PILTDOWN MAN: Investigators now believe they know who perpetrated the hoax.

LIFE IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: The Inevitability of Dirty Bombs.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: 2016: Is Anybody Actually Trying To Win This Thing?

SHORT CIRCUIT?: She lied. (Remember, William Safire called her a congenital liar in 1996.)

LIKE TRUMP, RIGHT SHOULD SPEAK TO AMERICA’S FORGOTTEN FISHTOWNS: The white working class has serious problems, many of them self-inflicted. Donald Trump is reaching out to these people, and conservatives should do the same.

Related: Elegy For Normality.

WHALE FALL: Bones on the sea floor. A “weird but informative” science story — hey, I think they’re cool.

GANGSTER GOVERNMENT: Emails reveal Hillary’s shocking pay-for-play scheme. “Hillary Clinton put the State Department up for sale, with top aides pulling strings and doing favors for fat-cat donors to the Clinton Foundation — including a shady billionaire, according to smoking-gun emails released Tuesday. The stunning revelations include how wealthy contributors seeking influence or prestigious government gigs could fork over piles of cash to get access to Clinton’s inner circle, including top aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills.”

IN CAPITALISM, THE RICH BECOME POWERFUL. IN SOCIALISM, THE POWERFUL BECOME RICH.

Shot: “We expect revolutionaries to be indifferent to money. Yet in reality the Left thinks about nothing but money…the ambition of all true Communists should be to become billionaire revolutionaries.”

—Richard Fernandez at the Belmont Club in May.

Chaser: “It is a common misconception that socialism is about helping poor people. Actually, what socialism does is create poor people, and keep them poor. And that’s not by accident. Under capitalism, rich people become powerful. But under socialism, powerful people become rich. When you look at a socialist country like Venezuela, you find that the rulers are fabulously wealthy even as the ordinary citizenry deals with empty supermarket shelves and electricity rationing.”

—Glenn Reynolds, USA Today in May.

Hangover: “‘Not bad, comrade’! Bernie Sanders’ socialist cred just took a BIG hit…The Burlington resident last week plopped down nearly $600,000 on a lakefront camp in North Hero. Sanders’ new crib has four bedrooms and 500 feet of Lake Champlain beachfront on the east side of the island — facing Vermont, not New York. The Bern will keep his home in Burlington and use the new camp seasonally.”

I’m sure if the writer had been able to concentrate a bit more, he would have chosen a word other than “camp” to describe real estate being put to use by a man whose totalitarian worldview blends nationalism and socialism, but to each his own – at least for the time being.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: UC Davis chancellor resigns following probe into ethical violations. Why are leftist-run institutions such cesspits of nepotism and unethical behavior?

ASHE SCHOW: Thomas Sowell takes down the gender ‘wage’ gap.

Thanks to an aggressive propaganda capaign, the idea that women are paid less than men for doing the same work has persisted for decades despite a mountain of data to the contrary. Politicians — particularly Democrats — love to trot out the apples-and-oranges comparison of men’s and women’s pay in order to garner votes.

On Tuesday, conservative commentator and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Thomas Sowell, took to debunking the myth yet again.

“As far back as 1971, single women in their thirties who had worked continuously since high school earned slightly more than men of the same description,” Sowell wrote. “As far back as 1969, academic women who had never married earned more than academic men who had never married.”

Even more recently, single, childless millennial women out-earn their male peers in major cities. Yet Democratic politicians continue to ignore facts in order to scare women into thinking they need government help in order to earn what they deserve.

And it’s not just gender earnings that are marred by discredited myths, Sowell wrote. The claim that black professors earn less than white professors also doesn’t hold up when things like where the professor got their degree and how many papers they had published are factored in.

“When all these things were held constant, the black professors earned somewhat more than white professors,” Sowell wrote. “But, since all these things are not the same among black and white professors in general, there is a racial gap in pay that allows some to loudly denounce racial discrimination among academics.”

Sowell also notes that facts like these are often ignored in educational institutions, since they “contradict the prevailing groupthink.”

And groupthink is what it’s all about.

SPENGLER: Trump lacks experience but his detractors lack common sense.

Last year I arrived early for a lunch address by Gen. Michael Hayden, who ran the National Security Agency and later the Central Intelligence Agency in the George W. Bush administration. Hayden was already there, and glad to chat. The conversation turned to Egypt, and I asked Hayden why the Republican mainstream had embraced the Muslim Brotherhood rather than the military government of President al-Sisi, an American-trained soldier who espoused a reformed Islam that would repudiate terrorism. “We were sorry that [Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed] Morsi was overthrown” in July 2013, Hayden explained. “We wanted to see what would happen when the Muslim Brotherhood had to take responsibility for picking up the garbage.”

“General,” I remonstrated, “when Morsi was overthrown, Egypt had three weeks of wheat supplies on hand. The country was on the brink of starvation!”

“I guess that experiment would have been tough on the ordinary Egyptian,” Hayden replied, without a hint of irony. As Tommy Lee Jones said in “Men in Black,” Gen. Hayden has no sense of humor that he’s aware of. He repeated the same point verbatim a few minutes later in his speech: It was a shame that the Muslim Brotherhood government of Egypt was overthrown, by acclaim of the majority of Egypt’s adult population, which had taken to the streets as the country careened towards ruin. Hayden, like Sen. John McCain, the Weekly Standard, and the majority of the Republican foreign policy establishment, believes that America should try to foster a democratic version of political Islam. It lionized Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood in Washington, nurtured Turkey’s dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and armed “moderate Islamists” in Syria as a supposed democratic alternative to the Assad regime. Hayden’s specialty was signal intelligence, and by all accounts he was good at his job. He is clueless about foreign policy.

Gen. Hayden was perhaps the most prominent signator of a letter from fifty former national security officials who served in Republican administrations, declaring that Donald Trump “lacks the character, values and experience” required of a president and, if elected, “would put at risk our country’s national security and well-being.”

You get political upheavals like the one America is experiencing — and, worse, will experience — when the powers-that-be don’t seem to be up to the job, especially when they also seem clueless to that fact.

JUST THINK OF THE MEDIA AS DEMOCRAT OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: “Trump joked about kicking baby out of rally & media went WILD. But when father of Orlando terrorist rallies for Hillary…. CRICKETS.”

IF CLINTON WERE RUNNING AGAINST A COMPETENT OPPONENT, SHE’D BE TOAST: Legal group issues private emails Clinton did not turn over.

The State Department has turned over 44 previously-unreleased Hillary Clinton email exchanges that the Democratic presidential nominee failed to include among the 30,000 private messages she turned over to the government last year. They show her interacting with lobbyists, political and Clinton Foundation donors and business interests as secretary of state.

The conservative legal group Judicial Watch obtained the emails as part of its lawsuit against the State Department. They cover Clinton’s first three months as secretary of state in early 2009, a period for which Clinton did not turn over any emails to the State Department last year. The government found the newly disclosed messages during a search of agency computer files from longtime Clinton aide Huma Abedin.

In one instance, Clinton exchanged messages with a senior Morgan Stanley investment executive whom she met with later that year at her office in Washington. They were among 246 pages of Abedin messages turned over to Judicial Watch.

Clinton campaign officials did not immediately answer questions about the issue.

The emails are separate from a larger batch of several thousand work-related emails that FBI officials recovered from Clinton’s private server.

Or maybe not. This is a Crazy Eddie election.

WELL, WE DON’T GENERALLY ALLOW PROFESSORS TO INFRINGE ON STUDENTS’ CIVIL RIGHTS WITH IMPUNITY: Professors who ban guns in their classrooms will be punished, UT lawyer says.

Meanwhile, some good sense from Prof. Erik Gilbert: Stop Worrying About Guns in the Classroom. They’re Already Here.

If you work at a Texas college and are worried by the prospect of having guns in your classroom, relax. The new campus-carry law changes your risk of gun violence very little. I can almost guarantee that if you have a few semesters of teaching under your belt, at some point there have been students with guns in your classroom. If those illegally armed students were not moved to violence by the content of your course or the statements of their fellow students, it seems highly improbable that a new group of legally armed students will prove to be more volatile or violence-prone than their scofflaw peers.

If you really think that there are no guns on college campuses in Texas, or elsewhere, because there is a law that forbids having guns on campus, you are mistaken. On my own campus in Arkansas, despite a strict prohibition on guns, in the last decade there has been at least one accidental discharge of a gun in a dorm room, several students who have been found to have guns in their cars, and at least one faculty member who was caught with a gun in on-campus faculty housing. And those are just people in “casual” possession of guns with no intention of causing harm or mischief who ran afoul of the campus police because they were foolish or indiscreet with them.

And here he is talking about it on NRA News.

The phobic reaction that some professors have to the idea of guns in the classroom undermines the claim that the academy is about rationality.

FLASHBACK: The Clintons, a luxury jet and their $100 million donor from Canada.

BARACK OBAMA’S MUNICH: “No one has suggested Mr. Obama is an anti-Semite or disloyal to America. Just that he entered into an appeasement with similarities to Munich. Both Munich and the Iran appeasement excluded from the parley the enemy’s target — Czechoslovakia in 1938 and Israel today. The exclusion from the Czechs from participation in Munich lead to Jan Masaryk to utter his immortal warning: ‘If you have sacrificed my nation to preserve the peace of the world, I will be the first to applaud you. But if not, gentlemen, God help your souls.’”

I blame ignorance rather deliberate malice amongst Mr. Obama and his young, clueless speechwriters that Obama’s second inauguration speech included the infamous Neville Again phrase, “Peace in our time,” but in retrospect, it was quite a poker tell of what was to come. All the president lacked that day was an umbrella.

HILLARY AIDE OKAYED ABU DHABI DEAL THAT PAID BILL $500,000 FOR A SPEECH: Richard Nixon had an 18-minute gap in a tape recording that was well and truly erased. Hillary Clinton has thousands of emails that were deleted but can never be erased. Slowly but surely, they are seeing the light of day and they are revealing.

The latest emails exposed are from 2012 and they shed new light on how the Clintons used their offices to enrich themselves through the Clinton Foundation, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Richard Pollock. TAQA is an Abu Dhabi-based oil and gas company with operations in 11 countries, including the U.S. and Canada.

“The emails show foundation officials were trying to complete a deal offered by TAQA managing director Leo Koot in Scotland. He agreed to give $60,000 to the foundation for Bill to speak at a Scotland charity and auction. The winner of the auction was to get a ‘Special Day with President Bill Clinton in New York,'” Pollock reports.

“The foundation accepted the $60,000, and Bill went to Scotland where he received an additional $250,000 to $500,000 for his speech before a group called ‘Business For Change,’ according to the Foundation’s website,” Pollock said.

Cheryl Mills, Hillary’s Chief of Staff, okayed the deal in private discussions with Clinton Foundation officials while her boss was in Bangladesh publicly defending another Clinton Foundation donor who was in hot water in that country over questionable accounting of government funds. And so on and so on and so on and …..

THAT’S NOT JUST TRUMP, THEY DO THAT TO EVERY GOP NOMINEE: GOP candidate could spend the next three months giving practical policy speeches and the media would still brand him a bigot.

PEOPLE WANT TO KNOW WHAT I THINK ABOUT THE EVAN MCMULLIN INDEPENDENT CANDIDACY. Not much. It’s basically David French 2.0.

If you want to support someone other than Trump, the obvious thing to do would seem to be supporting Gary Johnson. I really don’t understand the GOP people who say they’ll support Hillary.

YA THINK? FBI probe of Clinton’s emails prompted by espionage fears, secret letters say.

The two letters, dated October 23, 2015 and January 20, 2016, and marked “For Official Use Only,” were written by Peter Strzok and Charles H. Kable IV, the section chiefs of the FBI’s counterespionage section, and sent to Gregory B. Starr, the assistant secretary at the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security. They were written while the FBI was investigating Clinton’s use of an unsecure, private email server and the dissemination of classified information.

“The potential compromise was identified when, as part of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request [by VICE News], the U.S. Department of State (DoS) and the ICIG reviewed electronic mail (email) communications from the private email accounts previously used by a former Secretary of State during her tenure at DoS,” Kable wrote. “An initial review of this material identified emails containing national security information later determined by the US Intelligence Community to be classified up to the Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information Level.”

Ready to be a fully compromised President from Day One.

I’M GLAD PEOPLE ARE STANDING UP AGAINST DONALD TRUMP’S COARSENING OF THE CULTURE: Warren: Trump a ‘pathetic coward’ who can’t handle ‘losing to a girl.’

AND… YOU KNOW YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO DO THAT, RIGHT? Homemade Flamethrower Used to Kill Cockroaches Sparks Fire.

AND THEY’LL LIKELY COMPLY: Authorities in Swedish town are asking homeowners to give their houses up for newly arrived migrants.  What most Americans don’t know is that for years (decades?) Swedish homeowners have complied with a mandate to have a public bathroom in each private home, so….

WELL, YES.  WHAT PART OF SOCIALIST DID YOU FAIL TO UNDERSTAND?  THIS IS WHO THEY ARE. THIS IS WHAT THEY DO: Fresh Off His Campaign to Make Socialism Great Again, Bernie Sanders Buys $600,000 Summer House.