FEMALE PRIVILEGE: ‘Horndog High’ teacher says NYC Ed Department gave her ‘unfair’ 2-year suspension for after-school tryst with female colleague in suit.

OH, BY THE WAY, A NEW WINDOWS OPERATING SYSTEM DEBUTS NEXT WEEK: “Excited about the imminent release of Windows 10? You may want to wait,” Computer World suggests, which is often good advice whenever Microsoft introduces new software. But is anyone excited about a new Windows OS? I can remember back in 1995, when Windows 95 actually seemed like a planet-changing event. (For a look back at the surprisingly pivotal year, author/journalist W. Joseph Campbell has you covered, placing the Windows launch and the early days of the World Wide Web into the context of the times, in his latest book 1995: The Year the Future Began.) These days? Meh.*

Speaking of that bygone era, the answer is none. There is none more nineties than this, a Microsoft-produced video introducing Windows 95 to the world, with Jennifer Aniston, Matthew Perry, and character actress Marilyn Pasekoff channeling the ghost of Nancy Walker:

* Unless Windows 10 contains a cute paperclip-shaped animated avatar. Then that changes everything.

FASTER, PLEASE: Tweaking One Enzyme Doubles A Worm’s Lifespan: It could work the same way in humans.

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Procedures Faulted in Army Lab’s Shipment of Anthrax.

TOM COBURN: A Deficit Of Debt Discussion.

America’s cumulative borrowing is rapidly approaching $20 trillion, while the federal government’s unfunded liabilities (future expenditures minus future tax revenue) now exceed a whopping $127 trillion — better than $1.1 million per taxpayer.

That’s not merely unsustainable; it’s suicidal.

Following a similarly risky path, Greece has now defaulted on its obligations, sending a shock wave through financial markets around the world. This was a crisis that could have been avoided through sound fiscal policy, but the Greek government has for years lacked the political will to do what it takes to secure that nation’s financial health. The nightly news showcases the unfolding Greek tragedy as though it were another TV reality show. A country on the verge of collapse, full steam ahead on a similar trajectory as the American economy — and journalists are largely silent.

Closer to home, Puerto Rico teeters on the edge of financial ruin and risks enormous damage to municipal bond funds and other instruments relied on by millions of Americans to help protect their long-term financial security.

Let’s be clear: The United States must end the cycle of endless and unsustainable debt that we’ve seen elsewhere around the world, or it will face the same fate as other nations before us.

Doing nothing to improve Social Security’s solvency will only result in an empty trust fund and risks to future benefits for everyone. The same is true of every other budget-busting program in our bloated federal budget.

With these facts in mind, I must ask those running for the White House to lead America as our next president, particularly those in my party: What is your plan to deal with this? To the news media, why are you not asking our future leaders this question?

No one in the political class — and this very much includes those bylined operatives in the press — wants to shut down the gravy train, regardless of consequences.

THE TOXIC WORLDVIEW OF TA-NEHISI COATES, from Rich Lowry at (astonishingly enough), the Politico:

White Americans don’t even have the highest incomes of any group in the country that they have allegedly built to serve their interests with malice aforethought. Asians do. They, of course, didn’t experience chattel slavery, or the hideous discrimination of the Jim Crow South. But they still encountered prejudice, overcome with relatively intact families and high levels of education.

Coates reminds us of the shame of the American inner city, where kids have so few social supports and live with little margin of error. His account of slavery and the ensuing discrimination against blacks is powerful and true. But his is a stunted version of America. Here’s hoping his son reads more widely.

Read the whole thing.

HUFFPO ‘DATA JUSTICE’ DIRECTOR: ‘WILL UBER HELP KILL THE PLANET?’ “And when you take a step back, the fight over Uber and its future likely use of driverless cars has enormous implications for whether our nation and the world can stop climate change from killing the planet.”

If that’s the baseline assumption, shouldn’t the Huffington Post “data justice” director want to ban air-conditioned electrically-intensive server farms first? Or at least set an example to the world by demanding your own Website voluntarily going offline?

NASA: THIS PLANET COULD BE ‘EARTH 2.0:′

Wow. NASA on Thursday announced the discovery of a planet that could be the first found outside our solar system capable of sustaining human life. The planet, which is officially named Kepler-452b, is being described by NASA’s Jon Jenkins as Earth’s “older, bigger cousin” and it is the smallest planet discovered so far in the so-called “habitable” zone in a solar system in which a planet is capable of sustaining pools of water on its surface.

I’m not sure what all the fuss is all about — I discovered Earth II decades ago. Close-up, it didn’t look like all that much…

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): San Pedro Teacher, 28, Suspected of Sexual Abuse of 15-Year-Old Student. “Michelle Yeh was on a temporary teaching assignment at the San Pedro school’s science department in February, according to a news release from the Los Angeles Police Department. At the end of the 2015 school year, she ‘reached out to the victim and arranged private meetings,’ the release stated. The alleged victim, who was one of Yeh’s students, disclosed in July that he was sexually abused by Yeh on multiple occasions, according to police. It was not immediately clear if the boy or his family went to police, or how LAPD learned of the allegations.”

FALLEN ANGELS WAS JUST A SCIENCE FICTION STORY, RIGHT GUYS? RIGHT? GUYS? Arctic expedition to study global warming put on hold because of too much ice.

LIFE IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: Is This the End of Christianity in the Middle East? ISIS and other extremist movements across the region are enslaving, killing and uprooting Christians, with no aid in sight.

Obama doesn’t much seem to care, and even the Pope seems more interested in climate change.

CHICAGO’S EXCITING XBOX / CLOUD COMPUTING TAX! “So, basically, avoid living in Chicago if you enjoy living in the 21st Century. Or working in it, because they’re also going to tax the cloud. That’s why everybody outside of Chicago is excited about this. It’s not every day that a major city decides to deliberately drive non-geographically fixed companies out to the suburbs.”

Well, it is when that city is Sacramento and the suburbs are colloquially referred to as “Texas”…

COAL EXECUTIVE SLAMS OBAMA AS ‘NATION’S GREATEST DESTROYER’ That’s such an impolite phrase. Best to go with “fundamentally transformed,” instead.

WAIT A SEC: UN INSPECTORS WILL BE FORCED TO RELY ON SAMPLES PROVIDED BY … IRAN? “In other words, if nuclear inspectors get a hot tip that Iran is conducting (or conducted in the past) atomic-bomb work at a secret site, they don’t get to go to the site themselves and take samples from the soil, the walls, etc, to see if there’s uranium present,” Allahpundit writes at Hot Air. “They get their samples … from Iran. That’s like drug-testing a junkie by asking him to bring a sample from home.”

Plus this: “Exit quotation from Philip Klein: ‘The premise of every Kerry answer is — Iran was the stronger power here, they had all the leverage. We were lucky to get anything.’”

So is Kerry there to make Hillary’s tenure at Foggy Bottom look infinitely better by comparison, or is he setting up his own entry into the Democratic presidential race? Or both?

NEW YORK TIMES EDITOR: ISN’T IT AWESOME HOW HILLARY’S STONEWALLING THE PRESS? If you’ve ever thought that among all the major American newspapers, the Gray Lady existed the most in its own alternate universe, Sean Davis of the Federalist confirms your worst suspicions, with a profile of Andrew Rosenthal, the Times’ editorial page editor.

Rosenthal provided the initial spin on the George H.W. Bush supermarket scanner incident in 1992 as a claim that the former head of the CIA was a technological luddite. This week he critiqued the performance of GOP presidential candidate “Ben Nelson” by declaring “Everything Ben Nelson says is ridiculous,” (audio at link) and recently proclaimed himself a postmodern D-Day(!) truther, according to Michael Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to the United States.

Needless to say, read the whole thing.

CRUZ CONTROL: “During a rally Thursday protesting the Iran deal not including the release of four imprisoned Americans, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, was met with boisterous protests from the anti-war group Code Pink. Instead of ignoring the protesters, he debated them,” including Code Pink cofounder Medea Benjamin.

Video at link.

SHOCKER: Health Care Tax Faces United Opposition From Labor and Employers.

A FREE SPEECH VICTORY EIGHT YEARS IN THE MAKING: $900,000 settlement points the way to making campus censors pay for unconstitutional abuses.

If individual administrators had to worry for even a second that they might be held personally liable for violating students’ clearly established constitutional rights, you can guarantee one thing: Incidents of abuses of student free speech and due process rights would plummet. As I explained last year in my announcement of FIRE’s Stand Up for Speech Litigation Project, many administrators choose to overreact to speech because they feel that there is no downside for doing so, whereas there is a host of potential consequences for failing to act, including harassment lawsuits, tort lawsuits, and investigations by the Department of Education. However, administrators’ fear of personal liability would likely often outweigh their fear of these other consequences, making them think twice before violating student and faculty rights. But insurance and university policies undermine this potentially elegant solution.

AT AMAZON, deals galore at the Men’s Denim Store.

Plus, deals on Hunting & Tactical Knives.

And please remember: InstaPundit is an Amazon affiliate. When you do your shopping through the Amazon links on this page, including the “Shop Amazon” tab at the top or the searchbox in the right sidebar, you support this blog at no cost to yourself. Just click on the Amazon link, then shop as usual. I very much appreciate it when you do.

KERRY ‘FLEECED’ AND ‘BAMBOOZLED,’ SENATORS TELL HIM; BOXER CALLS THEM ‘INSULTING:’

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) rushed to the aid of Secretary of State John Kerry this morning, claiming that Senate Republicans were impugning his character by noting he got “bamboozled” and “fleeced” in the Iran nuclear deal.

“Not unlike a hotel guest that leaves only with a hotel bathrobe on his back, I believe you’ve been fleeced,” Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) told Kerry today at the top of a hearing to review the deal.

“In the process of being fleeced, what you’ve really done here is you have turned Iran from being a pariah to now Congress, Congress being a pariah,” Corker added.

“With all due respect, you guys have been bamboozled, and the American people are going to pay for that,” Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho) later added.

Boxer began her comments by stressing that she does think Congress faces a choice between accepting the deal and going to war with Iran — “at the end of the day, that’s really the option, which everyone tiptoes around.”

“I support the right of my colleagues to say anything they want, but you’ve sat there and you’ve heard two of my colleagues go after you with words that I am going to repeat. You were fleeced, one said. The other said you have been bamboozled,” she said.

“So putting aside the fact that I think that’s disrespectful and insulting, it — that’s their right to do. There are other ways to express your disagreement, but that goes to the — your core as a human being and your intelligence, and I think you are highly intelligent.”

Now there’s a vote of confidence. Besides, I thought Boxer appreciated senators when they’re “speaking truth to power,” especially to the Secretary of State.

UPDATE: As Ace writes: “Oh, Kerry got fleeced?”

Because I thought a bunch of dumbass, sell-out, go-along-to-get-along Republican Senators got fleeced by Obama and Kerry into approving this treaty before it was even finished.

So now we’re in the “I just can’t believe the outrageous things I already voted for” phase of the Failure Theater performance.

It’s DC — there’s enough failure to go around for everyone.

SLOWING IS GOOD. REVERSING IS BETTER. New antibody drugs show promise in slowing the advance of Alzheimer’s disease.

SHOCKINGLY, IT DIDN’T START AS A FAST-FOOD PLACE: Church Is Chicken: Abandoned Indonesian Temple Looks Like Poultry.

LIFE IN A POLITICIZED PROSECUTORIAL-ABUSE POLICE STATE: “The Wisconsin Targets Tell Their Story/After victory in court, conservative activists talk on the record for the first time about their 21-month ordeal.” “The targets have been vindicated, but a reckoning for prosecutors and the abusive John Doe machinery is still in order.” Yep.

I HAD MISSED THIS, BUT I LOVE THE TERM “GUNTRY CLUB.” Guntry clubs target a new breed of shooter: younger, more affluent and female.

PLANNING TO CARRY MORE OFTEN? Amazon has holsters.