JAPAN REVISITS ITS DARKEST MOMENTS WHERE AMERICAN POWs BECAME HUMAN EXPERIMENTS: One Japanese doctor has dedicated himself to ensuring the vivisection of eight US airmen by his fellow countrymen is not forgotten.

UPDATE: The Obama Narrative Goes to Hiroshima, Claudia Rosett writes today.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON AT PRAGER UNIVERSITY: Why Did America Fight the Korean War? (Video.)

I THINK HE SHOULD GO INDEPENDENT IF HE DOESN’T GET THE NOMINATION. FIGHT THE POWER! Bernie Won’t Get the Nomination. But His Online Army Isn’t Done.

FIVE ORGANIZATIONS THAT HELP OUR WOUNDED WARRIORS.

THIS DOES NOT SURPRISE ME: SoundCloud’s free “auto-mastering” audio tool is more of an auto-turd.

Landr’s landing site describes the mastering process as “complicated and elusive,” then insists that its product, which is almost entirely algorithm-driven, delivers a quality product for small-fry musicians by intentionally limiting how many options they can pick from. “Great design is all about limiting the field,” Landr says. As a result, the company touts that “we’re confident you’ll hear the difference” between professional mastering work and what Landr can pull off.

After our tests of SoundCloud’s new Landr functionality, we can safely agree with that statement—in every bad way possible.

Well, mastering is hard.

WHY THEY DIED: The Motivations of American Soldiers in 12 Great Wars.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Here’s Exactly Why Tire Pressure Is So Important to Your Car.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD AND AN EVERGREEN HEADLINE: Moderation Postponed in Iran.

For those puzzled by the hardline show of strength, it’s worth taking a look back at some of the smarter commentary at the time of the Iranian parliamentary elections this winter. The White House echo chamber and the 27 year-old know-nothings that Ben Rhodes has on speed dial were gushing over the “triumph” of the moderates and spinning it as a big win for the White House policy—but those who looked under the hood saw something different. As Eli Lake put it at the time:

Beginning in January, the regime’s Guardian Council began purging any candidates who espoused the slightest deviation from the country’s septuagenarian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Candidates who favored releasing political prisoners — including the leaders of the Green Movement that many Iranians feel won the 2009 presidential elections — were disqualified. Even members of the Assembly of Experts, who had previously passed the vetting process, were disqualified. So too was the grandson of Iran’s first supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. To paraphrase a former top U.S. negotiator in the Iran talks, Wendy Sherman, Iranians on Friday will have a choice between hardliners and hard hardliners.

Bottom line: the much ballyhooed ‘triumph of the moderates’ was another piece of White House spin, presumably pumped into the national consciousness by those helpful folks at Ploughshares.

The “triumph of the moderates” was one of the many lies used to sell Obama’s dangerous nuke deal with Iran.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Questions and Answers on the New Study Linking Cellphones and Cancer in Rats.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: 9 Handy Multitools to Keep You Ready for Anything.

I still like my Leatherman Skeletool.

OH, TO BE IN ENGLAND: The L-Word is triggering ever-so-sensitive British actors:

Calling actors ‘luvvies’ is as offensive as using racial slurs, Tom Conti said yesterday.

Shirley Valentine star Conti, who lives in a £17.5million mansion in Hampstead, told the Daily Mail that to use the word ‘luvvies’ was ‘as abusive as “Yid” or “n*****” and it’s a horrible expression.

‘It’s pejorative, denigrative and demeaning. I know a number of actors and certainly the actors with whom I have mixed over my entire life have been very bright people.’

Conti’s fellow luvvie, Downton Abbey star Peter Egan, agrees:

‘If actors are voicing an opinion, in many cases a true opinion, the way to dismiss that is to downgrade them with a diminishing term for a name.

‘It was exactly the same in Vietnam. The American troops used to call the Viet Cong “Charlie”. It’s how you degrade your enemy.’

Yes, it was exactly the same in Vietnam. And don’t get Egan started at British troops calling the Nazis “Jerries.” The L-word is the same as that. Exactly the same.

Thank God — or perhaps someone even more stentorian; Patrick Stewart or Ian McKellen perhaps! — we have the Luvvies to enlighten us and show us the evils of our wretched ways.

Related: A reminder from one of Tim Blair’s readers, who notes, “It never ceases to amaze me how some people simply make things up thinking no ones ever going to call them out. The Americans along with their allies, that being us,referred to the Viet Cong as Charlie not out of a form of degradation but because that was their call sign according to the phonetic alphabet. A-alpha b- bravo C-Charlie etc. V was Victor. So the radio call sign for the Viet Cong was Victor Charlie or simply Charlie for short. Amazing how some can twist somethings to suit their agenda.”

Everybody must be a victim in the 21st century — even luvvies and folkies, “We’ll always be victims of powerful people.”

MICHAEL TOTTEN: Venezuela Collapses, Colombia Rises.

DAVID BERNSTEIN: How Hillary loses:

As soon as the votes were tallied in 2012, Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO and Mary Kay Henry of SEIU were claiming unions had delivered Obama’s victory. They argued, with justification, that Ohio, Wisconsin and Nevada got into the blue column because of a massive turnout effort from labor. But earlier this year, both Trumka and Henry expressed concerns that Trump could flip that script.

“Our members are responding to Trump’s message,” Henry said in one interview. “Donald Trump is tapping into the very real and very understandable anger of working people,” Trumka said in a speech.

Clinton’s disdain for “the little people” is palpable, and in November they may get the chance to return the favor.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1117.

THE ONLY TRUE ‘SAFE SPACE’ IS LIBERTY AND FREEDOM: Heather Mac Donald’s Hamilton Awards Speech:

At Emory University, students stormed the office of the president shouting “We are in pain!” What caused their anguish?

The sight of the words “Trump 2016” that had been chalked on walkways around campus. Now it is just possible that there are more than a few people in this very room who experience great pain contemplating the prospect of Trump 2016.

But they do not demand the removal of Trump political slogans; they argue over whether the Donald should be elected.

The Emory students, by contrast, wanted their president to find and punish the malefactors that had caused them to feel “unsafe.”

My personal favorite in this tsunami of self-pity comes from Princeton’s put-upon minority students, who proclaimed that they were “sick and tired of being sick and tired,” a phrase first used by Fannie Lou Hamer, a civil rights activist who had picked cotton as a child on a Mississippi plantation and who was beaten for trying to vote.

Can we have a reality check here? Every American college student today, no matter his race or gender, is among the most privileged individuals in human history. Millions of Chinese students are at this very moment studying their butts off in the hope of gaining access to the intellectual resources that American students take for granted.

And being a Princeton or Yale student bears no resemblance — need I really say this? — to being a sharecropper in the Jim Crow South. And yet, virtually every college president grovels before delusional students who demand to shut down unorthodox viewpoints, by promising protection from unwanted speech and reparations for wholly nonexistent racism.

Read the whole thing.

REPORTS: ESPN EASING OUT ICONIC SPORTSCASTER CHRIS BERMAN:

The New York Post noted that Oppenheim did not say that Berman would remain at ESPN, but only that he was not retiring. The Post suggests that the agent’s remarks “carries the whiff of a power struggle at the Worldwide Leader” and that they may “have grown weary of his over-the-top shtick.”

The network has also lost an enormous number of subscribers in recent years, making the possible high-profile departure perhaps a cost-cutting move.

That tends to happen when media outlets cease being in the entertainment business and go full SJW. (hint: never go full SJW.)

SCENES FROM RAHM EMANUEL’S CHICAGO: Memorial Day weekend shootings leave 4 dead, at least 49 wounded.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, PROGRESSIVE AUTOPHAGY EDITION: Letter From Oberlin: The Big Uneasy.

During this academic year, schools across the country have been roiling with activism that has seemed to shift the meaning of contemporary liberalism without changing its ideals. At Yale, the associate head of a residence balked at the suggestion that students avoid potentially offensive Halloween costumes, proposing in an e-mail that it smothered transgressive expression. Her remarks were deemed insensitive, especially from someone tasked with fostering a sense of community, and the protests that followed escalated to address broader concerns. At Claremont McKenna, a dean sparked outrage when she sent an e-mail about better serving students—those of color, apparently—who didn’t fit the school’s “mold,” and resigned. In mid-November, a thousand students at Ithaca College walked out to demand the resignation of the president, who, they said, hadn’t responded aggressively enough to campus racism. More than a hundred other schools held rallies that week.

Protests continued through the winter. Harvard renamed its “house masters” faculty deans, and changed its law-school seal, which originated as a slaveholder’s coat of arms. Bowdoin students were disciplined for wearing miniature sombreros to a tequila-themed party. The president of Northwestern endorsed “safe spaces,” refuges open only to certain identity groups. At Wesleyan, the Eclectic Society, whose members lived in a large brick colonnaded house, was put on probation for two years, partly because its whimsical scrapbook-like application overstepped a line. And when Wesleyan’s newspaper, the Argus, published a controversial opinion piece questioning the integrity of the Black Lives Matter movement, some hundred and seventy people signed a petition that would have defunded the paper. Sensitivities seemed to reach a peak at Emory when students complained of being traumatized after finding “TRUMP 2016” chalked on sidewalks around campus. The Trump-averse protesters chanted, “Come speak to us, we are in pain!,” until Emory’s president wrote a letter promising to “honor the concerns of these students.”

Such reports flummoxed many people who had always thought of themselves as devout liberals. Wasn’t free self-expression the whole point of social progressivism? Wasn’t liberal academe a way for ideas, good and bad, to be subjected to enlightened reason? Generations of professors and students imagined the university to be a temple for productive challenge and perpetually questioned certainties. Now, some feared, schools were being reimagined as safe spaces for coddled youths and the self-defined, untested truths that they held dear. Disorientingly, too, none of the disputes followed normal ideological divides: both the activists and their opponents were multicultural, educated, and true of heart. At some point, it seemed, the American left on campus stopped being able to hear itself think.

That’s because it stopped thinking. Mouthing dumb slogans and taking offense at trifles doesn’t require thought. Mizzou, as I’ve said, was a harbinger. For those who don’t take the warning, there will be the opportunity to learn from their own experience.

ROGER SIMON: Memorial Day Campaign 2016 — The Year of Living Furiously.

FLASHBACK: Google Honors Activist Who Deemed U.S. Government World’s ‘Main Terrorist’

LIES WE ARE TOLD ABOUT REAL ESTATE. In the long run, of course, it can’t be cheaper to rent than to buy, or landlords would go out of the business. But my favorite was on HGTV’s bubble-era My House Is Worth What? where any appreciation was called “profit” even if it was less than the real estate commission you’d pay if you sold it. A 3% gain subject to a 6% commission isn’t a profit. Then there are taxes, upkeep, etc. . .

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SAME POTTIES, DIFFERENT WORLDS.

LIFE IN THE CHILDISH STATES OF AMERICA, as charted by Kyle Smith:

This week we learned that, for the first time in 130 years, more young adults ages 18-34 are living with their parents than not. We also learned (or were reminded) that students at Oberlin, one of the most prestigious colleges in the country, are wee wailing babies who are having the all-day equivalent of night terrors. You can hardly speak to them without using “magic circles” to soothe them.

These two trends aren’t coincidental: Millennials, and the generation following them, are reforming the country. What they’re creating amounts to the Childish States of America. If our national symbols were to be revised accordingly, the bald eagle would have to be replaced with a Teletubby.

Read the whole thing.