IS THERE A HARD LIMIT ON HUMAN LONGEVITY at about 115 years?

I should note that this article only addresses extensions in lifespan based on nutrition and traditional medical care, not on new technologies for DNA repair, etc., which would make such a “hard” limit much softer. But even a decade or two extension in “health span” would pay big dividends.

TALE OF THE TRUMP TAPE: NBC HAS A LOT OF EXPLAINING TO DO.

More to the point, why hasn’t all this terrible audio already surfaced? At any point in the last year, when there was still time to deprive Trump of the GOP nomination, did NBC brass ask Apprentice producer (and Trump friend) Mark Burnett for a look into his archives? Or were they complicit in allowing Trump to cruise to the GOP nomination when they knew there was likely evidence in Mark Burnett’s basement that could disqualify him?

* * * * * * * *

Back to NBC News’ anchors and reporters, who have been conspicuously silent about their network’s role in enabling Trump for years, then sitting on the explosive tape for (at least) five days before a whistleblower leaked it. Donald Trump was employed by the same network that currently employs Lester Holt, Brian Williams, Chuck Todd, Andrea Mitchell, Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes and its biggest star of all, Matt Lauer. Why the silence? They’re like Cardinals in the Vatican maintaining omerta about a pervert in their midst.*

There are clear lines of accountability here – to NBC News Chairman Andy Lack and NBCU CEO Steve Burke. Did these executives just look the other way for many months while a former employee whose bad behavior was well-known got closer and closer to the White House? And did they place the career of Billy Bush – reportedly being groomed to replace Matt Lauer on the hugely profitable Today program – ahead of the U-S presidency? That sounds absurd, but this is the twisted world of network television and NBC has some explaining to do.

Just think of them as Democrat operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.

* Hey, even I don’t think NBC has descended to the level of the BBC in this department, but they’ve certainly maintained their omerta about the multiple fabulists working in their midst.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Why I Have No Home Internet.

ROGER KIMBALL: Captain Renault Visits The Election. “Trump’s comments were rude, crude, and misogynistic. But, to adapt a line from The American Thinker’s Jack Hellner, against Trump’s dirty talk we must set Hillary actual corruption. Just this past week, Hellner notes, the Department of Justice dropped ‘the case against a gunrunner from Hillary’s Libya fiasco whose testimony would certainly have harmed Obama and Hillary.'”

CLARENCE THOMAS: DISAPPEARED BY THE SMITHSONIAN, Kevin D. Williamson writes:

The Left is committed to its Long March through the Institutions, with a special emphasis on cultural and educational institutions, the commanding heights of public discourse. The Left corrupts everything it touches, and it subordinates everything it touches to politics. That is true of everything from the public schools to labor unions to Catholic seminaries. If you are a high-school sophomore in Lubbock, Texas, that might mean receiving an account of American history which consists almost exclusively of the Great Depression, Jim Crow, and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, as I did. If you are a family of modest means that has saved its pennies for a once-in-a-lifetime trip to our nation’s capital with the intent of exposing your children, however briefly, to the best that has been thought and written in the American context, that means a museum of African-American history in which a major figure in African-American history has been airbrushed away like a Soviet apparatchik fallen into disfavor.

Ever since the debacle of the Enola Gay exhibition in 1994, we’ve known that the Smithsonian isn’t playing fair when it comes to American history. This memorable Iowahawk tweet sums up the museum’s curators rather well:

SEE, HE WAS A DEMOCRAT WHEN HE MADE THOSE REMARKS, SO IT WAS OKAY. IT’S ONLY WHEN HE SWITCHED PARTIES AND BECAME GOP NOMINEE THAT THE REMARKS TURNED DISGRACEFUL: Oddly, NBC didn’t think their Trump Tapes were that big a deal while paying him 7 figures/episode for 10 years.

AUSTIN BAY FLASHBACK: Ultimate Media Privilege: Hillary’s Crimes Versus Trump’s Mouth: Trump only ‘talks awful’—Hillary actually ‘does awful.’

JACK MA, SPIELBERG STRIKE DEAL TO BRING HOLLYWOOD TO CHINA: “It’s a casting director’s dream. Jack Ma, China’s richest man, and the highest-grossing Hollywood auteur of all time have struck a deal to work together to produce and finance films for the world’s second-largest movie market.”

I’m old enough to remember when Spielberg made films attacking murderous censoring dictatorships, instead of hopping into bed with them.

VIDEO: Bill Clinton Accuser Juanita Broaddrick Still Relives Brutal Rape.

IT’S FINAL MONTH OF A PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, SO IT MUST BE TIME FOR JOHN McCAIN TO FOLD: Sen. John McCain withdraws support from Donald Trump.

Suspended it, you might say.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1249.

APOCALYPTIC COMBAT: In the case of Dabiq it’s attrition, not apocalypse. However, the Islamic State quotes a saying attributed to Muhammad that “the Last Hour” won’t occur until “the Romans” are defeated at Dabiq. So ISIS uses Dabiq as a propaganda pitch. Come fight for ISIS and be there at the Apocalypse. RFE’s report is a balanced assessment of the battle and the politics surrounding it. It analyzes Turkey’s intervention– in fact, the article leads with a photo of a Turkish tank company (a file photo, indicating it wasn’t taken near Dabiq). The tanks are upgraded M-60s. In 1975 my platoon rode a much older model, the M60A1. Scroll through this archive and you’ll find a picture of a Turkish M60A3 TTS.

THE DECLINE OF THE WESTERN: Most of the recent batch of Hollywood remakes are pretty dismal affairs when compared to the original films they were based on. But comparing the two can tell us much about the state of the cultures that made each movie, and what was on the minds of Hollywood screenwriters at the time of their release. At Library of Law and Liberty, Molly Flynn has a nifty essay comparing the new version of The Magnificent Seven with John Sturges’ 1960 original, which put Steve McQueen on the map. But the she lays out some fascinating groundwork for her article with this introduction:

Tired of rants about how awful capitalism is? Here’s a fun trick: ask the people you’re discussing it with not to use the term “capitalism.” Politely suggest: since we seem to mean different things by it, let’s just say what we mean without using that one word. It might induce them to think, instead of grabbing pre-fab terms of abuse off the shelf and blaming every problem on that villain from central casting, the capitalist.

Emotionally loaded and so vague as to be almost useless, the word “capitalism” masks the massive phenomenon’s complexity—its fuel in varied motives, its entwinement with a legal order, and (most importantly) its moral ambiguities and mixed blessings.

But aren’t you bored? Thinking is just so . . . boring. Let’s complain about capitalism instead.

The new Magnificent Seven remakes John Sturges’ 1960 classic of the same name and has lots of complaining to do about “capitalism,” at the expense of its predecessor’s subtle and interesting civilizational themes.

Read the whole thing; even if you’re not a western fan, it’s interesting stuff.

MOB RULE AT JOHNS HOPKINS:

When the renowned Johns Hopkins psychiatrist Paul McHugh and Arizona State epidemiologist Lawrence Mayer published a lengthy New Atlantis essay questioning several sacred truths about gender, sexuality, and sexual orientation—including the view that sexual orientation is entirely innate and that gender reassignment surgery is the best practice for transgender individuals—they must have expected a backlash from academia’s ideological enforcers. And sure enough a backlash is brewing, with hundreds of students, faculty, and LGBT activists calling for the University to formally condemn the work of scholarship. . . .

We at Via Meadia are not experts on psychiatry or health care, so we can’t assess the validity of McHugh’s and Mayer’s reading of the empirical record. However, we are close enough observers of patterns in higher education politics that the pattern on display here (scholars express an unpopular viewpoint on a politically fraught subject, the left-of-center community erupts in outrage, petitions circulate demanding formal action from the university administration) sets off all sorts of alarm bells.

The basic gambit of the Western mode of scientific inquiry is that the competition of ideas will ultimately produce scholarly truth, or at least something close to it. This process must be decentralized and unencumbered by political dogma. For the Johns Hopkins administration to throw the weight of its authority behind one side or another in an ongoing scholarly debate in order to appease political activists would corrupt the process Jonathan Rauch has called “liberal science.” The university can help protect the integrity of academic thought by sending a strong message to the outraged petitioners that it will let its scholars’ work stand or fall on the merits.

The mob is not worthy of respect. It is not interested in truth, or even compassion. It is only interested in power.

HECKUVA JOB, JACK: TWITTER SALE PROCESS SAID ALMOST DEAD AS SUITORS BOW OUT.

As Iowahawk quipped last week:

DISABILITY: How Back Pain Took Over the World: The biggest cause of disability around the world is surprisingly banal.

When I got my first computer, I had a lousy chair and within a few weeks suffered from agonizing back pain. Just picking up a cup of coffee hurt like hell. Then I got a proper chair and was better in short order. Now I have a proper chair, and do squats, and I’m still fine.

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LIFE ON A NUCLEAR ATTACK SUB: Long patrols can get a bit raunchy.

HILLARY’S FAUX PRUDE ACT: Hillary is “shocked, shocked” by Trump’s language.

2008 FLASHBACK: GOP Nominee McCain Is A Sexist, Entitled Predator. “How can purported feminists even contemplate voting for McCain when his creepy, fighter-jock attitude toward women has left a trail throughout his public career? Let’s look at just three dots of gender jokes over time and see if we can connect them.”

The Dems use the same playbook every time, and the GOP is caught by surprise, every time.

Related: Sex, double standards, and journalists.

UPDATE: Politico: Exclusive poll: GOP voters want the party to stand by Trump.

Related: Byron York: Will there be a GOP stampede from Trump? And will it matter?

HEY, EVEN LEFTISTS CAN BE DEPLORABLES THESE DAYS! Lawmakers denounce de Blasio for calling constituents heartless:

A group of Queens elected officials on Thursday denounced Mayor de Blasio for calling their constituents heartless in a video posted by City Hall for opposing a homeless shelter.

The 86-second clip produced by the mayor’s office shows city officials ushering homeless children from the Bellerose shelter on a field trip to the Manhattan Children’s Museum on Sept. 24 as protesters rallied outside.

It also quotes Social Services Commissioner Steven Banks as saying the protesting residents “want to throw [the children] into the streets.”

Huh — whoda thunk that New York Democrats would cling bitterly to their old ways almost as much as Pennsylvania Democrats?

Related: Number of homeless living in New York hotels rises 50 percent in two months.

LOOKING ON THE BRIGHT SIDE: Despite dour campaigns, American life is getting better.

To provide a much-needed injection of good news, HumanProgress, a project of the libertarian Cato Institute, launched “Your Life in Numbers.”

The website is fairly simple. You enter your country and year of birth and it tells you how much six important ways life in that country has changed since your birth.

For example, I plugged in my birth year and found that life expectancy in the United States improved by 5 percent since I was born. Income per person is up 45 percent. Average years of schooling is up 7 percent. Infant survival is up by 38 percent.

The median age in the U.S. now is 38. Since someone born in 1978 in the U.S. entered the world, income per person is up 81 percent, infant survival is up 59 percent and life expectancy is up 8 percent. Food supply per person is up 15 percent and average years of schooling are up 12 percent.

I just want to ensure these trends continue.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Black Tenant Slams Neighbor’s Noise Complaint As Racist ‘White Tears:’

The noisy neighbor, Richard Brookshire, issued a blistering response accusing his neighbors of racial aggression and calling their note a “direct threat”.

“As a Black man, I take these overt actions as a direct threat to my physical and psychological well-being and as an act of violence upon me (see attached list of the 821 black men, women, and children killed by police or in police custody to date in 2016),” he wrote. “This threat cannot be taken lightly.”

Because for leftists in 2016, the will to power derives from victimhood — and not just on college campuses anymore.

Obligatory:

NOT MUCH THAT’S NEW IN THIS STORY IN THE KNOXVILLE NEWS-SENTINEL, BUT THE NEWS IS THAT NOW IT’S IN THE KNOXVILLE NEWS-SENTINEL: UT investigating sexual harassment claim after student gets zero on quiz. A lot of important alumni, from what I can tell, are concerned that UT seems to be growing a bit too PC.

Me, I’ve been hoping that this story was a hoax, or a misunderstanding, though it seems like we’d have heard that by now if so. Maybe not . . . .

And if you want to understand how a single-sentence provision designed to prevent discrimination against women’s athletic teams can be turned into something that’s used to punish a student for writing down a name that might be that of an obscure porn star, read Robert Shibley’s Twisting Title IX, a short, clear explanation of this how insanity came about.