IF YOU’RE LOOKING FOR RECIPES, Mary Chastain’s got you covered.

GERMAN TEXTBOOKS AND ANTI-ISRAEL LIBERAL ELITES: At Commentary, Evelyn Gordon writes “a German study showing that educated elites, rather than the far-right fringes, are the wellspring of anti-Semitism in that country; just last month, another study found that the same is true for anti-Israel sentiment. And the reason for this goes beyond the obvious fact that anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism are related:”

The background to the new German study is a series of polls showing shocking levels of anti-Israel sentiment among ordinary Germans: For instance, fully 35 percent “equate Israeli policies toward the Palestinians with Nazi policies toward the Jews.” Given the vaunted “special relationship” between Germany and Israel, such findings raise obvious questions about how so many Germans developed such warped views.

So a group of German and Israeli researchers decided to analyze German textbooks to see what exactly German schools are teaching their students. They examined 1,200 history, geography and social studies textbooks from five German states, and concluded that these books portray Israel almost exclusively as a militarist, warmongering society.

Israel’s robust democracy, respect for human rights and other achievements are absent in these books. The illustrations consist of “tendentious and one-sided photographic presentations” of Israeli soldiers threatening or inflicting violence on Palestinians.

To quote from a 2012 article at the Israeli YNet Website:

To quote psychiatrist Zvi Rex: “Europe will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.” Europe doesn’t want to live under the psychological burden of Auschwitz forever. The Jews are living reminders of the moral failure of Europe. This leads to the projection of guilt on Israel and the remaining European Jews.

Gordon also notes that in America, 47 percent of Democrats “deemed Israel racist, with only 32 percent disagreeing, and a whopping 76 percent said Israel has too much influence on U.S. foreign policy. But in truth, it shouldn’t be news to anyone by now that anti-Israel sentiment, like its kissing cousin anti-Semitism, is primarily the province of the liberal elites.”

Read the whole thing.

RELATED: “A BBC documentary has substituted the word ‘Israelis’ for ‘Jews’ in its translation of interviews with Palestinians, its maker has admitted.”

Unexpectedly.

WANT TO REVISIT YOUR YOUTH? WHY NOT TRY PAPER-AND-PENCIL ROLEPLAYING GAMES: “So you experimented in college. Well, I’m here to tell you that you needn’t feel ashamed,” Moe Lane writes.

PLAN TO REQUIRE BACKGROUND CHECKS FOR AMMUNITION SALES QUIETLY SUSPENDED IN NEW YORK:

The administration of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo agreed on Friday to suspend a plan to require background checks on ammunition sales, putting in doubt part of the gun control law that he considers one of his proudest legacies.

The decision, which the administration did not publicize, was the result of an unusual deal the governor’s office reached with the State Senate’s Republican majority. The Senate’s Democratic minority and the speaker of the State Assembly condemned the move.

Yet another Friday afternoon news dump.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 793.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 794.

JOURNALISM: No, the Oregon bakers weren’t fined for doxxing the complainants.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Pols’ High Anxiety Over Higher Ed.

College, once a sure ticket to the middle class, is causing a lot of anxiety these days. People are concerned about its cost, about low graduation rates and about the poor employment prospects of some graduates.

Hillary Clinton complained about the burden of student debt in a speech in New York last month. Senator Marco Rubio devoted much of a speech on economic opportunity this week to his own ideas for reforming higher education. We’re beginning to see the outlines of two rival approaches to addressing these problems. Democratic solutions center on increased federal spending and regulation, and Republican ones on increased competition. As a result, the next election could matter more than most for the future of higher education.

In particular, progressives want to use increased federal funding as leverage to get schools to act the way federal policymakers want them to. Thus President Barack Obama’s proposal to spend $60 billion to eliminate tuition at community colleges that “adopt promising and evidence-based institutional reforms to improve student outcomes.” A related idea is to have the government publish ratings for colleges, the better to make them responsive to the desires of Washington. The progressive approach exposes newer players, such as for-profit schools, to special scrutiny.

Conservatives, on the other hand, increasingly favor policies that provide new options for students: new educational institutions, new financing methods and new information for evaluating them. Rubio wants to liberalize accreditation rules to break up what he calls the higher-education “cartel.” He wants to make it easier for private institutions to extend student loans in return for a share of students’ future income. He thinks vocational education should get a greater share of federal funds. He thinks prospective students should have access to data about how well graduates of specific college programs fare at getting jobs. And he wants higher-education institutions, whether new or old, for-profit or not, to be accountable to customers rather than to the government.

If they’re accountable to customers rather than to the government, though, that reduces politicians’ leverage.

INSTITUTIONALIZED RACISM AND MISOGYNY: Democratic Senate Candidate Accuses DSCC Of ‘Insensitivity’ Towards ‘African-American Women.’

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JOURNALISM: Turns out the water Tom Selleck was accused of stealing was paid for.

IRAN MADE ILLEGAL PURCHASES OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS TECHNOLOGY LAST MONTH:

The question is not whether Iran can be trusted to uphold the nuclear deal now being negotiated in Vienna (it can’t), but whether the Obama administration and its P5+1 partners can be trusted to punish Iran when it violates the agreement?

Experience shows that unless Iran violates the deal egregiously, the temptation will be to ignore it. For instance, Iran got away with selling more oil than it should have under the interim agreement. More ominously, Tehran repeatedly pushed the envelope on technical aspects of the agreement—such as caps on its uranium stockpile—and got away with it. The Obama administration and other Western powers have so much invested in their diplomatic efforts that they’ll deny such violations ever occurred.

Or as Lee Smith writes elsewhere at the Weekly Standard, “Obama is counting on Iran to be a cornerstone of a regional peace similar to what the Congress of Vienna built in 1815. The more likely result is that he has unleashed a monster.”

Speaking of which, “‘Death to America’ Flag Barbecue in Iran ‘No Mere Sideshow’ as Talks Continue.”

JOEL KOTKIN: Countering Progressives’ Assault On Suburbia.

THE JUSTICE WHO STANDS ALONE: Giving Clarence Thomas His Due:

For political observers, the story of the Supreme Court’s recently concluded term was the clash of two great colliding forces. On one side stood the Court’s always-unified liberal bloc, fortified by the apostasies of Republican-appointed Justice Anthony Kennedy and sometimes Chief Justice John Roberts, most prominently in cases involving same-sex marriage and Obamacare. On the other side stood Justice Antonin Scalia, a lion in winter, caustic and witty in his dissents. But for close watchers of the Court, another theme ran through this term: the breadth and depth of Justice Clarence Thomas’s institutional critique of the Court itself for straying from the Constitution, failing to apply its own precedents evenhandedly, neglecting the separation of powers and federalism, and allowing itself to be manipulated by runaway executive agencies.

Like a medieval monk preserving Western culture through the Dark Ages, Thomas soldiered doggedly on, carrying the largest writing workload on the Court, pressing his point in cases small and large, sometimes at odds with his conservative colleagues, often alone. Perhaps history will never return to the path he is marking, but no one can say we weren’t warned.

Supreme Court justices are often little known or understood by the general public, and in Thomas’s case, his image is further obscured by his race, the controversies surrounding his 1991 confirmation, and his famous refusal to ask questions at oral argument. Thomas’s critics outside the legal profession tend to fall back on open attacks on his race (a “clown in blackface,” said Star Trek actor, Facebook meme-sharer, and gay-rights crusader George Takei recently) or unsubtly coded attacks (such as Harry Reid’s assertion that Thomas wasn’t smart or a good writer like Scalia, though Reid couldn’t name any of his opinions).

Read the whole thing.

HOW TWITTER CAN GET YOU KILLED: Terrorist talk online is evolving into a major threat.

SO, NO FLYING CARS, BUT IN THE 21ST CENTURY WE’VE AT LEAST GOT THIS: KFC Just Changed The Game With The “Chizza,” A Pizza With A Fried Chicken Crust.

As a friend said on Facebook, we may not have hoverboards, but if you stick with these you’ll find yourself on a Hoveround!

FALLEN ANGELS WAS JUST A SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL, RIGHT GUYS? RIGHT? GUYS? Is a mini ICE AGE on the way? Scientists warn the sun will ‘go to sleep’ in 2030 and could cause temperatures to plummet.

I’m sure global warming is to blame, somehow.

RICH KARLGAARD & MICHAEL S. MALONE: Building a Winning Political Team: Ronald Reagan knew how to do it. So did Bill Clinton. Their secret? They ignored the conventional wisdom.

As the 2016 presidential candidates start the long downhill run to the primaries early next year, the real test of their campaign teams begins.

If history is any guide, many of today’s highflying contenders will fall to earth in the next nine months, dragged down by dysfunctional organizations. What is astounding is that for all their experience running gubernatorial, senatorial or corporate staffs, most of this year’s candidates will repeat the same mistakes that have sunk their predecessors for generations.

For example, Jeb Bush is assembling a team of “superstars,” some of the best names in the campaign business. Hillary Clinton has pulled together staff based primarily on their compatibility and loyalty to her. Both strategies are usually recipes for disappointment.

We have been studying how effective teams work. Much research has been done the past 15 years that can shed light on this question—by anthropologists, sociologists, brain scientists and even cultural historians, who have uncovered common organizational archetypes that have held through the ages. If we’ve learned anything, it is that conventional wisdom about building and leading successful teams is almost completely wrong. . . .

As sensitive as presidential candidates are to the tiniest shifts in public opinion, they can be shockingly obtuse about problems in their own organizations. But even an excellent politician can crash and burn without the right support from a well-oiled team. Remember: In business you can come in second or third and still be successful, but not in politics.

True.

I SENSE A PATTERN HERE: New York magazine notes that “Climate scientists are dealing with psychological problems,” though I’m not sure which is the cause and which the effect:

One psychologist who works with climate scientists told Richardson they suffer from “pre-traumatic stress,” the overwhelming sense of anger, panic, and “obsessive-intrusive thoughts” that results when your work every day is to chart a planetary future that looks increasingly apocalyptic. Some climatologists merely report depression and feelings of hopelessness. Others, resigned to our shared fate, have written what amount to survival guides for a sort of Mad Max dystopian future where civilization has broken down under the pressures of resource scarcity and habitat erosion.

This kind of doom and gloom is not shared across the board, but nearly all climate scientists harbor serious doubts about the industrialized (and industrializing) world’s willingness to meet the challenges we face, which of course compounds their trauma. And perhaps the biggest indicator of that unwillingness is the constant attacks climate scientists endure at the hands of climate-change deniers — attacks that leave their own psychological bruises.

Meanwhile, another religion plots violent jihad against the infidels:

Professor’s Manifesto: Vegans Must Illegally Overthrow Society to Save the World http://t.co/RZw2wZRDRm pic.twitter.com/Y6r5Zaaexp

— National Review (@NRO) July 10, 2015

A few years ago at City Journal, Fred Siegel explored the last half century of “Progressives Against Progress:”

Crankery, in short, became respectable. In 1972, Sir John Maddox, editor of the British journal Nature, noted that though it had once been usual to see maniacs wearing sandwich boards that proclaimed the imminent end of the Earth, they had been replaced by a growing number of frenzied activists and politicized scientists making precisely the same claim. In the years since then, liberalism has seen recurring waves of such end-of-days hysteria. These waves have shared not only a common pattern but often the same cast of characters. Strangely, the promised despoliations are most likely to be presented as imminent when Republicans are in the White House. In each case, liberals have argued that the threat of catastrophe can be averted only through drastic actions in which the ordinary political mechanisms of democracy are suspended and power is turned over to a body of experts and supermen.

And just imagine what they’re telling their children about how awful the future will be.

JOHN FUND: History Shows That Donald Trump Is Perfectly Willing To Play A Third-Party Spoiler.

THIS WEEK’S FRIDAY NIGHT NEWS DUMP: Army National Guard Announces Data Breach:

This incident is unrelated to the breach of federal civilian employee personal information reported last week and on Thursday by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), officials confirmed.

“All current and former Army National Guard members since 2004 could be affected by this breach because files containing personal information was inadvertently transferred to a non-DoD-accredited data center by a contract employee,” said Maj. Earl Brown, a spokesman for the National Guard Bureau.  The data includes the Soldiers’ names, full Social Security numbers, dates of birth and home addresses.

“The National Guard Bureau takes the control of personal information very seriously,” Brown said.  “After investigating the circumstances of these actions, and the information that was transferred, the Guard has determined, out of an abundance of caution, to inform current and past Guard personnel that their Personally Identifiable Information (PII) was among the files that were transferred.”

“The issue was identified and promptly reported, and we do not believe the data will be used unlawfully,” Brown said.

That doesn’t sound very comforting.

I COULD SEE HIM AS PRESIDENT, OF THE INTERNET: Donald Trump, King of Trolling His Critics, Should Be the Internet’s Choice for President.

WHAT WILL WE DO When Antibiotics Don’t Work Anymore?

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How To Forge A Sword In Fire.

Back when I was in high school, a couple of friends of mine and I made Roman armor (lorica segmentata), cut and hand-riveted. We cheated on the swords, though, the blanks for which were bootlegged through the metal shop at Oak Ridge via a family friend.