THEODORE DALRYMPLE: Should You Demand Fresh Blood For Your Next Transfusion? “Happily in the event, there was no difference in the outcome of the 2430 patients who took part in the trial. Fresh blood did not conduce to better survival than stored blood. Indeed, those patients who were given stored blood had a lower death rate, though not significantly so. The authors admit limitations to their study: their patients were a mixed lot, with many different conditions, and so the results may have concealed differences in sub-groups. Moreover, their fresh blood could have been still fresher, and that might have made a difference. If fresh blood were needed anywhere, you might suppose, it would be in cardiac surgery. But a second paper, American this time, that reported a trial in 1481 patients, showed the same thing: that fresh blood was not superior to stored. What stands to reason, or is thought on instinct to stand to reason, may not be so.”

That’s interesting. I had seen earlier studies showing that stored blood loses nitric oxide, and so when I give blood I take an extra arginine supplement in the morning to boost the nitric oxide in the blood when I donate.

MY THOUGHTS ON THE CIVIL WAR AND ITS AFTERMATH, from 2003. I should note that the Democrats were on the losing side.

And there’s more here.

YA THINK? Happy Fathers’ Day: Study shows American dads portrayed as ‘bumbling’ moron not ‘patriotic’ or ‘heroic.’

The study, titled “Stay Tuned: Portrayals of Fatherhood to Come,” found significant differences between what it calls, middle- and working-class dads. It studied 13 fathers in 12 sitcoms and their 699 interactions with minor children.

The study’s abstract concludes that father-child interactions do not differ based on race or ethnicity, but they do depend on a family’s economic class, marital status, and the TV network airing the show.

For instance, Troilo found heterosexual dads were much more likely to say hurtful things to their children than the one gay father in the study, whose parenting skills were depicted as nearly perfect.

Portraying fathers as bumbling idiots is not a new trend, but does seem to be growing.

I would have said it had peaked, but I don’t watch a lot of TV.

A CHANCE TO REPEAL NEW YORK’S DUMB AND DANGEROUS KNIFE LAW: Batter-up New York: Let’s bring gravity-knife repeal home.

But look who’s standing in the way: Will New York Republicans Kill Knife Law Reform for the Second Year in a Row? Come on, guys. Show some sense here. Even the Village Voice is on board. Plus: “Many of [those opposed] are upstate senators whose constituents are going to the city and getting arrested with the same pocket knives they’re carrying back home.” What the hell? (Bumped).

VIDEO: How an enormous Caterpillar mining truck is built. “Forget a factory assembly line. The Cat 797 mining truck is so gigantic, it’s assembled on-site.”

AT AMAZON, coupons galore in Vitamins & Dietary Supplements.

Also, 30% off on Pro & DJ Headphones.

THERE’S A LOT TO SEE HERE, I SUSPECT: Federal Judge Reopens Suit to Obtain Huma Abedin’s Clinton E-Mails.

A federal judge has reopened a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that aims to obtain e-mails between former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her longtime aide, Huma Abedin, saying that the discovery of Clinton’s private server warranted the revival of the case.

Abedin is essentially Hillary’s right hand, and arguably much, much more. She is the wife of disgraced NY Congressman Anthony Weiner, and has been intimately associated with Clinton for many years. Her emails are just as essential to see as Hillary’s.  Good for Judicial Watch for pursuing this.

CATHY YOUNG: The Most Radical $10 Bill Candidate: Ayn Rand. The only problem is, our current political class is treating Atlas Shrugged as a how-to manual, rather than a cautionary tale.

DIAGRAMMING DINERS’ DIETS:

These days, it’s not uncommon to give a dinner party where you find that one person’s a vegan, a second eats gluten free, the third is allergic to tree nuts, and a fourth will not eat shellfish or berries. After you add up all the religious and moral prohibitions, the allergies, the sensitivities, and the preferences, what remains to serve your guests is … a nice big helping of air. HEPA-filtered, low-humidity air.

I recently saw just such a problem in my Twitter feed: One brunch guest was a vegetarian and another guest had eschewed gluten, nuts and dairy products. How do you cope with such a conundrum?

There are three basic strategies you can employ here: Capitulation, Divide and Conquer, or Armistice.

Or just throw cocktail parties.

OF COURSE HE HAS A “MANIFESTO.” AND HIS BIGGEST COMPLAINT WAS THAT HE COULDN’T FIND ANY OTHER RACISTS TO HANG OUT WITH. Charleston Shooter Dylann Roof’s Racist Manifesto: On what appears to be his website: “We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet.”

Meanwhile, the survivors are forgiving him: “Such strong and profound expressions of Christianity rarely appear in the media. Truly awe-inspiring.”

THE HORROR: HuffPo Blogger Describes ‘The Pain Of Realizing I’m White.’

So, do you wanna go to The Gap?

Plus, the real takeaway:

Michael hated her own “Whiteness,” but admitted she “disliked the Whiteness of other White people more.”

“I felt like the way to really end racism was to feel guilty for it, and to make other White people feel guilty for it too,” she stressed.

Uh huh.

ONE DOES NOT SIMPLY SCRUB THINGS FROM THE INTERNET: China Announced and Immediately Hid Its New World-Class Monster Cannon: 7.5 meters long, 125mm shells, Mach 6 firing speed, scrubbed off the internet. “While it looks like artillery, details of the cannon’s construction (specifically the placement of its recoil system) suggest it’s optimized for horizontal discharge, not high-angle firing. Which is to say this sucker might be destined for a tank.”

THE FERGUSON EFFECT: Gallup: Confidence in police at a 22-year low:

The poll found that 25 percent of Americans said they had “a great deal” of confidence in the police while 27 percent said they had “quite a lot,” 30 percent said “some,” 16 percent “very little,” and 2 percent said “none.”

According to Gallup, the 18 percent total of “very little” and “none” is the highest it has seen.

Gallup attributed the decline in confidence to recent police actions in cities such as Ferguson, Missouri, Staten Island, New York, and North Charleston, South Carolina where black men were killed by white police officers.

“These events likely contributed to the decline in confidence in police, although it is important to note that Americans’ trust in police has not been fundamentally shaken — it remains high in an absolute sense, despite being at a historical low,” the Gallup report reads.

Overall the group that saw the largest drop in confidence were Democrats, who experienced a 13 percentage point decline over the past two years.

Well, yes — Democrats are the ones driving the decline in confidence. After all, to liberals/progressives, law is just politics, so this notion filters down to law enforcement as well. Ironically, the ones hurt the most by this attitude are the residents of low income communities — mostly blacks — who have pledged unwavering political fidelity to Democrats.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 772.

MORE ON THE REASON AFFAIR: How Government Stifled Reason’s Free Speech. I continue to think that this is a case of U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara doing one (or both) of two things: (1) Attempting a sort of brushback pitch regarding people talking smack about federal judges, to the effect of saying that we can’t punish you under the First Amendment but we’ll go after you anyway; and/or (2) doing a “favor” for a judge before whom he has a lot of cases. Both seem like abuses of power to me.

TOO BIG TO FAIL, OBAMACARE EDITION: Obamacare’s Oligopoly Wave.

The five largest commercial health insurers in the U.S. have contracted merger fever, or maybe typhoid. UnitedHealth is chasing Cigna and even Aetna; Humana has put itself on the block; and Anthem is trying to pair off with Cigna, which is thinking about buying Humana. If the logic of ObamaCare prevails, this exercise will conclude with all five fusing into one monster conglomerate. . . .

[T]he economics of ObamaCare reward scale over competition. Benefits are standardized and premiums are de facto price-controlled. With margins compressed to commodity levels, buying more consumers via mergers is simpler than appealing to them with better products, to the extent the latter is still legal. Synergies across insurer combinations to reduce administrative overhead and other expenses also look better for shareholders.

The mergers reflect the reality that government—Medicaid managed care, Medicare Advantage and the ObamaCare exchanges—is now the artery of insurance profits, not the private economy. The feds “happen to be, for most of us now, our largest customer,” Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini said this month at a Goldman Sachs conference. . . .

A healthier market would have many new competitive entrants given the transformative pace of technological and biomedical discovery. Health-care finance and delivery ought to be evolving along with these innovations, but the only disruptive force under ObamaCare is government. So five years into the glories of “health-care reform,” the same antiquated incumbents dominate as they did before, only with less accountability to patients. Cartels don’t care about quality, safety or costs to consumers.

It’s not a flaw; it’s by design. Next stop: single-payer, unless Obamacare is repealed, and soon. 

VIRGINIA POSTREL: Paulson’s $400 Million Gift Represents Harvard’s Realization That You Can’t Be a First-Rate University Without A First-Rate Engineering School.

Ultimately, the Allston move arose from a conjunction of the university’s recognition that Harvard could not be a great university in the 21st century if it didn’t have a great engineering school, and students recognizing that there were lots of things they could learn by taking our courses that would help them to solve the world’s problems in a way that not only had significant impact but was fun. . . .

I’m arguing here for the importance of engineering and applied science as a discipline, rather than as a tool to be used by other people to solve their problems. We’ve always, in computer science and other areas of applied science, fought the perception that other people come to us with neatly formulated problems and then we do a couple of equations, or write a couple of programs, and give them back the solution. That’s not the way serious problems get attacked, and it’s certainly not the way inventions get created.

Read the whole thing.

TERROR: At least two killed in Austria after man drives into crowd before ‘stabbing passers-by’ in Graz. At present, it’s 3 dead, more than 50 injured, but based on what I’m seeing on Twitter quite a few of the injured are in bad shape so the death toll may go higher.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The US government’s predatory-lending program: America earns $3 billion a year charging strapped college parents above-market interest. “It’s like ‘The Sopranos,’ except it’s the government.” “PLUS loans have also become a key revenue source for many schools, particularly historically black colleges and for-profits that tend to serve lower-income families. But that just illustrates the increasingly tortured economic paradoxes at the heart of modern higher education, where schools have no incentive to provide affordable prices as long as they can count on federal dollars for making education affordable. Ultimately, Parent PLUS sluices more cash into the college-industrial complex, helping educators jack up their tuitions while pressuring parents to make up the difference with debt, while doing nothing to ensure they’re getting a real return on their investment. It enhances accessibility, but not really affordability.”

Do tell.

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!

ASHE SCHOW: Finally, someone in the national media is standing up for due process.

This week marked the first time someone in the national media reported that due process is under attack at colleges and universities across the country.

For too long, only accusers of sexual assault had their side of the story told in the national media. Their stories were rarely questioned, as activists claimed that to question an accuser was to be a rape apologist.

The only time an accusation was ever questioned was when it fell apart spectacularly, as in the Duke Lacrosse case and the Rolling Stone gang-rape story. Even then, those who questioned the accounts were labeled denialists and chastised for daring to question a “victim.”

Meanwhile, accused students across the country have been pushing back, insisting that the accusations against them are inaccurate and that they lacked the due process to prove their innocence. They’ve been largely ignored by the national media. Until now.

This week, Fox News host Megyn Kelly took issue with a particularly egregious case in which a male student received a sex act while he was blacked out and two years later was accused of sexual assault. He was not given the tools to defend himself, such as the representation of counsel (an adviser was allowed to sit with him but couldn’t advocate on his behalf) or the ability to compel evidence that could persuade the hearing panel of his innocence.

He was found responsible and expelled. He hired a lawyer, who discovered text messages sent from the accuser immediately after the encounter indicating there was no sexual assault. When the accused student presented these texts to the school, they refused to reopen his case.

Kelly discussed the case three nights in a row. On the first night, she brought on K.C. Johnson, co-author of a book about the Duke Lacrosse rape hoax. The second night she discussed the case with Fox News political analyst Brit Hume, and on the third night she interviewed the accused student’s lawyer. Each night, viewers could see the outrage Kelly felt toward the university and the “injustice,” as she called it, done to this student.

Bravo.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Harvard-Stanford admissions hoax becomes international scandal.

The Korean math prodigy at one of the nation’s top high schools had Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg on the phone, personally encouraging the teenager to attend Harvard University. She received letters from Harvard professors, encouraging her to bring her brilliant abilities to Cambridge next fall instead of accepting her admission to Stanford University on the opposite coast.

As she struggled to decide between five-figure scholarship promises from both schools, she got a novel offer: She could spend two years at each elite school as part of an arrangement just for her. The exciting dual-enrollment opportunity garnered starstruck coverage from Korean media outlets, which dubbed her the “Genius Girl.”

But none of it was true. . . .

The question now at a school is what caused the student to concoct an elaborate college admissions scheme. The answer seems obvious to students and teachers there: Overwhelming pressure to succeed from parents and unrealistic expectations from the teens themselves.

“We celebrate the accomplishment of students who get into all eight Ivies,” said Brandon Kosatka, TJ’s director of student services. “That’s the bar, and our kids are shooting for that. They don’t like to be the second best. If that’s the bar, then yes, that creates anxiety for them.”

The whole thing’s a cargo cult. She’s just taking it to the next level.

THIS SEEMS UNWISE: Why Does McDonald’s Want to Rebrand as a ‘Progressive Burger Company’?

UPDATE: From the comments:

McDonald’s completely destroyed its brand with me by hiring the loathsome apologist Robert Gibbs to be its public face. McDonald’s, you are now dead to me. If you think ever encroaching government is “socially responsible,” we no longer have anything in common.

With chains with fantastic products like Shake Shack and In n’ Out — and mediocre but still much better than McDonald’s Five Guys — slowly growing throughout the USA and eventually the world, there will no longer any reason for anybody to eat the crap at McDonald’s.

Yeah, I don’t think the “progressive” demographic is enough to sustain them.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO LIE ABOUT RAPE! (CONT’D): Jailed: Tube worker who called police to falsely claim she was raped outside east London nightclub at 5am. The judge told Comfort Yinusa she had “let down genuine rape victims.”

A Tube worker, who dialled 999 at 5am to falsely claim she had been raped in the street, was jailed for eight months at the Old Bailey today.

Comfort Yinusa, 23, accused two men of attacking her outside a club near Liverpool Street station.

Judge Peter Rook told her: “You have let down genuine rape victims, your actions led to a costly and unnecessary police investigation and two innocent men being put through the trauma of arrest and the procedures that follows.”

Yinusa had claimed she had left the Dollhouse club with the two men and made the allegation after phoning her boyfriend in distress and asking to be picked up.

Two police officers and an ambulance with two paramedics were sent to investigate and treat any injuries.

But detectives discovered CCTV footage in a nearby McDonald’s restaurant showed Yinusa and her two alleged attackers laughing together.

Phone records showed one of the men was combing streets of the City looking for his car when the alleged rape was said to have happened.

Police were able to track down the two men who spent six weeks each on police bail before suspicion was dropped.

More than £3,000 was wasted on forensic lines of inquiry before her lies could be proved and she was arrested in December 2013.

At first Yinusa pleaded not guilty to doing actions intended to pervert the course of justice but changed her plea before she was due to go on trial last month.

The Brits seem to be better at actually punishing false accusers.