ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Which Character Didn’t Survive ‘The Walking Dead’ Finale?

A UNITER, NOT A DIVIDER! In Wisconsin, Bernie Will Make It Six Straight Wins.

HEY, IT’S THREE HOTS AND A COT: Prison As The New Retirement Plan.

TYLER COWEN: The Criticism Of Trump That Few Will Utter:

It is sad to see so many people, including those on the Left or in the Democratic Party, criticize the idea of a Trump presidency without ever uttering the phrase: “No man or woman should have so much political power over others.” I agree with many of the moral criticisms of Trump as a leader, but don’t let them distract you from this broader truth.

It is strange but instructive how many Democratic criticisms of Trump circle back into criticisms of other, earlier, and now often irrelevant Republicans. That is simply a language of attack they are more comfortable with.

The good news, if that is what one should call it, is that the best criticisms of Trump involve the concept of individual liberty and freedom from arbitrary legal authority and pure presidential discretion. The bad news is that so few intellectuals have the relevant ideological vocabulary in that regard.

They’re fine with an all-powerful, oppressive government. They just want to be in charge.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The Shrinking Ph.D. Job Market. “As number of new Ph.D.s rises, the percentage of people earning a doctorate without a job waiting for them is up. While all disciplines face the problem, some have particularly high debt levels.”

All is proceeding as I have foretold.

MAYBE THE SCIENCE ISN’T AS SETTLED AS YOU’D LIKE: How the Media Got a Study About Vegetarianism Really, Really Wrong.

“Our claim is that, to put it simply: you need to have a diet that is matched to your genes,” Ye explained. “For those individuals that carry the ‘vegetarian allele,’ our suggestion is to stick to the vegetarian diet because that’s what your ancestors ate and that’s what your ancestors adapted to. Too much meat or vegetable oil is not good for these people, because those foods also contain omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids.”

But somehow, this study about a gene variant that means some people might be better off eating a vegetarian diet was misinterpreted to mean that eating vegetarian will cause your genes to mutate and lead to a higher risk of colon cancer.

“There was a cascade of misinformation,” said Nathaniel Comfort, the Baruch Blumberg professor of astrobiology at the Library of Congress and NASA who blogs about hype and misconceptions in genetic research. “The way this happened is through a kind of informational entropy.”

Only 17% of those with European ancestry carry the vegetarianism allele, so I’m going to play it safe and grill a massive ribeye tonight.

STATIN ALTERNATIVE FLOPS: Dashing Hopes, Study Shows a Cholesterol Drug Had No Effect on Heart Health. The drug did what it was supposed to — lowered LDL and raised HDL — it just didn’t make any difference. Maybe the medical community’s understanding of cholesterol is just wrong?

AT AMAZON, $15 off FireTV Devices. I have 2, and like them both.

Plus, deals on Levi’s Jeans.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, BLACK-COLLEGES EDITION: Failing HBCUs: Should They Receive Life Support or the Axe? “Many of America’s 106 HBCUs—which are concentrated mostly in the South—are in crisis. Years of falling enrollment, declining academic standards and graduation rates, shrinking endowments, and poor management have called into question such institutions’ staying power. Various reforms have been attempted, but those have often been Band-Aids for problems that demand long-term solutions and fresh thinking. The downward trajectory has continued as HBCU supporters and policymakers have treated the sector as a protected class in higher education—one in which outside criticism is labeled reactionary or, worse, a vestige of racism. Objectively, however, HBCUs in many respects fail the students they purport to uplift: low-income students, first-generation college students, and students with substandard academic preparation.”

In the era of segregation, these schools got the best black students. Now they don’t. And their problems offer an advance look at what many other institutions will be experiencing soon.

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED. Every Single One: Since 2009, Obama’s DOJ Civil Rights Division Hired ONLY Leftist Lawyers — Hundreds.

THELMA AND LOUISE: THE NEXT GENERATION!

Shot: Hillary Clinton wears leather, talks trash and blows a stop light.
—The New York Daily News, Friday.

Chaser: ‘Our eyes connected and I thought “Wow”‘: Hillary Clinton’s top aide Huma Abedin gushes about presidential hopeful and describes the moment they first met
—The London Daily Mail, today.

Hangover: While the tabloid press are running these “granny gets her freak on” headlines, as NewsBusters noted last night, AP and the New York Times have memory holed “Mrs. Clinton’s seven damning words, ‘the unborn person doesn’t have constitutional rights.'” “The best way to tell when a leftist’s gaffe is serious is to see if the Associated Press or the New York Times have recognized its existence. As of 9 p.m. ET this evening, neither has. So it’s serious. Pile-ons are coming from the left and the right.”

UNEXPECTEDLY? U.S. factory data signals further slowdown in economic growth.

New orders for U.S. factory goods fell in February and business spending on capital goods was much weaker than initially thought, the latest indications that economic growth slowed further in the first quarter.

The Commerce Department said on Monday new orders for manufactured goods declined 1.7 percent as demand fell broadly, reversing January’s downwardly revised 1.2 percent increase. Orders have declined in 14 of the last 19 months. They were previously reported to have increased 1.6 percent in January.

The department also said orders for non-defense capital goods excluding aircraft fell by a steeper 2.5 percent in February instead of the 1.8 percent drop reported last month.

These dismal industrial numbers, plus continued weakness in consumer spending, just don’t seem to square with the official unemployment rate of 5%.

ON THE UPSIDE, IT WAS FOUNDED BY A WOMAN, WHICH GOT IT YEARS OF UNCRITICAL POSITIVE PRESS: Theranos Promised a Revolution, but Delivered Dangerous Errors: A government investigation of Theranos’s lab has documented a host of troubles at the blood-testing startup.

WELL, THIS IS HUGE: FIRE Aims to Challenge Legality of Federal Sexual Misconduct Mandate.

Five years ago today, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) announced sweeping new requirements for colleges and universities adjudicating allegations of sexual misconduct. By unilaterally issuing these binding mandates via a controversial “Dear Colleague” letter (DCL), OCR ignored its obligation under federal law to notify the public of the proposed changes and solicit feedback.

To correct this error, and to begin to fix a broken system of campus sexual assault adjudication that regularly fails all involved, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) seeks a student or institution to challenge OCR’s abuse of power. FIRE has made arrangements to secure legal counsel for a student or institution harmed by OCR’s mandates and in a position to challenge the agency’s violation of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). In keeping with FIRE’s charitable mission to advance the public interest, representation will be provided at no cost to the harmed party. . . .

The APA requires federal agencies implementing new substantive rules to first offer those rules for public notice and comment, so that affected parties may provide feedback before they are adopted. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, before which claims under the APA are often adjudicated, has held that “[a] rule which is subject to the APA’s procedural requirements, but was adopted without them, is invalid.” The APA exempts from its notice-and-comment requirement “interpretative rules”—those which merely interpret existing statutes or regulations. But after five years, OCR has repeatedly failed to identify a legal provision that requires institutions nationwide to use the “preponderance” standard. Accordingly, OCR’s enforcement of this mandate violates the APA.

“Scores of students—both alleged victims and accused students—have sued their institutions after suffering under the faulty systems that OCR has effectively crafted through the DCL,” said Susan Kruth, a FIRE senior program officer for legal and public advocacy. “Those who will be affected by new rules must be given the opportunity to comment on their development. That’s the best way to create a system through which campus sexual assault allegations will be effectively and fairly addressed.”

Before that can happen, OCR must rescind the DCL’s mandates and subject them to public notice and comment as required by the APA. Since it has not done so voluntarily despite a substantial public outcry, the time has come to hold the agency accountable for its unlawful actions. A student or institution harmed by the DCL’s mandates can do this by filing a lawsuit against the agency.

Much more at the link.

UPDATE: Link was bad before. Fixed now. Sorry!

‘Batman v. Superman,’ ‘Star Wars’ and Hollywood’s New Obsession With the “Requel,” as explored by the Hollywood Reporter:

Holy box office! The industry’s latest trend isn’t a sequel or reboot, it’s a hybrid engineered to capture nostalgia and launch a new (and lucrative) film universe.

Hollywood’s done the remakes, reboots, prequels and three­quels. The latest obsession: the “requel,” a movie that’s both a reboot and a sequel, blending old with new in an effort to extend the life of a franchise and, in the best cases, reinvent it for a “universe” of follow-up movies.

Regarding “Batman v. Superman v. your sense of hearing,” last week James Lileks wrote:

If you’d told me as a child that the future would contain almost nothing but superhero movies with all my favorite characters, and that my future self wouldn’t be surprised if they greenlit “Fin Fang Foom v Paste-Pot Pete” I would have looked up in confusion: “What do you mean, greenlit? I don’t understand the term.”

Never mind, that’s not the point. All your childhood joys will be brought to life at the cost of billions of dollars, shown in 3-D on indoor screens the size of the Starlight Drive-in. You win. The kids win. All your stories become the dominant American cultural product.

I would have been ecstatic. But I wouldn’t have expected that I would tire of the bombast, the unreality of the action, the feeling of leaving the theater with a lacerated spleen. I wouldn’t have thought that I’d put on the earlier Michael Bay movies because now they looked like Ingmar Bergman stories of a guy playing chess for an hour.

So I’m done. Except for the next Captain America, which is a great series of movies. In the next one he fights Iron Man! Good. If anyone needs a good beatdown by a God-fearing patriotic man with a sense of decorum, it’s Tony Stark. I also hope they make more Ant-Man and Thor, and hopes are high for Dr. Strange. He’s a magician! And he fights a guy whose head is on fire. Awesome!

I wonder what used to keep grown-ups from being excited about such things. Besides shame, that is.

As I wrote here last week, if you’re wondering how Hollywood went from Gone with the Wind, Citizen Kane and Casablanca, to Batman Versus Superman and Quentin Tarantino’s entire oeuvre, the remarkably influential 1960s-1970s-era New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael is the linchpin between old and new Hollywood. But as Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader (whose early career Kael championed) once said, “It was fun watching the applecart being upset. but now where do we go for apples?”

FIGHT THE POWER: German Woman Jailed For Refusing To Pay Public Broadcast Fee. ” She was marched off to a police station and then to jail in Chemnitz, Saxony – and a notice that she was being let go from her job followed soon after. But the broadcaster fee refusenik, who stopped paying in 2013, believes that her cause is just. She and other opponents of the fees argue that public TV channels ARD and ZDF and radio broadcaster Deutschlandradio are massively overfinanced and have overstepped the bounds of the ‘basic service’ the law calls on them to provide.” They also, of course, engage in politicking on behalf of the political class, which is in fact their entire reason for existing, as with all the other national broadcasting entities.

21st CENTURY HEADLINES: Get Your Bicycle Blessed With Holy Water at Cathedral of St. John the Divine. “While bike lanes and infrastructure continue to increase, riding in New York City still comes with risk — and some cyclists look to the heavens for a little extra protection.”

Glad to know that while de Blasio seems hellbent on eliminating all of the reforms started by Rudy Giuliani that Michael Bloomberg maintained to keep New York safe, he’s continuing Mayor Mike’s fever dream to turn Manhattan into one giant bike lane. (Albeit one that’s now much more graffiti, crime, and homeless splattered than in the past.)

A STAY-AT-HOME MOM’S GUIDE TO SMALL TALK: “You’ve said your polite hellos, ascertained how you both know the host, discussed the merits of the cheese platter and come back around to what a lovely party it is.  The smiles are freezing on your faces and you’ve both taken a drink from your glass to fill the awkward silence.  It’s inevitable.  She goes first: ‘So, what do you do?’ You thought this interaction was awkward before! Just wait until I’ve answered that question. You see, I’m a stay-at-home mom. Not a staying-home-for-a-little-while-then-going-back-to-work mom, a stay-at-home mom. Which surprisingly, as far as I’m concerned, is kind of hard for people to deal with. Particularly working moms. If you’re a stay-at-home mom too, you may also have found yourself in awkward situations like this one. But never fear. Here, at last, is a stay-at-home mom’s guide to small talk. Let’s begin.”

HIGH QUALITY HEADPHONES, from Amazon Basics.

MACHINE LEARNING for easier dieting.

DON’T MENTION THE WAR: “This isn’t some sort of technical glitch. The White House posted the full audio and video of Hollande’s remarks, took it down, and put up this redacted version. They did this. In 2016, an openly socialist Frenchman has a more clear-eyed view of world events than the President of the United States. And we’re censoring his words. We’re actually censoring a world leader who’s precisely and accurately describing a problem, because it might offend some people. People who definitely need to be offended.”

Related: Kerry Thanks Senegal for ‘Humanitarian Resettlement’ of Gitmo Detainees.

BELMONT VS. FISHTOWN: It’s a “Coming Apart” election.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Heavy Recruitment of Chinese Students Sows Discord on U.S. Campuses. “On some campuses, wealthy Chinese students stand out for their extraordinary opulence—and fuel resentment in the process. Ashley Yao, a student at Stony Brook University in New York, speeds to classes in a tricked-out BMW X5 M sport-utility vehicle. The 25-year-old wears haute couture and hangs out with other wealthy Chinese-born university students who drive candy-colored Lamborghinis, Ferraris and McLarens. Ms. Yao, who lives in a four-bedroom house her parents bought for her, says she finds it difficult to connect with the U.S. students on campus.” It’s all about the money.

NO, THIS HASN’T GONE AWAY: Hillary’s ‘classified’ smokescreen hides real crime: Law makes clear DOJ should prosecute Clinton for mishandling ‘national defense information,’ classified or not.

ROGER KIMBALL: What Happens Now?