IRAN ON OBAMA’S CLAIM THAT THEY’RE NOT LIVING UP TO THE “SPIRIT” OF THE AGREEMENT: Iran Says: Spirit? What Spirit? We’re Preparing For War!

IT’S IMPORTANT TO LOVE YOUR WORK: I Was A Call Girl But Not Just For The Money.

SPRING CLEANING AT AMAZON: Organize Your Office!

Plus, Up to 50% Off Select Remington Airguns & Targets.

VITAMIN D UPDATE: Daily dose of vitamin D ‘can improve function in damaged hearts.’

Researchers studied 160 patients being treated for heart failure using a variety of proven drug treatments and pacemakers.

Participants who took a vitamin D3 supplement daily for one year experienced an improvement in heart function not seen in those given a dummy pill.

Lead scientist Dr Klaus Witte, from the School of Medicine at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, said: “This is a significant breakthrough for patients.

“It is the first evidence that vitamin D3 can improve heart function of people with heart muscle weakness, known as heart failure. These findings could make a significant difference to the care of heart failure patients.”

The researchers measured “ejection fraction”, which shows how much blood is pumped from the heart with each heartbeat.

Supplements are good, especially in climates where you can’t get enough sun. But I suspect that there’s an added benefit to making your own vitamin D the old-fashioned way. I still take it every day.

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: DNA nanotechnology defeats drug resistance in cancer cells.

OCCUPY LE CORBUSIER! “Will a silent majority rise against architecture’s elite?”, David Brussat asks at the American Conservative:

In most cities and towns, the way new buildings look is not influenced by public taste, which is generally traditional. Instead, it is the purview of municipal and institutional facilities committees, design-review panels, the developers who hire architects who cater to the tastes of officialdom, and the local circle of professionals, academics, and journalists who may be relied upon to cluck at any deviation from the elite fashion in the design of new buildings.

Maybe we should be glad that voters are not faced with yet another set of reasons to shout at each other, as building design stays absent from public debates. But it is far from clear that traditional architecture and urban design, if they became a political issue, would be as divisive as immigration, abortion, or gun control. In fact, such an agenda would likely prove appealing across ideological divides—so the first party to politicize architecture could steal a march on its rival.

Architecture is not intrinsically conservative or liberal, let alone Democratic or Republican. Yet a quiet consensus favors traditional styles in architecture. It seems an awful lot like a “silent majority.”

Except that, as Tom Wolfe noted in From Bauhaus to Our House 35 years ago, virtually all modern architecture flows from the early socialist worker housing concepts drawn up inside the Bauhaus, the pioneering modernist German design school, which lasted from 1919, when it was founded by Walter Gropius, until it was shuddered by the Nazis in 1933, when its last leader was Mies van der Rohe. As historian Jonathan Petropoulos wrote last year in his book Artists Under Hitler: Collaboration and Survival in Nazi Germany, both Mies and Gropius, dedicated avant-garde socialists in the 1920s, were much more willing to stay onboard with the National Socialist regime that succeeded the socialism of Weimar-era Germany than most-postwar historians were aware of. At least until 1937, when Hitler finally made hatred of modernism official Nazi policy via his very public attendance at the infamous Degenerate Art exhibition in Berlin that year.

Even as he was championing European modern architecture in America in the 1930s (in particular, introducing Mies’s work to the US), via his perch as the first director of architecture for the nascent Museum of Modern Art in New York, Philip Johnson (1906-2005) was an open admirer of the Nazis. Writing as a correspondent to Father Coughlin’s publication Social Justice*, Johnson accompanied one of the Nazis’ raids on Poland in the fall of 1939, after which, he chilling wrote in a letter to a friend, “The German green uniforms made the place look gay and happy. There were not many Jews to be seen. We saw Warsaw burn and Modlin being bombed. It was a stirring spectacle.”

Eventually, he too came to his senses and worked very hard to expunge this period of his past; it wasn’t until very late in his career, when first Spy magazine in 1988 and then in 1996, veteran architectural historian Franz Schulze began writing about Philip’s dark past as the Zelig of Liberal Fascism. In the 1920s, France’s Le Corbusier, the subject of the witty title of the above-linked article, began his hothouse career designing beautifully minimalist white stucco homes for wealthy patrons such as Villa Stein (built for the sister-in-law of Gertrude Stein), and coining the phrase the ur-1920s modern architectural aphorism that “the home is a machine for living in.” But in 1932 he entered into (and subsequently lost) a design competition to build Moscow’s Palace of the Soviets, before volunteering his services to the Nazi-puppet regime of Vichy France in 1940. As Henry Samuel of the London Telegraph wrote last year on a recent French biography of Corbusier titled, Le Corbusier, un fascisme francais, “In August 1940, the architect wrote to his mother that ‘money, Jews (partly responsible), Freemasonry, all will feel just law’. In October that year, he added: ‘Hitler can crown his life with a great work: the planned layout of Europe.’”

In America, because of the influence of Mies and Gropius as instructors to a whole new generation of architecture, as Tom Wolfe noted, virtually all pre-modernist architectural styles died in the public sphere and as a medium for large-scale corporate architecture. Long before today’s college campus began to live out the nightmare “thoughtcrime” and book-burning scenarios depicted in Orwell’s 1984 and Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, postwar modern architects were all too eager to self-lobotomize.

The best of the pre-war European architecture designed by Corbusier, Gropius and especially Mies was remarkable stuff, and postwar American modernism could produce, on occasion, handsome buildings such as Mies’ legendary Seagram building. And modernism is still inspiring to many today. But there’s no doubt, as Brussat writes, a vast swatch of the American public feels left out of the debate.

So Occupy Le Corbusier? It’s certainly an idea that the grandmasters of European modern architecture would all have endorsed during the radical early years of their careers.

* Gee, with a title like that, it’s as if Father Coughlin was a leftist himself. Who knew?!

HOW MICROSOFT’S TAY BECAME A GENOCIDAL, FOUL-MOUTHED, SEX-CRAZED NAZI IN ONE DAY: “Most sci-fi thrillers involving AI usually result in AI becoming smarter than humans and coming to the conclusion that humanity needs to be wiped out by violence. Who thought that AI would be a problem not because it becomes super intelligent and paranoid, but because we taught it how to behave through our own actions and words?”

Or as a wise AI construct once said, “This sort of thing has cropped up before, and it has always been due to human error.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE: My Kids Don’t Eat Organic. Here’s Why.

TAKING ON BENTLEY AND ROLLS-ROYCE: Cadillac Is Working on a $250,000-Plus Sedan and SUV, Says Rumor.

AT AMAZON, it’s the Spring Gardening Event.

Plus, Cookbooks, Food & Wine.

Also, Best Sellers in Kitchen & Dining.

OKAY, MAYBE IT’S NOT AN AESTHETIC TRIUMPH, BUT IN MANY WAYS IT REALLY DOES REPRESENT A TRIUMPH OVER ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY: For the first time ever, there are more obese people than skinny people.

IT’S SPRING: 10 Raised Garden Beds That Fit Any Backyard Space.

By the way, a good book on this is Square Foot Gardening, by Mel Bartholomew.

CAN WE GET A FIX, PLEASE? The Rogue Immune Cells That Wreck the Brain: Beth Stevens thinks she has solved a mystery behind brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia.

MEET THE CANDIDATE HILARY AND DONALD ARE AFRAID TO DEBATE.

TRAINSPOTTING: The New York Daily News has a little fun with Bernie Sanders, asking him near the end of an interview, “When was the last time you rode the subway? Are you gonna a campaign in the subway?”

Sanders: Actually we rode the subway, Mike, when we were here? About a year ago? But I know how to ride the subways. I’ve been on them once or twice.

Daily News: Do you really? Do you really? How do you ride the subway today?

Sanders: What do you mean, “How do you ride the subway?”

Daily News: How do you get on the subway today?

Sanders: You get a token and you get in.

Daily News: Wrong.

Sanders: You jump over the turnstile.

Daily News: We would like our photographer to be there when you jump over the turnstile.

That’s nice. Now show Hillary as equally out of touch — if not more so.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:

Reporting from Washington — Law enforcement officials had only begun their examination of a Tucson supermarket scene where Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 17 others were shot Saturday when many on the political left settled on a culprit: overheated political rhetoric.

Even before the name of the shooter was known, a fierce debate spilled out across blogs and social media, with liberal commentators blaming the attack on the violent imagery evoked by some “tea party” candidates and conservatives during the recent midterm elections.

They noted that Giffords’ tea party-backed opponent, Jesse Kelly, held a fundraiser at a shooting range in which he invited supporters to “help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office” by shooting an M-16 rifle with him. They pointed to an online map Sarah Palin posted during the midterm election that used cross hairs to mark each congressional Democrat she wanted to defeat, along with her frequent use of shooting metaphors on the campaign trail.

—“In Gabrielle Giffords shooting, many on left quick to lay blame,” the Los Angeles Times, January 8, 2011.

Flash-forward to today; L.A. Times editors choose cartoon of Ted Cruz armed with a long-barreled pistol about to duel with an unarmed Donald Trump to illustrate Jonah Goldberg’s latest column for the paper, “How to stop Donald Trump.”

Given that in January of 2011, Michael Hirsh of the left-leaning National Journal appeared on MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews and called for, as Jeff Poor of the Daily Caller wrote at the time, “a moral sanction against gun metaphors similar to the ‘N’ word,” why on earth would the L.A. Times choose such an obviously racist visual metaphor during a heated election year?

And given that, as Glenn asked a few minutes ago, “If Trump Is the One Promoting Violence, Then Why Do So Many Americans Say They Want to Punch Him in the Face?,” why is the Times ratcheting up the eliminationist rhetoric to a whole new level?

THE INSTA-WIFE’S QUESTION HAS YET TO BE ANSWERED: If Trump Is the One Promoting Violence, Then Why Do So Many Americans Say They Want to Punch Him in the Face?

ZIKA NEWS: DEET Seen as Safe for Pregnant Women to Avoid Zika Despite Few Studies.

You know what’s safer? Mosquito eradication.

WHAT HATH MERKEL WROUGHT? Two-thirds of Germans want end to open borders. And it’s not just Germans: “The survey by French pollsters Ifop found that while 60 percent of Italians were against Schengen – an agreement which allows people to travel within the EU without showing a passport – across the Rhine the number of French people wanting borders closed was as high as 72 percent.”

RICHARD EPSTEIN: The Fannie & Freddie Fiasco.

THEY’RE WAFER-THIN — AND SO HEGEMONICALLY GENDER OPPRESSIVE! “it takes a special kind of academic fathead to ruin Thin Mints. But we have people up to it.”

SNEAK PREVIEW OF 2017: Future Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer Wants New Smartphone Gun Investigated.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1062.

WEST HOLLYWOOD MAYOR TO TRUMP: YOU’RE NOT WELCOME HERE! Trump could — and should — have plenty of fun pushing back against “low-level Democratic functionaries like Lindsey Horvath,” via a carpet-bombing of Alinsky-style ridicule, Allahpundit writes:

He never would have scheduled a rally in West Hollywood before this, I’m sure, but he’d be a chump not to schedule one now. Make a spectacle of Horvath’s lame attempt at left-wing “safe space” censorship. Plan a rally and then, when the permit’s denied, sue the pants off of her and her administration on First Amendment grounds. He’d very likely win, which would be a nice feather in his cap, and win or lose he could say that he feels duty bound to stand up for free speech against politically correct government bullies. Even his critics, starting with me, would back him up.

Read the whole thing.