PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: “Hey, Everybody, It’s Not Okay to Denounce Trump Anymore,” or, two Joe Scarboroughs in one!

THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Blue Origin rocket flies to 339,178 feet and then lands safely.

For the third time.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Talk of censorship backfires for Erdogan, Obama and anti-Trumpers: From U.S. college campuses to Turkey to the White House, censorship provokes more speech.

AIR FRANCE FEMALE FLIGHT CREW MEMBERS REFUSING TO COVER UP FOR FLIGHTS TO IRAN:

Union leaders and management for the flight company are meeting Monday about objections to a memo telling female attendants they must wear the pants version of their uniform, rather than the skirt option, on the flights to Tehran, as well as a “loose-fitting jacket and headscarf” before exiting their planes, the AP reports.

Now that economic sanctions on Iran are lifted, Air France will begin running three flights a week between Paris and Tehran on April 17, after eight years without service between the two countries.

Union leaders said that the headscarf mandate infringes on the attendants’ personal freedoms and qualifies as being told to wear an “ostentations religious sign,” which is illegal in France.

They want flights to and from Tehran to be optional for flight attendants, and one leader said Air France authorities had floated the possibility of consequences for staff who wouldn’t comply with the uniform specifications.

It’s sad to see Air France management take the Mullah’s side, but it’s hardly surprising.

EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN! Obama administration pushes banks to make home loans to people with weaker credit.

As we saw in 2008 when Bill Clinton’s efforts in that department reached their full fruition, that will end well. Again:

Earlier: “Obama was a pioneering contributor to the national subprime real estate bubble, and roughly half of the 186 African-American clients in his landmark 1995 mortgage discrimination lawsuit against Citibank have since gone bankrupt or received foreclosure notices.”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1061.

CLAIRE BERLINSKI IS crowdfunding a book on Europe’s Crisis. I’ve donated.

MEGAN MCARDLE: The Real Victims Of Political Bias On Campus:

Every time I write about bias against conservatives in academia, I can count on a few professors writing me to politely suggest that I have no idea what I’m talking about. Sometimes they aren’t so polite, either. How would I know what goes on in their hiring meetings, their faculty gatherings, their tenure reviews? They’re right there, and they can attest firsthand that there ain’t no bias, no sir!

But none of them can explain why, if that bias doesn’t exist, so many of their conservative and libertarian colleagues feel compelled to hide in the closet. Deep in the closet, behind that plastic zip bag of old winter coats in mothballs, and sealed, with many layers of packing tape, in a box marked “Betamax Tapes: Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon 1981-1987.”

“The modern academy pays lip service to diversity,” notes my colleague Virginia Postrel in a column about “Passing on the Right,” a new book about the conservatives in academia. “Yet as a ‘stigmatized minority,’ the authors note, right-of-center professors feel pressure to hide their identities, in many cases consciously emulating gays in similarly hostile environments.” If conservatives aren’t being discriminated against, then why are so many of them, sitting in those same meetings and tenure reviews, afraid to show their ideological colors? . . .

As it happens, I think there are some justice problems with discriminating against people for their political beliefs, particularly in places that are nominally dedicated to free inquiry. But let’s leave aside those questions, and think about what the politicization of the academy does to the quality of its work.

Consider, for example, a study showing that conservative and libertarian law professors tend to publish more and be cited more than their liberal counterparts. This suggests that schools are effectively engaging in a sort of affirmative action for liberal professors, lowering the intellectual firepower of the teaching staff as a whole. Or consider the way bias can affect the methods researchers use and the questions they ask, potentially leading to invalid results.

But perhaps even more disturbing is the way that this bias alters, and narrows, what gets studied. “Conservatives can safely study ancient history but not modern American history, economics but not sociology,” writes my colleague. “Literature, largely a politics-free zone until the 1980s, has become hostile territory.” This resonates with me, and not just for ideological reasons.

The politicization of the humanities was well under way when I was an English major in the early 1990s, and my education suffered as a result. This wasn’t because I was so oppressed as a conservative, but because in roughly half my classes, there was no easier route to an A than to argue that some long-dead author was a sexist pig, racist cretin or homophobic jerk. Being, like so many college students, not overfond of unnecessary labor, I’m afraid I all too frequently slithered along the easy path to the 4.0.

And students who do this get shortchanged, but their tuition check still clear, so the academy doesn’t particularly care.

LOOK WHAT’S MAKING A COMEBACK — EUGENICS.

It never truly went away; just into hiding for a time after being discredited by the horrors of the Nazis. But no bad idea ever really dies amongst self-styled “Progressives,” who in reality are permanently trapped in a late 19th century Mobius Loop.

GOVERNMENT IS JUST ANOTHER WORD FOR THE THINGS WE CHOOSE TO DO TOGETHER: This city is forcing a family to destroy their vegetable garden…on their own land.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Talk of censorship backfires for Erdogan, Obama and anti-Trumpers: From U.S. college campuses to Turkey to the White House, censorship provokes more speech.

BERNIE SANDERS TO CHARITIES: DROP DEAD!

#NEWYORKVALUES: New York taxi drivers to be banned from flirting with or ejaculating on passengers.

THE RICH DEFEND THEIR WEALTH: Harvard And Princeton Release Statements On Their Endowments. “Harvard’s endowment (at more than $36 billion) was the largest in the nation, and Princeton’s (at nearly $23 billion) was the fourth, according to the latest data from the National Association of College and University Business Officers and Commonfund.”

All is proceeding as I foretold.

OH, THAT DEATH OF THE GROWN-UP: The New Thought Crime: ‘Adultism.’

ERIC S. RAYMOND: This May Be The Week The “Social Justice Warriors” Lost It All. “The hacker community has spoken, and it put its money where its mouth is, too. Now we know how to stop the SJWs in their tracks – fund what they denounce, make their hatred an asset, repeatedly kerb-stomp them with proof that their hate campaigns will be countered by the overwhelming will of the people and communities they thought they had bullied into submission. I’m proud of my community for stepping up. I hope Sir Tim Hunt and Brendan Eich and Matt Taylor and other past victims of PC lynch mobs are smiling tonight. The SJWs’ preference-falsification bubble has popped; with a little work and a few more rounds of demonstration we may be able to prevent future lynchings entirely.”

HOW CAN THAT BE, WHEN SO MANY OF AMERICA’S POLITICAL CLASS REALLY ENJOYED THEIR SEMESTERS ABROAD THERE? Most of Europe Is a Lot Poorer than Most of the United States.

Most European countries (including Germany, Sweden, Denmark and Belgium) if they joined the US, would rank among the poorest one-third of US states on a per-capita GDP basis, and the UK, France, Japan and New Zealand would all rank among America’s very poorest states, below No. 47 West Virginia, and not too far above No. 50 Mississippi. Countries like Italy, S. Korea, Spain, Portugal and Greece would each rank below Mississippi as the poorest states in the country.

Plus: “None of this suggests that policy in America is ideal (it isn’t) or that European nations are failures (they still rank among the wealthiest places on the planet). I’m simply making the modest — yet important — argument that Europeans would be more prosperous if the fiscal burden of government wasn’t so onerous. And I’m debunking the argument that we should copy nations such as Denmark by allowing a larger government in the United States (though I do want to copy Danish policies in other areas, which generally are more pro-economic liberty than what we have in America).”

MAUREEN DOWD TO TRUMP: HAVE YOU EVER ASKED A WOMAN TO GET AN ABORTION? “Did anybody ever ask Obama that? Or Bill Clinton?”

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Massive Document Leak Details Offshore Accounts Connected to Putin and Other Leaders.

In one of the largest and most far-reaching document leaks in modern history, more than 370 journalists from 76 countries spent over a year plowing through 11.5 million records on offshore accounts and dummy corporations created by a secretive Panamanian law firm.

What the group—which was co-ordinated by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and over 100 media entities around the globe—found was a trove of files that detail the holdings of 140 politicians and public officials, including the prime ministers of Iceland and Pakistan and the president of Ukraine.

The documents, which cover more than 40 years worth of offshore companies created by the Mossack Fonseca firm, also exposed the holdings of a dozen other global leaders. According to the ICIJ they show how officials tied to Russian President Vladimir Putin moved as much as $2 billion in Russian currency through a variety of banks and dummy corporations.

The millions of leaked documents were obtained by reporters at the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, which shared them with the ICIJ and other media partners. In the U.S., those partners included Univision, the Miami Herald and The McClatchy Co. Univision-owned Fusion has published a look at the documents and their impact.

The leak “provides details of the hidden financial dealings of 128 more politicians and public officials around the world,” the ICIJ says. “The cache of 11.5 million records shows how a global industry of law firms and big banks sells financial secrecy to politicians, fraudsters and drug traffickers as well as billionaires, celebrities and sports stars.”

There’s plenty of crookedness and corruption here, but the real problem is that tax laws almost everywhere are too intrusive, and take too much money. Simpler taxes and lower rates wouldn’t stop the Putin-bribery, but they’d put a big dent in the rest, which provides cover.

More here.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: Wave of Suicide Attacks Kill at Least 29 People Across Iraq.

DEAR TRUMPKINS, THIS IS WHY NOBODY LIKES YOU.

I CAN’T REPRODUCE IT, BUT THE SITE’S NOT DISPLAYING PROPERLY FOR SOME PEOPLE. The tech guys are working on it. Sorry!

UPDATE: A reader writes: “That happened on one of my computers. Deleting the bookmark and rebookmarking appeared to fix it in Firefox.”

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Liberal bastions may decide GOP race.

Conservative voters in New York and California are finally going to have their say.

Republicans in the two liberal strongholds have long been marginalized in national politics, with their primaries coming late in the process and their general election votes canceled out by Democrats.

But this year is different.

The two states collectively represent about 30 percent of the outstanding delegates in the Republican race, which means the results of their primaries will go a long way toward deciding whether Donald Trump will win the GOP nomination outright or be forced into a contested convention in July.

Both states are holding closed primaries that only allow Republicans to vote, a policy that in other states has helped Ted Cruz.

But Trump has a huge lead in both states, polls indicate, raising the possibility of decisive wins.

Stay tuned.