BRENDAN O’NEILL: Stop boozing after four drinks? The public health people just don’t want us to have fun. “Nothing better sums up the out-of-touchness of public health prigs than the debate about so-called binge drinking. To these teetotal, ciggie-dodging suits, for whom fun is the foulest of f-words, and who are such miserabilists that they’re made sad by the idea of happy hour, anything more than four units of booze a day for a bloke, and three for a lady, counts as binging. Four units is two pints of weak lager. Three units is a large glass of wine. Are these people for real? That’s lunch for many of us.”

A “unit” isn’t a drink.

FASTER, PLEASE: For Vaccines Needed in an Epidemic, Timing is Everything.

Last year, scientists launched a trial of an experimental vaccine against Ebola in Guinea. On Friday, they reported great news: The vaccine works well, providing remarkable protection just 10 days after injection.

“We have to stop and celebrate the fact that an innovative trial design was able to come up, in the middle of an emergency, with pretty strong results,” said Dr. Seth Berkley, the chief executive officer of Gavi, an alliance of public and private organizations that provides greater access to vaccines in developing countries. “Let’s start with that.”

But let’s not end with that.

Dr. Berkley and other vaccine experts note a grim irony. Scientists showed that this vaccine was effective in monkeys a decade ago. Thereafter, the vaccine lingered in scientific limbo.

“We should have had an Ebola vaccine at least two or three years ago,” said Dr. Peter J. Hotez, the president of the Sabin Vaccine Institute and a science envoy at the State Department.

Only after the West African outbreak exploded last year did fresh urgency push experimental Ebola vaccines into trials. By the time the positive results were published, the outbreak was subsiding.

“After considerable rush and expense, and after thousands of people have died, you now have a vaccine that appears to be pretty damn good,” said Dr. Stanley A. Plotkin, an emeritus professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the board of the Foundation for Vaccine Research.

We can only guess how many lives might have been saved if this vaccine had passed muster before the outbreak, rather than after.

Years ago, I talked with Bill Frist about his desire to have the ability to develop vaccines really quickly. Failing that, you can just start earlier, I guess.

WHEN WORK is punished.

ROAD AND TRACK: The 2016 Cadillac ATS-V Is More of an M3 Than an M3.

THE WHITE HOUSE CAMPAIGN AGAINST CHUCK SCHUMER PICKS UP STEAM: WILL SCHUMER HOLD FIRM?

Possibly — isn’t all just “failure theater” anyhow? But at least, as Fred Fleitz writes at Iran Truth, “The reason the Schumer defection matters is because it puts the lie to the Obama administration’s shameful claim that opponents of the Iran deal are partisan extremists who want war with Iran. Schumer’s announcement is a powerful indication that opposition to this terrible agreement is in fact principled and bipartisan.”

Which is why, as with Joe Lieberman a decade ago, Schumer is in the left’s crosshairs.

ROGER SIMON ON WHY TRUMP WOULD BE A DISASTER AT FOREIGN AFFAIRS:

Here’s how I would imagine they would handle Trump. They would love him to death, treat him like the king of the world, the genius at deal-making, ask him for advice on everything from golf courses to hospital maintenance,  and if he got suspicious, love him even more, say great things about how rich he is, what a wonderful plane he has, ask for a tour, get pictures with him for People and Der Spiegel… then, after he feels like he’s been just the perfect president and has settled everything, that’s maybe six months,  snatch the Baltic states (Russia), explode your bomb (Iran), move in on practically everything west of Honolulu (China) and look the other way when ISIS blows up three shopping malls in Dallas.

What would Donald do about it? Say “You’re fired”? Brag about his money? I’m not optimistic.

And when it comes to domestic matters, as libertarian blogger “Popehat” tweets, “Consider the way Trump and his supporters speak of perceived enemies. Now, give them control of the IRS and Justice Department.”

So a looming disaster on public policy, a thin-skinned vindictive man with control over the IRS and the Justice Department, a core base of voters who view him in a near messianic light, a Fox News hater, and a man who has made common cause over the years with Bill, Hillary, Harry Reid, and the late Ted Kennedy. Trump really is the Bizarro World version of Obama.

But then, counting 2007, when the media went first started going all-in to create the Obama myth, it really has been the last eight years that led us to this moment.

TEST DRIVE: 2015 Mercedes-AMG C63 S Sedan.

POLITICO: ROGER STONE QUIT, WASN’T FIRED BY DONALD TRUMP IN CAMPAIGN SHAKEUP. “Donald Trump made the surprising announcement Saturday afternoon that he was firing his top adviser, Roger Stone, but hours before the political consultant’s friends told POLITICO that he was actually quitting.”

Which is a curious development, as the two men were made for each other, in oh, so many ways. Or as Jesse Walker of Reason tweets, “Donald Trump has fired Roger Stone, presumably upon realizing that his entire campaign has been an elaborate Roger Stone prank.”

(Stone’s a much snappier dresser, but his style is somewhat offset by the yuuuge Nixon tattoo.)

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FIRST, BANKRUPTING CITIES FOR LACK OF TRAFFIC FINES. NOW THIS? Self-Driving Cars To Cause Car Insurance Industry Revenue Plunge.

AFTER PUTIN, a Russian breakup?

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NEWS YOU CAN USE: How To Shoot Down A Drone.

EXERCISE: Walking vs. The Elliptical Machine. My own experience is that although the elliptical is lower impact, when I was doing it a lot (like 45 minutes 3 or 4 times a week) I got a lot of knee and ankle pain. I think it’s bad that each stride is basically identical.

TRUE: “Republicans smugly predicting Trump will fail from self-inflicted wounds don’t see what a stunning admission of their own failure that is.” Trump is the symptom. Lousy leadership is the disease.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 821.

CAITLIN FLANAGAN: Today’s College Students Can’t Seem To Take A Joke.

Three comics sat around a café table in the chilly atrium of the Minneapolis Convention Center, talking about how to create the cleanest possible set. “Don’t do what’s in your gut,” Zoltan Kaszas said. “Better safe than sorry,” Chinedu Unaka offered. Feraz Ozel mused about the first time he’d ever done stand-up: three minutes on giving his girlfriend herpes and banging his grandma. That was out.

This was not a case of professionals approaching a technical problem as an intellectual exercise. Money was riding on the answer. They had come to Minneapolis in the middle of a brutal winter for the annual convention of the National Association for Campus Activities (NACA), to sell themselves and their comedy on the college circuit. Representatives of more than 350 colleges had come as well, to book comics, musicians, sword swallowers, unicyclists, magicians, hypnotists, slam poets, and every kind of boat act, inspirational speaker, and one-trick pony you could imagine for the next academic year.

For the comics, the college circuit offers a lucrative alternative to Chuckle Hut gigs out on the pitiless road, spots that pay a couple hundred bucks and a free night in whatever squat the club owner uses to warehouse out-of-town talent. College gigs pay easily a grand a night—often much more—and they can come in a firecracker string, with relatively short drives between schools, each hour-long performance paid for (without a moment’s ugliness or hesitation) by a friendly student-activities kid holding out a check and hoping for a selfie. For all these reasons, thousands of comics dream of being invited to the convention.

The colleges represented were—to use a word that their emissaries regard as numinous—diverse: huge research universities, tiny liberal-arts colleges, Catholic schools, land-grant institutions. But the students’ taste in entertainment was uniform. They liked their slam poets to deliver the goods in tones of the highest seriousness and on subjects of lunar bleakness; they favored musicians who could turn out covers with cheerful precision; and they wanted comedy that was 100 percent risk-free, comedy that could not trigger or upset or mildly trouble a single student. They wanted comedy so thoroughly scrubbed of barb and aggression that if the most hypersensitive weirdo on campus mistakenly wandered into a performance, the words he would hear would fall on him like a soft rain, producing a gentle chuckle and encouraging him to toddle back to his dorm, tuck himself in, and commence a dreamless sleep—not text Mom and Dad that some monster had upset him with a joke.

People who can’t handle jokes aren’t mentally strong enough for college. They don’t belong there, and their unreasonable reactions shouldn’t be indulged.

SELF-IMAGE: Liberals Can’t Admit To Thinking Like Conservatives.

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WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Courtesy of Obama’s Nuclear Deal: Iranians Visiting a Nuclear Plant Near You?

THE WHITE HOUSE AND JEWS: “It’s the kind of dark, nasty stuff we might expect to hear at a white power rally, not from the President of the United States—and it’s gotten so blatant that even many of us who are generally sympathetic to the administration, and even this deal, have been shaken by it.”

Well, you should have been paying attention earlier.

WHEN GOVERNMENT FAILS AT GOVERNMENT’S FIRST JOB: Europe Paralyzed as Migrant Deaths Mount.

The latest tragedy in the Mediterranean, where a fishing ship smuggling possibly as many as 600 people capsized on Wednesday with about 200 presumed dead, is a portrait in miniature of the mess of policy mistakes, unintended consequences, and human folly that’s turning the Mare Nostrum into a graveyard. (A mark of how bad things are: 200 deaths can be considered “a portrait in miniature”.)
According to the WSJ, many of those aboard the ship came from Syria. For four years, the West has refused and/or been unable to do anything about the plight of that war-torn country, and no wonder people are fleeing it. Meanwhile, the port of immediate departure was in Libya, where the West—at the urging of many European nations—did intervene, but without any intention to stick around or plan to deal with the aftermath. Even as it becomes increasingly clear that Libya’s disorder is at the root of the current immigration crisis, Europe has not the foggiest clue how to fix things there.

For the short period of time during which they were on the fishing boat, the passengers appear to have suffered horrific but sadly unsurprising abuse at the hands of the smugglers they’d each paid thousands of dollars to. The tragedy was precipitated when an Irish patrol vessel came into sight, and those aboard the fishing boat rushed toward the side of the boat, causing the boat to capsize.

The passengers who were rescued were only 75 miles off the coast of Libya, less than halfway to the first bit of Italian territory in the Med, the island of Lampedusa, which itself lies twice as far again from Sicily. Yet the rescued migrants were taken to Europe, not turned back. On the one hand, this is an understandable humanitarian reaction, given what these people must have been through. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that this reaction creates inducement in and of itself for people to take such risks, and indeed, previous capsizes are though to have been caused when people rush to get “caught” by patrol ships.

Incentives matter.

DEAN OF SEXUAL ASSAULT: How The Sexual Assault Campaign Drove One Student Affairs Administrator Out Of Her Job:

My job, upon hearing of a situation (whether or not it was heading to a conduct hearing or a report to law enforcement), was not to take sides but to remain as clearheaded and objective as possible. Calling myself Dean of All Students — the accused and the accuser — was my reminder to myself as I began the process of overseeing the institutional response: the investigation, the support, the parents’ questions, the community outcry (if there was one).

I didn’t investigate: I deployed skilled people to do that. I didn’t advocate: I assigned staff to those roles. I didn’t judge: I relied on smart, thoughtful, compassionate colleagues to find whatever truth might be there in the midst of accusations and counteraccusations.

My job was to protect a process that often felt like it was under siege by parents, lawyers, friends of the students involved, faculty and staff members who had an interest in the case. I stood at the figurative door and held off all those who would interfere, impede or otherwise compromise a process we had worked hard to create, so that my colleagues could do their work and my students could be treated fairly. . . .

Then the world started to change. The community in which I did my work was breached by those on the outside who understood very little of what my day-to-day work entailed. In 2011, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights sent a Dear Colleague letter clarifying its expectations for how we were to handle sexual assault.

I read the letter, nodding at some parts and shaking my head at others. It felt like a group of well-intended but misinformed interlopers had shown up to tell me how to do a job I had done for years. Absent any input from people in jobs like mine, this group of lawyers and policy specialists created a blueprint for an already existing structure, disregarding the years of effort undertaken to build it. We needed some renovation. They were requiring a gut rehab.

Why did this happen? There were institutions that had not treated their students well, and quite possibly there were some incompetent people at the helm of those institutions’ efforts. But many of my counterparts and I had been doing the hard work of managing these cases for years and knew a lot about what worked well and what needed changing. Didn’t our judgment, our input, count for anything?

No, it’s a war on men.

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Environmental Protection Agency Dumps a Million Gallons of Orange Mine Waste into a Colorado River.