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“FUNNY THE WALL QUOTE MENTIONS ‘CRUSH.’ LET’S TALK ABOUT THAT.”

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, TEXAS! TODAY MARKS TEXAS INDEPENDENCE DAY: “On this day in 1836, Texas broke away from Mexico and became a republic.”

A republic — if you can keep it.

OVERTON WINDOW MOVED: DON’T LOOK NOW, BUT THE EUROPEAN UNION IS NOW CALLING FOR… A WALL. As Ace writes, “if you want to keep having no borders within the Union, you need to build up the fences and interdiction efforts at its frontiers.”

BEN CARSON PLANS TO EXIT 2016 RACE: “In an email to supporters, Carson said that he plans to skip Thursday’s GOP debate in Detroit and ultimately exit from the GOP primary contest, arguing that there is no ‘political path forward’ after a poor showing on Super Tuesday.”

YOU SHOULD ALWAYS KNOW WHERE THE EXITS ARE ANYWAY: Would you trust a malfunctioning robot in an emergency? These people did. “You’re in a building. The building is on fire. Luckily, an emergency robot is there to show you the way out – but it appears to be malfunctioning… or at least behaving strangely. Do you put your trust in the robot to help direct you to the exit, or try to find your own way out of the burning building? In the situation described above – the actual setting for a first-of-its-kind experiment designed to test human trust of robots in emergency situations – participants largely placed their faith in the machine to help get them to safety, despite a prior demonstration that it might not be working properly.”

MEH. IF I’D CUT OFF CONTACT WITH MY EXES, I WOULDN’T BE SO HAPPILY MARRIED: Survey Says: Cutting Off Contact With Ex is Smart, But We Don’t Actually Do It. I met the Insta-Wife through an ex-girlfriend.

TRUMP AND THE KKK: Jonah Goldberg offers the best explanation for Trump’s footsie-ing with David Duke on Sunday. As Jonah writes, “the issue for me really isn’t whether Trump is a Klan-loving racist. I never thought that (and you can fall far short of that standard and still not have admirable views on various issues), but that isn’t really what matters in this context:”

Again, the best defense of Trump is that he hates these PC gotcha games by the press. I think that’s plausible and probably explains some of it.

But, denouncing the Klan should be easy. You shouldn’t have to think about it. And you certainly shouldn’t let you’re fear of being called “politically correct” get in the way. That’s beyond asinine. If you want to turn the tables on the interviewer and note that the Klan used to be the militant wing of the Democratic party, go for it. The one thing you shouldn’t do is sound like you’re reluctant to condemn the Klan(!) or that you’re dog-whistling that you don’t really mean it when you do.

Yet when you watch the Tapper interview, it becomes clear what is really going on: He think condemning the Klan will hurt him with conservatives or southerners or both. He needed aides to tell him, “Mr. Trump, sir, it’s okay to disassociate yourself with the KKK.” And so he took to Twitter to clean up the mess he created.

In other words, the issue isn’t that conservative opponents of Trump think he’s a Klan supporting racist, it’s that Trump thinks many of his conservative supporters are. And that’s just one reason I don’t want this guy speaking for me.

Read the whole thing.

Before and after Mitt Romney was shlonged in the 2012 presidential election, Jonah liked to write that Romney speaks conservatism as a second language. Trump does too, only he’s able to disguise it better because of his pushback against PC and because of his decidedly non-patrician tone. The fact that Manhattan limousine leftists such as Vanity Fair’s Graydon Carter, who coined the infamous “short-fingered vulgarian” leitmotif while editing New York’s ur-’80s Spy magazine to describe Trump, have long despised the man as a classic nouveau riche wannabe obviously helps to burnish his conservative street cred. (Most people instinctively know they’d have a lot more fun hanging out with Al Czervik than Judge Elihu Smails.) As I’ve mentioned before, this is very much akin to another former New York Democrat who decided to turn his megaphone towards an eager right-leaning audience, Morton Downey Jr. But Trump’s tone-deafness towards conservatism also explains the clanger last night: “Donald Trump Praises Planned Parenthood Again, Attacks ‘So-Called Conservatives’ Who Disagree.”

Expect a lot more of this between now and August and/or November.

And if Trump wins the White House? As Bill McGurn of the Wall Street Journal recently noted, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s spectacular-celebrity fueled race to Sacramento, followed by five or so years of inertia because the legendary Hollywood tough guy was terrified of running afoul of the state’s entrenched socialist special interests (unlike Wisconsin’s milquetoast appearing Scott Walker) may be a sneak preview to what’s to come.

See also: Ventura, Jesse.

UPDATE: Heh, indeed.™

I BLAME CHIPOTLE: America’s Methane Crisis Just Got Worse.

FIRST, DO NO HARM: Many physicians of the Classical era employed brutal practices including bloodletting and burning, but some treated patient pain with baths, naps, and wine.

CHRIS CHRISTIE’S WORDLESS SCREAM: Read this. You will laugh.

[jwplayer mediaid=”228083″]

STEVE GREEN BREAKS OPEN THE PIÑATA AND FINDS SUPER TUESDAY’S MIXED BAG OF NUTS.

I BOUGHT WENDY DAVIS’ PINK SNEAKERS AT HER ESTATE SALE:

During her time in the senate she listed her permanent address as the Fort Worth house and also lived in Austin where the legislature met. However, a 2014 Washington Free Beacon investigation found that Davis had spent more than $130,000 in campaign cash to live in luxury apartments that offered a wide range of amenities during her months in the state capital.

Now that she holds no elected office, she will be forced to pay for her Austin residence out of her own pocket, which is likely why she is selling her Fort Worth house.

This sort of economic struggle is understandable as we have entered the eighth year of the Obama economy, so I decided that to help Wendy I would grab a few more items before I checked out.

I was drawn to the stack of Forgetting to Be Afraid, and when I got to it I noticed that it was also being offered as an unabridged audio book. I grabbed both, but neither had a price.

When I checked out, the pair was offered to me for $10—but my inherent New York values led me to negotiate the cashier down to $8.

Sorry, Wendy.

Ouch. Nobody trolls the left like the Washington Free Beacon.

I’D LIKE TO TURN MINE BACK A COUPLE OF DECADES: An Epigenetic Clock Controls Aging. “We are accustomed to treating aging as a set of things that go wrong with the body. But for more than twenty years, there has been accumulating evidence that much of the process takes place under genetic control. We have seen that signaling chemistry can make dramatic differences in life span, and that single molecules can significantly affect longevity. We are frequently confronted with puzzling choices the body makes which benefit neither present health nor fertility nor long-term survival. If we permit ourselves a shift of reference frame and regard aging as a programmed biological function like growth and development, then these observations fall into place and make sense. This perspective suggests that aging proceeds under control of a master clock, or several redundant clocks. If this is so, we may learn to reset the clocks with biochemical interventions and make an old body behave like a young body, including repair of many of the modes of damage that we are accustomed to regard as independent symptoms of the senescent phenotype, and for which we have assumed that the body has no remedy.”

Faster, please. I’m feeling moderately more hopeful today, though. I drove down to Chattanooga for the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop and, though that was a conference about interstellar flight, I wound up having a lengthy conversation afterwards with Greg Benford, whose non-SF work these days is on anti-aging stuff.

HMM: So far, Trump wins open primaries and Cruz wins closed … and the calendar is starting to change toward more closed primaries.

Plus, reader Ron Pevey offers a historical analogy to the general that I hadn’t considered:

Here is a question I have been wondering about lately concerning the presidential battle that is shaping up. I have read several columns drawing the analogy to the 1980 election, but have yet to read one with the parallel that seems most appropriate to me: Give-‘em-hell Harry against the smooth Wall-Street-backed New Yorker in 1948. Truman’s famous coarseness, his popularity in fly-over country, even the parallels between Trump’s bankruptcies and the “failed haberdasher”.

Has it faded too far into our collective memory? Is everybody waiting for the general election? It would seem to me that, since the tables are turned (party-wise), it would make an interesting analogy that might even appeal to traditional non-elite Democrats. (The fact that both the 1948 and 1980 traumatic elections were harbingers of go-go decades for the country might even relieve some people’s anxiety a tad.)

Well, that’s a cheerful thought.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1028.

WELL, TO BE FAIR, THE WHOLE THING IS ABOUT VIRTUE-SIGNALING AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR GRAFT. PLANET-SAVING IS JUST AN EXCUSE, AND THUS OPTIONAL. A Hollow Treaty: The EU Can’t Keep Its Climate Promises.

Of all the stakeholders at the negotiating table in Paris this past December, the EU was perhaps the most vociferous in its attempt to try and hammer out an international climate treaty. The document the summit produced requires nations to submit plans for how they’ll reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, and notably lacks any sort of robust enforcement mechanism. Now, it seems the EU ought to be thankful that the climate treaty turned out to be so flimsy, as it’s on track to emit two billion more tons of carbon dioxide than was agreed three months ago, according to a European Commission document. As the Guardian reports, the bloc’s lackluster Emissions Trading System is to blame. . . .

In the meantime, the EU apparently has no intention of beefing up its emissions reduction targets until 2020 at the earliest, despite the fact that the Paris treaty “requires” signatories to review their climate goals in 2018. The thinking in Brussels seems to be that the current target—a 40 percent reduction in greenhouse gases by 2030 as compared to 1990 levels—is sufficient for at least another four years. According to a draft text (seen by Reuters) that EU environment ministers will work off of at a meeting later this week, the aforementioned goal “is based on global projections that are in line with the medium-term ambition of the Paris Agreement.”

Still, whatever the reasoning, it’s a bad look for the EU—supposedly the greenest bloc of countries in the developed world—already to be flouting the review process of a treaty drafted not 12 weeks ago. And even if the targets it’s currently working off of are sufficient past 2018, there’s still the question of whether one of its most important tools for achieving those reductions—the bloc’s carbon market—is up to the task. We’re already seeing how hollow the Paris treaty really is.

Like I said, it’s about virtue-signaling and graft, so it’s accomplishing its goals.

ACTUALLY, THE WAY THINGS ARE GOING THESE DAYS, THE REAL QUESTION IS, WHY ISN’T EVERYBODY ONE? Why Are One In Three Lawyers Problem Drinkers?

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RETHINKING THE BIG SHORT AND THE 2008 FINANCIAL CRISIS (VIDEO):

Watch the whole thing. And for background, check out this remarkably prescient Winter of 2000 City Journal article titled “The Trillion-Dollar Bank Shakedown That Bodes Ill for Cities.” Note the president who was in office when it was written, and it’s understandable why Hollywood would want to shift the blame to create a “decade of greed”-style Wall Street morality tale for the Bush era.

PUNCHING BACK TWICE AS HARD: Ted Cruz Mocks George Stephanopoulos: “If we unify, head-to-head, our campaign beats Donald soundly. And for everyone concerned about the best interest of the Republican Party, if Donald is the nominee, in all likelihood, your former boss Hillary Clinton becomes the president.”

Why doesn’t every GOP interviewee bring up this connection when interviewed by Hillary’s most visible surrogate?

ROGER SIMON: The #NeverTrump Crowd Should Get a Life.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: How A Decade Of Debt Changed The Law Student Experience.

NATO COMMANDER: Terrorists “a daily part” of refugee flow into Europe.

[U.S. Air Force Gen. Philip] Breedlove said Russia’s actions in Syria have “wildly exacerbated the problem.” Despite its public pronouncements, Russia has done little to counter ISIS, but instead has bolstered Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Russia and Assad, Breedlove said, are using mass migration as a weapon to overwhelm European support structures and break European resolve. He cited the use of barrel bombs, which are unguided weapons and have no military value, against civilians in Syria. The only purpose of these indiscriminate attacks is to terrorize Syrian citizens and “get them on the road” and make them problems for other countries, Breedlove said.

Didn’t John Kerry negotiate a ceasefire in Syria?