KURT SCHLICHTER: Gun Rights Advocates Have A Devastating New Argument Against Gun Control. Here It Is. I think this argument may have broader application.

UNDER DEBLASIO, NEW YORK GOES BACKWARD: “Take a walk around the Grand Hyatt and neighboring Grand Central Terminal these days. It’s often like stepping out of H.G. Wells’s time machine straight back into the 1970s or 1980s. Vanderbilt Avenue, in particular, is becoming once again the urinal of the universe, with one block wall-to-wall ‘bum stands,’ as my son, with childhood inventiveness, used to call them: the stolen supermarket shopping cart, the garbage bag full of scavenged cans and bottles for redemption, the prone figure wrapped mummy-like in a filthy blanket. The heart sinks. It took so much effort by so many people to clear up the human wreckage that so many years of liberal ‘compassion’ had created in a dying New York. And to see it all—I can’t put it any better than the esteemed New York Post—’pissed away’ by a mayor not smart or perceptive enough to have learned one thing from the experience of the last 20 years, since his own personal demons have left him stuck in the politics of the 1950s and 1960s, is tragic. It is so hard to build; so easy to destroy.”

MAKE ‘EM PAY. U.Va. Grads Sue Rolling Stone Over Retracted Rape Article. “Court documents show that three University of Virginia graduates and members of a fraternity profiled in a debunked account of a gang rape in a retracted Rolling Stone magazine story are suing the publication and the article’s author. The three graduates filed suit Wednesday in U.S. District Court in New York. They are also suing Rolling Stone’s publisher, Wenner Media. A lawyer for the men said they suffered ‘vicious and hurtful attacks’ because of the inaccuracies in the November 2014 article, which was written by journalist Sabrina Rubin Erdely.”

The complaint is here. The Southern District of New York, where this was filed, tends to be especially friendly to libel defendants.

DRIP, DRIP: Hillary Clinton’s former spokesman turns over 20 boxes of emails. Hmm. Mysteriously appearing boxes of records? That sounds familiar. Plus: “Hackett also told the court that State couldn’t produce all of the documents requested by the AP at this time — including one related to Huma Abedin’s role as a ‘special government employee.’ He said the agency is still awaiting work-related emails from former agency officials Abedin, Jake Sullivan and Cheryl Mills. Hackett did not say whether the documents being sought were from a personal account or State.gov account.”

SEEMS LIKE AN UNLAWFUL PRIOR RESTRAINT. ALSO, AN ADMISSION OF SORTS: Restraining order issued against anti-abortion group’s video.

HONESTLY, I JUST AVOID BOTH: The Evidence Supports Artificial Sweeteners Over Sugar. This past year, the Insta-Daughter quit putting sugar in her coffee, following my advice: Just stop and after a couple of weeks you won’t miss it any more. That works for lots of things. And once you get used to that, the sugary stuff tastes icky-sweet.

INDICTED DEM REP. CHAKA FATTAH RODE ON AIR FORCE ONE TO PHILLY WITH OBAMA THIS MONTH FOR CRIMINAL JUSTICE REFORM SPEECH.

And of course, the White House claims Obama “was not aware of Rep. Chaka Fattah’s pending indictment when they flew together recently on AF1.”

It’s a fair cop — our semi-retired president only discovers bad news after it’s been on TV.

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: An Affair Of The Mind.

The controversy surrounding the F-35 is fundamentally an extension of the debate over what a future fighter should be. Recently the aircraft made news when it was officially announced that the airframe couldn’t dogfight worth a damn. The standard riposte is that dogfighting as a form of aerial combat, stopped being relevant a long time ago.

Perhaps the best advocate for dogfighting-is-dead point of view isn’t a paper for the F-35 but a paper which argues that air combat is fundamentally changing. Perhaps the F-35 is not the best tool for coming era, but neither is the super-dogfighter many in the public seem to crave. In a PDF article titled Trends in Air-to-air Combat, John Stillion of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments argues that the era of pointing the airframe at moving point in space is over. It never really existed. Even during the age of gun kills, most victories arose from a dominant situational awareness and the ability to initiate the fight and disengage at will. The dominant importance of getting in first did not change in Vietnam.

Read the whole thing.

BECAUSE THEY HAVE CONTEMPT FOR ANYONE WHO TRIES TO STOP THEM: Obama Administration lawyers have (once again) been threatened with contempt. This time, it’s federal district judge Emmet Sullivan, who threatened today to hold the IRS Commissioner and DOJ attorneys in contempt because the the IRS has failed to produce status reports and newly recovered emails of Lois Lerner, as Sullivan had ordered on July 1, 2015.

According to Judicial Watch, the group initiating the lawsuit against the IRS for its failure to comply with a FOIA request:

During the a status hearing today, Sullivan warned that the failure to follow his order was serious and the IRS and Justice Department’s excuses for not following his July 1 order were “indefensible, ridiculous, and absurd.”  He asked the IRS’ Justice Department lawyer Geoffrey Klimas, “Why didn’t the IRS comply” with his court order and “why shouldn’t the Court hold the Commissioner of the IRS in contempt.”  Judge Sullivan referenced his contempt findings against Justice Department prosecutors in the prosecution of late Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) and reminded the Justice Department attorney he had the ability to detain him for contempt.  Warning he would tolerate no further disregard of his orders, Judge Sullivan said, “I will haul into court the IRS Commissioner to hold him personally into contempt.”

I don’t recall any prior Administration being threatened with contempt as often as the Obama Administration. It seems that, in multiple major cases, they are being threatened with contempt. DOJ lawyers are starting to get a bad reputation, when they used to be widely respected. DOJ lawyers in previous Administrations certainly did not so brazenly defy the orders of federal judges and Congress. The Obama Administration’s disrespect for the rule of law is permeating virtually everything it does.

MARK RIPPETOE WOULD APPROVE, PRESUAMBLY: Don’t Get in the Way of a Strong Man That Wants to Ride His Bike: Because he’ll lift the car out of the way.

ANIMAL LOVERS ENCOURAGE MURDER IN REVENGE FOR A LION’S DEATH, from Bookworm Room:

While I’ve long ago left behind my knee-jerk opposition to all hunting, especially since I recognize that hunters do a great deal to preserve natural habitats in America, I don’t think I’d like to hunt, and I most certainly cannot come up with a rationale to justify big game hunting. Put another way, I’m not a fan of what the dentist did, even assuming it’s true he didn’t intend to contravene game preserve protections.

Not being a big fan, though, is not the same as being a crazed, hysterical murderer — and that’s precisely what Cecil’s fans are looking for.

RELATED: “What Cecil the Lion Tells About America,” from Aaron Clarey, the author of Enjoy the Decline:

The real story is not that poor Cecil was tragically shot.  It’s that western civilization, specifically the younger generations, have lost their collective minds and do not have the mental faculties to be adults, let alone adults in the free world.  They are effectively zombies.  And there is no reasoning with them.

Plan accordingly.

Read the whole thing.

THOUGHTS ON TRUMP, from Roger Kimball:

I don’t think Donald Trump will be the GOP candidate in 2016, and I don’t think he would win if he were.  But he has raised some issues that the high and mighty dispensers of conventional wisdom would do well to ponder. Moreover, he has done it in a way that, though terribly, terribly vulgar, is catapulting Trump to first place in the polls. What does that tell us?  That the people are stupid and need to be guided by the suits in Washington?  If you believe that, I submit, you are going to be profoundly disappointed come November 2016.

Though does anyone think Trump will be a laissez–faire kind of president if he actually won? To borrow from the Spy magazine gag line on Trump that Roger quoted in his post, wouldn’t President Trump likely be a “short-fingered vulgarian” clone of Michael Bloomberg or Jimmy Carter? Perhaps not in terms of specific policies (such as Bloomberg’s obsession with bike lanes), but in terms of wanting to micromanage everything? Generally, that’s been a recipe for failure in the White House, whether it’s LBJ or Obama personally choosing bombing runs to Carter’s legendary micromanagement of the White House tennis court. It’s only a matter of time before someone like that thinks he knows what’s better for the American people than the people themselves.

WHY DO GOVERNMENT SERVICES SO OFTEN SUCK SO BADLY, Charlie Martin asks:

With the IRS, we can imagine lots of reasons that the number of calls answered is so low. (I personally like the theory that the IRS is pissed about being caught in the IRS scandals, but I don’t actually know.)

Look at the situation, however, and we can see this: the IRS doesn’t get any particular rewards from answering calls; after all, they’re just doing their job. But the IRS commissioner can go in front of Congress and insist that they can only answer more calls if they receive a massive budget increase — which has always worked before, after all.

So what I’ve done here is proposed a theory: people tend to do what they find rewarding, and what people are doing now is what’s been rewarding in the past. Readers can evaluate this for themselves — just think about where you get good service and bad service, government or private, and see if what you consider good service is being rewarded. (For an interesting thought experiment, ask yourself why McDonalds drive-through orders are wrong so much more often than orders at the counter.)

If you find this theory plausible, then ask yourself one more question: do we reward government, and government workers, for when they are giving us good service?

If you have a puppy that always wants to chew a sock, it probably means that chewing the sock got it attention in the past.

Read the whole thing.

MARK RIPPETOE: Big Brother Is Watching You Squat: State Licensure — What Coaches And Trainers Need To Know. Punch back twice as hard.

NETS COVERED CECIL THE LION MORE IN ONE DAY THAN PLANNED PARENTHOOD VIDEOS IN TWO WEEKS: Why, it’s as if Cecil was a useful distraction for the media to temporarily sandbag a developing story they want absolutely nothing to do with. In other words, Gosnell redux. As Jim Treacher noted last year, “Modern journalism is all about deciding which facts the public shouldn’t know because they might reflect badly on Democrats.”

RELATED: Planned Parenthood on the run: Refuses to attend Texas hearing.

DO WE NEED TO BAN KILLER AI? Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking think so.

REP. CHAKA FATTAH (D-PA) INDICTED FOR ALL SORTS OF POLITICAL CORRUPTION, REALLY. And note this:

Fattah’s office confirmed he has agreed to give up his leadership post on the Appropriations Committee, where he is the top Democrat overseeing criminal justice and science spending. He will be replaced by Mike Honda, D-Calif., who is currently the subject of an ethics probe.

At Front Page, Daniel Greenfield adds:

Fattah had garnered attention for demanding that Congress expunge the impeachment proceedings of Bill Clinton… and impeach Bush.

Chaka Fattah had joined Jesse Jackson Jr. on H. Res 635 to impeach Bush. Jackson was busted and went to prison. Now Chucklehead Fattah looks likely to join him. The bill was put forward by John Conyers whose wife went to jail for bribery.

Nothing to see here. Just more Democrats being Democrats.

Or as my friend Michael Walsh likes to say, “Think of the Democratic Party as what it really is: a criminal organization masquerading as a political party.”

RELATED:

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Plus, deals on Hunting & Tactical Knives.

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NTSB: Mistimed Maneuver Doomed Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo. “A mistimed feathering maneuver resulted in the fatal crash of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo last October, an accident which killed one, critically injured another, and set back the company’s space tourism ambitions. Feathering is the maneuver in which part of the wings change position to increase drag and slow re-entry. But the feathering system was unlocked too early, compromising the craft and shearing off the wings.”

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): “A 41-year-old woman accused last week of inappropriate sexual conduct with a 15-year-old male via Facebook was back in front of a judge Monday facing an additional charge in the case. Kathi Linn Pederson was charged with attempted witness tampering for calling the boy’s home at about 3 a.m. Friday, less than 24 hours after her first court appearance.”

5 REASONS THE MUSIC BUSINESS IS IN THE TOILET:

It doesn’t take a big-shot music executive or a statistician to see that the music industry is in a major period of upheaval.

Sales of recorded music are at or near all-time lows, digital downloads and concert revenues aren’t doing enough to stop the bleeding, and technology has made recording and sharing music easier than ever, driving up competition in an already traditionally competitive industry.

Rock musicians vowed to smash capitalism and to “imagine no possessions.” What’s the problem here?

READER BOOK PLUG: From reader Patrick Wayland, Deadman Bay.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: George Washington University Drops ACT/SAT Requirement.

MAKING WIRELESS POWER TRANSMISSION more efficient. Personally, I’d like to do it losslessly via quantum entanglement.

SPACE: ‘Trillion-Dollar Asteroid’ Zooms by Earth as Scientists Watch. “The near-Earth asteroid is an intriguing candidate for mining, said representatives of the company Planetary Resources, which is hoping to begin these activities in the coming decades. . . . Previous studies by Planetary Resources estimated that 2011 UW158 contains about $5.4 trillion worth of platinum, an element that is rare on Earth.”