Food. In tough times, it’s good to know where your next meal is coming from.

Plus, Kindle Daily Deals.

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

MORE ON THAT TEXAS HIGHER-ED SCANDAL: UT and Legislature Just Keep Digging That Wallace Hall Hole Deeper for Themselves.

From the very beginning, top Texas legislators and key officials at the University of Texas have offered only one response to revelations of wrongdoing brought forward by UT System Regent Wallace Hall of Dallas — absolute denial, backed up by a yee-haw hog-hunting bloodlust for Hall’s scalp. The more they do it, the deeper they dig.

In the last few days, the corrupt practices discovered by Hall — funny money at the law school, secret backdoor admissions for relatives of legislators, bogus accounting of endowment funds and more — have spurred a cascade of negative external consequences for UT.

Plaintiffs in the longstanding Abigail Fisher reverse discrimination litigation this week filed a new writ in the U.S. Supreme Court charging that the university’s system for achieving racial diversity “is a sham,” citing evidence first discovered by Hall and confirmed in subsequent investigations.

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni in Washington yesterday issued a blistering condemnation of efforts we told you about here Monday by a state senator who wants to pass a law against university trustees asking too many questions. Citing the Enron debacle, the council warns that putting directors in blindfolds and handcuffs is exactly the wrong way to go in seeking institutional responsibility.

No shit.

Just in case somebody thought there was anything “conservative” about Amarillo Republican state Senator Kel Seliger’s attempt to hog-tie university trustees and regents, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank in Austin, weighed in yesterday: Thomas K. Lindsay, director of the foundations’ Center for Higher Education, wrote an open letter to Seliger explaining to him the concept of fiduciary responsibility.

That’s a notion that more university trustees need to be familiarized with.

BYRON YORK: As tech giant calls for more foreign workers, Senate hears of displaced Americans.

The Eric Schmidt pleading for more foreign workers is the same Eric Schmidt who boasts of turning away thousands upon thousands of job seekers who apply for a few prized positions at Google. For example, at an appearance in Cleveland last October to promote his book, How Google Works, Schmidt explained that his company receives at least 1,000 applications for every job opening. “The good news is that we have computers to do the initial vetting,” Schmidt explained, according to an account in the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Other tech leaders join Schmidt in calling for more foreign workers. Some companies are actually lobbying for more H-1Bs and laying off American staff at the same time. For example, last year Microsoft announced the layoff of 18,000 people at the very moment it was pushing Congress for more guest worker visas.

Given all that, there’s not quite the unanimous agreement on the need for more foreign workers that Schmidt claims. At a hearing this week before the Senate Judiciary Committee, a number of experts testified that the H-1B program, so sought-after by CEOs, is being abused to harm American workers.

Ron Hira, a Howard University professor and author of the book Outsourcing America, told the story of Southern California Edison, which recently got rid of 500 IT employees and replaced them with a smaller force of lower-paid workers brought in from overseas through the H-1B program. The original employees were making an average of about $110,000 a year, Hira testified; the replacements were brought to Southern California Edison by outsourcing firms that pay an average of between $65,000 and $75,000.

“To add insult to injury,” Hira said, “SCE forced its American workers to train their H-1B replacements as a condition of receiving their severance packages.”

There’s a big campaign issue here, if the GOP can bring itself to say something bad about big corporations.

HMM: US Orchestrated Anti-Bibi Bomb May Bite its Backers.

SETTING UP ANOTHER CONFIRMATION FIGHT: ATF director steps down after bullet ban controversy.

WITH LAW SCHOOL APPLICATIONS SET TO HIT 15-YEAR LOW, Declining Applications Cause Law Schools to Deploy ‘Strange’ Survival Tactics.

Related: Law School Fire Sale: Pace Offers to Match In-State Public Tuition.

Say, have I mentioned that applications are up 79% this year at the University of Tennessee College of Law? Or that we rocketed up 20 places in the U.S. News rankings this year? Probably not, as I’m known for my modesty.

CONGRESS: Holder in Overtime as Lynch Nomination Delayed.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Tempe police arrest PE teacher in sex conduct with minor. “Nicole Renee Wooten told police that she committed sexual acts with an eighth-grader between 2005 and 2006, according to court documents. The girl was about 12 years old at the time.”

Remember, male teachers are scarce because people are afraid they might be sexual predators.

SMART DIPLOMACY: Assad crosses Obama’s imaginary red line.

TRUESBURY: Get yer race conversation right here.

SHOCKER: NBC Fudges Ratings Numbers In Wake Of Brian Williams Scandal.

AT AMAZON, deals galore in Training & Fitness.

And shop the Amazon Emergency Prep Store. Plus, Emergency & Long-Term Storage Food Deals. When bad things happen, it’s good to have food.

Plus, Generators and Portable Power for Storm Season. Just remember, when winter storms are over, spring and summer storms are on the way.

HOW ALLERGY MEDICATIONS CAN interfere with your sex life.

TRAINING: Pentagon To Conduct “Realistic Military Training” For War On American Soil Against “Insurgents.” They’ve been doing this for a long time. And let me note, for those fearing some sort of coup, that if the Obama Administration were planning on that, they probably wouldn’t have spent so much time gratuitously pissing off the military and law enforcement communities. . . .

MEANWHILE, I DON’T EVEN RECYCLE: Serbia Asks People To Please Stop Throwing Their Grenades In The Garbage.

JOHN PODHORETZ ON ISRAEL: The Crisis Has Exploded. “We may be hard upon a great moment of testing for American Jews. Are they going to fall for this? Are they going to allow themselves to be used as a wedge against Israel in hostile territory like the United Nations? Are they going to provide more ammunition to the president and his effort to still his critics only weeks before the United States might be announcing its acquiescence to the gravest existential threat the Jewish people have faced since the Holocaust?”

We may be hard upon a great moment of testing for Americans in general, and not just where Israel is concerned.

SCIENCE: Better Sleep For A Better Sex Life.

Related: How To Get Your Spouse To Exercise.