INSULT TO INJURY: United Nations’ Israel-bashing hits a new low.

AN IDEA SO CRAZY IT JUST MIGHT WORK: Like… letting the free market operate. Yes, allow Colorado grocery stores to sell full-strength beer and wine.

BECAUSE EATING FAST FOOD AND GAINING WEIGHT IS SO MYSTERIOUS: Feds Spend $1.1 Million Studying the ‘Freshman 15’.

THIS WILL END IN TEARS: Craziness spreads from campus to business.  Subordinate seduced me — then got me fired: executive.

BRAD TORGERSEN ON THE FUNDAMENTALS OF ADULTHOOD: What does the Bible have in common with William Shatner?

COLOR ME TERRIFIED: Iran Warns U.S.: New Sanctions Will End Nuclear Deal.  They might end the fake deal and… what?  Not take our money?

BILL DE BLASIO, LET THE CHILDREN GO: It’s time to hold the corrupt school system accountable.

IN OTHER NEWS, PHYSICS STILL WORKS: Glock Trumps Brick.

OKAY, OKAY, SO THERE IS CRYING IN BASEBALL: Little League heartbreak: Lessons for kids and coaches.

A NEW HOPE: Star Wars and the Human Wave.

RAND SIMBERG: We’ll Never Get To Mars If We Put Safety First.

AT AMAZON, The Holiday Toy List: Top Picks In Quadrocopters, Trains, and Automobiles. Get your drones now, before the feds register them!

Plus: Top Picks in STEM Toys.

TUNKU VARADARAJAN: 5 takeaways on Biden’s bow-out: The vice president gets off the Hillary highway.

HMM: Hidden Epidemic: 
Tapeworms Living Inside People’s Brains. “The closer scientists look at the epidemiology of the disease, the worse it becomes. Nash and other neurocysticercosis experts have been traveling through Latin America with CT scanners and blood tests to survey populations. In one study in Peru, researchers found 37 percent of people showed signs of having been infected at some point. Earlier this spring, Nash and colleagues published a review of the scientific literature and concluded that somewhere between 11 million and 29 million people have neurocysticercosis in Latin America alone. Tapeworms are also common in other regions of the world, such as Africa and Asia.”

SEEMS PLAUSIBLE: Lifting Weights, Twice a Week, May Aid the Brain. “The results were alternately sobering and stirring. The women in the control group, who had concentrated on balance and flexibility, showed worrying progression in the number and size of the lesions in their white matter and in the slowing of their gaits. So did the women who had weight trained once per week. But those who had lifted weights twice per week displayed significantly less shrinkage and tattering of their white matter than the other women. Their lesions had grown and multiplied somewhat, but not nearly as much. They also walked more quickly and smoothly than the women in the other two groups.”

IF MCDONALD’S GOES UNDER IT WILL BE BECAUSE THEY FOLLOWED LIBERALS TO DISASTER: At Hot Air, Jazz Shaw writes:

McDonald’s could still probably be saved, but I doubt they’re willing to risk the backlash from Michelle Obama’s army if they did it. The company could go back to their old school formula. Trim down the menu for starters. You need a hamburger, cheeseburger, the Quarter Pounder and the Big Mac. Toss in the fish fillet and maybe one chicken sandwich. Put the fatty, lard filled oil back in the fry machine. Keep those molten hot apple pies and maybe a few dessert options. Kick the rest except for some seasonal specialties like the McRib. I’m guessing people would come back and your waste costs would go down hugely. You may get nailed with a minimum wage increase, but all your competitors will face the same thing if you do.

It’s a shame to see McDonald’s floundering, but they really brought it on themselves.

Steve Green saw the handwriting on the wall back in April when he warned, “McDonald’s Is Doomed:”

To understand why I’ve come to this conclusion, read the very next line from the story:

[New CEO Steve Easterbrook] plans to unveil his plan for turning McDonald’s into a “modern, progressive burger company” on May 4.

Now maybe I should withhold judgement until I see this plan next week. Maybe a bold headline like “McDonald’s Is Doomed” is just the kind of baseless clickbait fear-mongering I try to resist indulging in.

But a progressive burger company? Really?

* * * * * * * * *

This shouldn’t be rocket math. Progressivism has come to mean top-down, pre-engineered, overpriced, “we know what’s best for you,” nannystatism — which is not what I consider to be a fun meal with the kids.

A fun meal with the kids is decent, fast, inexpensive dining on American food. There’s nothing “progressive” about it. And any attempt to force that square peg into the round hole of our hungry mouths is doomed to failure.

Would it surprise you to learn that Easterbrook is a Brit?

And he’s on the cusp of accomplishing a half-century “Progressive” goal so big that not even the Frankfurt School or Michelle Obama dared dream it could ever be real: killing McDonald’s.

GOOD IDEA: Let’s End “Too Big To Fail.”

WHICH PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE RESEMBLES which Star Wars character?

MICHAEL TOTTEN: What Just Happened In Syria? “Everyone already knows we’re backing the Kurds against ISIS, and everyone already knows the Turks would rather see an ISIS victory than a Kurdish victory. None of this is even remotely a secret. It’s all right out in the open. Official denials aren’t fooling anybody. Besides, pretending we’re not doing what we clearly are doing just makes it look like the Turkish government’s complaint is legitimate. It’s not.”

THINGS THAT DON’T SUCK: I was talking with someone the other day about how much I love these Klipsch computer speakers. A very simple two-plus-one setup, under $150, but they sound great. I have a set at home and bought another for my computer at the office.

THE UK HOUSE OF LORDS asked my colleague Maurice Stucke and his coauthor Ariel Ezrachi of Oxford to submit comments for its hearing on “Online Platforms and the EU Digital Single Market.” You can read their comments here.

WHY ARE LEFTIST INSTITUTIONS SUCH HOTBEDS OF SEXUAL PREDATION? The Strange Case Of Anna Stubblefield:

When she arrived at the house on Memorial Day in 2011, Anna didn’t know what D.J. planned to do. His brother, Wesley, was working in the garden, so she went straight inside to speak with D.J. and his mother, P. They chatted for a while at the dining table about D.J.’s plans for school and for getting his own apartment. Then there was a lull in the conversation after Wesley came back in, and Anna took hold of D.J.’s hand. ‘‘We have something to tell you,’’ they announced at last. ‘‘We’re in love.’’

‘‘What do you mean, in love?’’ P. asked, the color draining from her face.

To Wesley, she looked pale and weak, like ‘‘Caesar when he found out that Brutus betrayed him.’’ He felt sick to his stomach. What made them so uncomfortable was not that Anna was 41 and D.J. was 30, or that Anna is white and D.J. is black, or even that Anna was married with two children while D.J. had never dated anyone. What made them so upset — what led to all the arguing that followed, and the criminal trial and million-­dollar civil suit — was the fact that Anna can speak and D.J. can’t; that she was a tenured professor of ethics at Rutgers University in Newark and D.J. has been declared by the state to have the mental capacity of a toddler.

To be fair, she seems not to be much beyond the toddler level herself:

Anna shared this interest in disabilities: As a high-school student, she studied Braille and learned the alphabet in sign language. But as a junior academic, she would apply the mandate of tikkun olam to a different focus — the fight for racial justice. Since getting her Ph.D. in 2000, she has become a prominent scholar in the field of Africana philosophy, has published widely on race and ethics and has served as the chairwoman of the American Philosophical Association’s Committee on the Status of Black Philosophers — the first and only white scholar ever to have done so. ‘‘Our world is in shambles,’’ she wrote in ‘‘Ethics Along the Color Line.’’ ‘‘White supremacy is central to this state of affairs, and we cannot repair the world without ending it.’’

Her own family is mixed-­race — she has two children with her ex-­husband, Roger Stubblefield, a black tuba player and classical composer. For 11 years, she served on the faculty at the Newark campus of Rutgers University, whose student body is among the nation’s most diverse. Yet for all her work on behalf of African-­Americans, she worried that she might be ambushed by the ‘‘habits of racism.’’ ‘‘Even in well-­intentioned quests to be antiracist,’’ she wrote, ‘‘white people all too often invade or destroy the space of nonwhite people.’’ The same essay lays out what could be a thesis statement for her whole career: It is crucial, she wrote, for white philosophers ‘‘to wrestle with the horrors and conundrums of whiteness.’’

To be fair, she certainly has managed to destroy the space of some nonwhite people here. Why are so many “social justice” crusaders crazy, with twisted sexual issues?

CHRIS PETERSON ON the future of the human lifespan.

CLOSE CALL: 2015 TB145: Huge Halloween asteroid discovered three weeks before flyby of Earth.

A large asteroid is set to pass Earth on Halloween, surprising astronomers who only discovered it two weeks ago. The asteroid, which measures up to 2,000ft in diameter, will flyby Earth at a distance of around 310,000 miles, or 1.3 lunar distances – the largest object to come so close to our planet in recent years.

Despite its size, the asteroid – called 2015 TB145 – was found just three weeks before its closest approach by astronomers using the Pan-STARRS I telescope in Hawaii. Nasa said it is the biggest asteroid to come this close to Earth until 2027.

“The asteroid is on an extremely eccentric and a high inclination orbit,” the space agency said in a statement, possibly explaining why it avoided detection until two weeks ago. “This is the closest approach by a known object this large until 1999 AN10 approaches within one lunar distance in August 2027. The last approach closer than this by an object with H < 20 was by 2004 XP14 in July 2006 at 1.1 lunar distances." . . . The asteroid's flyby comes as prominent scientists call for more research into asteroid-tracking technology to protect the planet from unknown space rocks. It is currently estimated we have detected around 1% of asteroids bigger than 40m that could pose a risk to Earth. Asteroid Day, launched earlier this year, outlined the goal of rapidly increasing asteroid detection over the next 10 years. Organisers said they want to find 100,000 asteroids every year – at present we have found around 10,000 in total.

If we develop our technology properly, those asteroids won’t be threats, but opportunities. Here’s my InstaVision interview with Planetary Resources’ Chris Lewicki on that.