THE TRUTH ABOUT TED NUGENT: The Nuge – read before you judge.

I WAS EXPECTING AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: Mark Levin Goes Nuclear Over Donald Trump’s Debate Comments.

THIS SEEMS LIKE A BIG DEAL: Exclusive: Whistleblowers Warned Top Spy About Skewed ISIS Intel: It wasn’t just the generals who were warned that ISIS intelligence assessments were overly rosy. The office of the director of national intelligence knew, too.

Related: Clapper knew. White House knew. NSC knew. They ALL knew.

Background here: Obama’s Messy Iraq Intelligence Scandal.

ANOTHER NAME FROM THE MTV ERA HAS LEFT THE BUILDING: Vanity Dead at 57, Prince Protege Known for ‘Nasty Girl:’

[Denise Katrina Matthews] struggled with drug abuse, which took its toll on her health. At one point she suffered renal failure and, according to a Jet feature on the singer, required peritoneal dialysis five times a day.

Following a 1994 crack cocaine overdose that left her with near-renal failure, Matthews renounced her stage name and became a born-again Christian, at one point saying, “When I came to the Lord Jesus Christ, I threw out about 1,000 tapes of mine — every interview, every tape, every video. Everything.” Following a 1997 kidney transplant, she devoted herself to evangelism, speaking at churches.

RIP.

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Multiple advances in de novo protein design and prediction.

I’D RATHER TEAR OUT THE ENTRAILS, BUT WHATEVER: Nipping At The Heels Of The Administrative State.

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NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: Welcome To Cold War 2.0: The risk of the Kremlin rolling the dice against NATO is real.

PRAGER UNIVERSITY PRESENTS GEORGE WILL: A Progressive’s Guide to Political Correctness.

YOUR GOVERNMENT AT WORK: Five Years Of Gas-Can Hell.

I’m pretty sure gas cans used to work. Yes. It was a can. It had a spout. It had a vent hole on the other side. You stuck in the spout and tipped. You never saw the gas.

Then government “fixed” the gas can. Why? Because of the environmental hazards that come with spilled gas. You read that right. In other words, the very opposite resulted. Now you cannot buy a decent can anywhere. You can look forever and not find a new one.

Instead you have to go to garage sales. But actually people hoard old cans.

Yeah, I have a couple of old ones I was going to throw away, but I kept them precisely because everyone says the new ones suck.

THE SENATE’S ROLE ISN’T “ADVICE AND RUBBER STAMP”: The Appointment Clause of Article I, section 2 of the Constitution makes it clear that while the President has the power to nominate Supreme Court Justices, no appointment can take place without the “Advice and Consent of the Senate.”

As Michael Barone explains, the Senate’s checking function–particularly in a presidential election year–should be (and historically has been) taken seriously:

Obama has made it clear, in his statement after the announcement of Justice Scalia’s death and through press spokesman Eric Schultz, that he will send a nominee’s name to the Senate and that he will not do so during the current 10-day President’s Day recess. But the Senate doesn’t have to act on the nomination at all. . . .

The Constitution clearly gives the president the duty of appointing a justice and it clearly gives the Senate the prerogative to confirm or deny confirmation to that nominee. . . .

Newspapers like the Washington Post will be full of articles about the Obama nominee’s great skills and attractive background. For an example of what’s coming, consider this article on one possible nominee, who if confirmed and if he lives as long as Scalia would serve until 2052. The writer relishes the prospect of Republicans opposing an outwardly attractive Mexican-American nominee, though to me it brings back the spectacle of the Democrats in the first term blocking the appeals court nomination of Miguel Estrada for fear that he would become an attractive Supreme Court nominee. Estrada’s nomination was not reported to the floor when Democrats were in the majority and when Republicans gained the majority it was filibustered — the first filibuster of an appeals court nominee in history. So much for precedent. . . .

Republicans could argue, as their presidential candidates did in Saturday’s debate, that the president should not get to nominate a justice in his last year in office. That’s a principled stand, and one for which there is ample precedent. . . .

The last three times a justice was nominated and confirmed in a presidential year were in 1956, 1940 and 1932. In 1956 and 1932, Republican presidents named a Democratic nominee who served on their state’s highest courts: Dwight Eisenhower chose William Brennan (whose selection he later called one of his biggest mistakes) and Herbert Hoover chose Benjamin Cardozo. In 1940 a Democratic president named a Democratic nominee, Attorney General Frank Murphy, who was nominated on January 4 and confirmed by a Democratic-majority Senate 12 days later. If you want to take this as a precedent for consideration and confirmation of a nominee in an election year, note that it is 76 years old.

UPDATE: Adam J. White, on the basis of impressive historical research, makes the point in the Weekly Standard blog that the Senate has no constitutional duty to vote on Supreme Court appointments. In fact, the Senate has confirmed only 124 of 160 presidential Supreme Court nominations, and of the 36 unsuccessful nominees fully 25 received no up-or-down vote. The Senate would be well advised, in my view, to treat an Obama nominee the same way.

SEXISM AND HIGHER EDUCATION IN BRITAIN: It’s no surprise if men decide university isn’t for them: Why are researchers preoccupied with ‘lad culture’ when the under-representation of men among students is the real problem, asks Joanna Williams.

Male students have become a rare breed in UK universities.

They were first outnumbered by women as far back as 1992 and, since then, the gender gap has increased annually.

Statistics released by Ucas last week show that this year almost 100,000 more women than men have applied for a university place. In England, women are 36 per cent more likely to submit an application than their male peers; among those from disadvantaged backgrounds this rises to 58 per cent.

Imagine for a minute what would happen if these figures were reversed. I have no doubt there would be panicked calls for an inquiry into what was causing such dramatic gender inequality. There would be demands for better outreach programmes, publicity campaigns and positive discrimination to get girls into higher education.

In reality, the news that boys are significantly less likely to apply to university has passed with little comment. . . .

Research exploring why white working class men are less likely to go to university does exist, but as even a rough count of journal articles shows, it comprises a tiny fraction of the research published in this area. Too often the under-representation of men is written off as either a “non-issue” or rectifying an historical injustice.

The dominance of feminism within educational research limits both the topics explored and the perspectives adopted. Rather than evaluating the nature and meaning of female success and the creation of new sites of gender inequality, researchers instead seek out the few remaining areas where women can still claim to be at a disadvantage. Attention is drawn to the greater number of male professors and vice-chancellors rather than the sharp increases in female students, postgraduates, researchers and academics.

Alternatively, current research into higher education and gender focuses on the “problem” of masculinity in universities. Growing attention is being paid to “laddism” or “lad culture” and the difficulties this apparently poses for all in universities. Male students are criticised for being confrontational in seminars and disruptive in lectures. It is suggested that they hinder not just their own learning but that of their female classmates too.

Even relatively mild-mannered male students are considered to dominate seminars in a way that silences female voices. For some lecturers, it seems, the presence of men in their classroom is a particular challenge to be managed, rather than simply being part and parcel of the often mundane experience of teaching.

Clearly, the only way we can achieve equality in higher education is to ban men from universities entirely.

OKAY, THE SCALIA ASSASSINATION CONSPIRACY THEORIES ARE GETTING OUT OF HAND.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: This Chart Shows Who Marries CEOs, Doctors, Chefs and Janitors.

Perhaps worth looking at next to this: Are Single Women Just Too Smart For Marriage?

EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN: Beyonce and the Return of Radical Chic.

When Sha-Na-Na took the stage at Woodstock in 1969 in T-shirts, gold lamé Elvis jackets and Brylcreemed pompadours, they were correctly understood to be an “oldies act,” celebrating a culture that had died five years earlier — when the Beatles’ arrival in America in 1964 consigned ‘50s-era rock and roll to the dustbin of history. How did a once-fast-changing pop culture become so permanent that Beyonce is glorifying the Black Panthers, whose heyday was 45 years ago, even as the top film in the country is a sequel to a movie made almost 40 years ago?

EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN: Vinyl LP Demand Fuels Quest for Perfect Record Player.

Not for me – I remember the poor mastering on some of the earliest CDs, and I know today’s MP3s often have absurd levels of brickwall compression to sound as loud and bassed-out as possible, but I have no desire to go back to the era of scratches, hiss and surface noise.

That said, I wouldn’t mind trying Izotope’s free reissue of their first home recording plugin, Vinyl — which is designed to add plenty of scratches, hiss and surface noise — on my own homebrew MP3s from time to time, for a vintage effect on intros and outros.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: A mind-boggling stew of nations is fighting in Syria’s civil war.

IS OUR CHILDREN LEARNING? Liberals Rewrite History, Make a Few Mistakes:

A fetish for de-honoring objectionable historical figures is sweeping American college campuses. Targets range from unrepentant bastards like Jeffery Amherst to imperfect great men like Thomas Jefferson. I wonder if America’s undergrads realize that imperfection, and bastardy, are surprisingly widespread conditions:

“The white race of South Africa should be the predominating race,” said Mahatma Gandhi. He also said, of himself and his followers, “We believe as much in the purity of race as” white South Africans. He called black South Africans “kaffirs,” which is South Africa’s equivalent of “n***ers,” and objected to blacks living among South African Indians: “About this mixing of the Kaffirs with the Indians, I must confess I feel strongly. I think it is very unfair to the Indian population.” He wrote that “Kaffirs are as a rule uncivilized. . . . The reader can easily imagine the plight of the poor Indian thrown into such company!”

There are dozens of such Gandhi quotes. Students at Oxford tried to tear down a statue of Cecil Rhodes — who endowed Oxford’s Rhodes Scholarship — after they found out he held comparable, Gandhi-esque views. Should we expect a “Gandhi Must Fall” campaign targeting the innumerable Gandhi statues worldwide? Like the one standing in London, in front of the Houses of Parliament?

Read on for similarly damning quotes from t-shirt icon Che Guevara, pioneering “Progressive” Karl Marx, and the man whose name adorns seemingly every building in West Virginia, Robert Byrd.

As for Gandhi, skip the film, just read the great movie review ever written instead. (Text also online here, if article is behind the subscriber paywall.)

ALIEN ARTIFACTS: 40,000-year-old bracelet made by extinct human species found.

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Also, markdowns in Car & Vehicle Electronics.

IS THE SUGAR IN FRUIT BAD FOR YOU? It depends. “Not if the fruit in question is whole fruit. Unlike honey, cane sugar, high-fructose corn syrup and other forms of sugar that are added to many processed foods, the sugar naturally found in fruit is consumed in the company of fiber, which helps your body absorb the sugar more slowly.”

DIE, MOSQUITOES, DIE! When Extinction Is a Humanitarian Cause: The mosquito spreading Zika doesn’t belong in our environment. Soon we may be able to eradicate it with new technology.

THE KINGDOM OF SPEECH: Big News: Tom Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech Is in the Pipeline; Out in August.

Presumably, the book, Wolfe’s first non-fiction since his Hooking Up anthology in 2000, will build on Wolfe’s 2006 lecture to the National Endowment for the Humanities, in which he said:

I love my man Zola. He’s my idol. But the whole business exudes irony so rich, you can taste it. It tastes like marzipan. Here we have Darwin and his doctrine that in 1859 rocks Western man’s very conception of himself . . . We have the most popular writer in the world in 1888, Zola, who can’t wait to bring the doctrine alive on the page . . . We have the next five generations of educated people who have believed and believe to this day that, at bottom, evolution’s primal animal urges rule our lives . . . to the point where the fourth greatest pop music hit of 2001, “You and Me, Baby” by the Bloodhound Gang, proclaims, “You and me, baby, we ain’t nothing but mammals. / So let’s do it like they do on the Dis-cov-ery Channel”–it’s rich! rich! rich beyond belief!

O. I love you, Emile, but by the time you and Darwin got hold of it, evolution had been irrelevant for 11,000 years. Why couldn’t you two see it? Evolution came to an end when the human beast developed speech! As soon as he became not Homo sapiens, “man reasoning,” but Homo loquax, “man talking”! Speech gave the human beast far more than an ingenious tool. Speech was a veritable nuclear weapon! It gave the human beast the powers of reason, complex memory, and long-term planning, eventually in the form of print and engineering plans. Speech gave him the power to enlarge his food supply at will through an artifice called farming. Speech ended not only the evolution of man, by making it no longer necessary, but also the evolution of animals! Our animal friends–we’re very sentimental about predators these days, aren’t we–the lions, the tigers, the wolves, the rhinoceroses, the great apes, kangaroos, leopards, cheetahs, grizzly bears, polar bears, cougars–they’re “endangered,” meaning hanging on for dear life. Today the so-called animal kingdom exists only at the human beast’s sufferance.

Oh the fun that will be had when this book is debated.

NEWS YOUR DM CAN USE: Sex and Role-Playing Games.

EIGHT THOUGHTS ON SCALIA FROM JONAH GOLDBERG:

3. The double-standard for Republicans is not shocking but it remains galling. As Jim Geraghty notes in today’s Jolt, Chuck Schumer took exactly the same position on any further Bush appointments in 2007. I don’t seem to recall the shock and outrage we’re seeing today.

4. On that note, Ruth Marcus — an often independent-minded liberal — offers some classic concern trolling of the GOP today in her column. She writes:

Finally, a Senate work stoppage would, in fact, be bad for Republicans. In the nation’s capital these days, everything is political, every institution politicized. That may be inevitable and irreparable, yet tables here have a way of turning. One party’s obstructionism ends up hurting it down the road.

Marcus is surely right that tables can turn. What she leaves out is the simple, glaring, fact that the tables are turning on Democrats who’ve been playing outrageous games with appointment process for a quarter century. When Robert Bork was defenestrated by Joe Biden, despite having said he would have no choice but to vote for someone so well-qualified, he was setting the tables for payback. When Harry Reid pulled the trigger on the nuclear option (on lower court appointments) he was warned that this would come back to haunt him. When Democrats disgustingly blocked Miguel Estrada from the bench solely because he was a Hispanic, they set the table to be turned. When Barack Obama voted to filibuster Alito, he set the table to be turned.

Cry me no tears now that Republicans are finally putting their shoulders to the table.

And note this: “If Scalia’s interpretation of the Constitution held sway in the land, the Court and the government would have much less power over our lives. And that, more than anything else, explains why the left hated him so much.”

Read the whole thing.