MAYBE A LOT OF PEOPLE IN WASHINGTON NEED VITAMINS TODAY: Was Mary Todd Lincoln Driven Crazy By A Vitamin Deficiency?

YOU’LL NEVER GET A LIBERAL TO ANSWER THESE QUESTIONS ABOUT GUN CONTROL: “Just who does the left think should march into cities like St. Paul, New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Atlanta, Dallas, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York, and take the guns away from the gang bangers. Just how would that be accomplished without a massive loss of life? Does anybody really think that a phalanx of body-armored paramilitary police can accomplish this in even one city?”

Nahh. But President Shepherd will, singlehandedly!

KABUKI UPDATE: Clinton picks up progressive endorsements ahead of joint appearance with Sanders in New Hampshire.

It’s the most gripping Will They/Won’t They since Sam & Diane.

NEW VIDEO FROM PRAGER U ASKS: DO 97% OF CLIMATE SCIENTISTS REALLY AGREE?

Related: When human cost of ‘going green’ can be far too high. “How could a popular pier become so algae-dense that it contributed to five people’s deaths? The answer should cause us to question green dogma and consider the real-life cost of environmental policies.”

THE INTERNET OF OFF-ROAD THINGS: Jeep and Ram Owners in Houston Targeted by Laptop-Wielding Thieves.

Surveillance video from a Houston garage shows a Jeep Wrangler being methodically commandeered by a man using a laptop and tablet. After last year’s remote-control Grand Cherokee incident, this is another hacker-related headache for Fiat Chrysler Automobiles.

The Houston Police Department’s Auto Theft Division released the video on June 22, but the theft itself occurred on April 20. The video doesn’t show the first suspect, who — according to police— raised the Wrangler’s hood and seemingly cut off the vehicle’s audible alarm. A second suspect walks up to the vehicle 10 minutes later, pulls out a laptop, and is soon able to open the vehicle’s door, kill the four-way alarm lights, then start up the Jeep and drive off.

As a former Wrangler owner, I don’t understand the want or need to cram computerized goodies into what is supposed to be a tough & simple off-road vehicle.

MY BROTHER LIVES ON A SMALL LAKE, and when I ran across this castable floating depth finder that links to your smartphone, I sent him one. He says it works really well, and that he and my geeky nephew have embarked on a project to map the entire lakebottom.

INTER-FEMALE COMPETITIVENESS IS A BRUTAL THING: The Internet Thinks Taylor Swift Got Breast Implants — and Some Are Shaming Her For It.

THE DEMOCRATS’ SELF-SERVING DISTRACTIONS: They Blame the GOP, but Who Runs American Cities?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Public Colleges Chase Out of State Students for Higher Tuition.

All is proceeding as I have foretold.

YEAH, THAT WAS A LIE.

WHEN YOU’VE LOST THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER: “’Ghostbusters’: Film Review. The Bottom Line: A Bust…The unfunny mess that hits theaters Friday, like a big goopy splat of ectoplasm, will no doubt make those naysayers feel vindicated. But the fact is that an estrogen-infused makeover, particularly one with such a comedically gifted cast, was a promising idea. Sadly, that’s where the inventiveness ended.”

IS TARGET DOING Ghostbusters Damage Control? “This reporter went to his local Target store to see if those markdowns were mere aberrations. Sure enough, several ‘Ghostbusters’ toys were similarly labeled with the chain’s “Clearance” stickers. Mind you, these toy markdowns came mere days before ‘Ghostbusters’ officially opens – July 15. The entire ‘Ghostbusters’ toy section, in fact, was practically nonexistent.”

It may turn out that telling people “You’re sexist pigs if you don’t support our lame remake!” was a poor marketing strategy.

WASHINGTON POST: Leaked document says 2,000 men allegedly assaulted 1,200 German women on New Year’s Eve. And then it was covered up, to protect politicians and their agenda.

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Is the economy shortening Americans’ lives?

It has long been known that high-income people in the U.S. tend to live longer than those lower down the income ladder. But a growing body of research shows that millions of Americans are, for the first time in more than a century, seeing their life expectancy slip. And, while the reasons for that decline are complex and not yet fully understood, the contours of an explanation are starting to take shape: Despair is shortening their lives.

“One thing we’re seeing is that people who are poor live a lot less — a striking amount less — than the rich,” said Diane Whitemore Schanzenbach, an economist with Northwestern University and director of The Hamilton Project, a think tank focused on boosting the country’s economic prosperity. “There are real disparities across the income distribution.”

Under Obamanomics, income disparity is up, labor force participation is down, and wages for the working poor are stagnant.

That all sounds a lot more like “despair” and a lot less like the “hope and change” we were promised.

YA THINK? ‘Terrorists’ smuggled into Europe with refugees, Merkel says.

SO MUCH FOR SETTLED SCIENCE: Scientists who found gluten sensitivity evidence have now shown it doesn’t exist.

But what is gluten?

(Via SDA.)

ASIA PIVOT: China illegally cordoned off a huge part of the South China Sea for military drills—and will likely do so again.

NORTH KOREA THREATENS “PHYSICAL RESPONSE MEASURES” TO SOUTH KOREA-US ANTI-BALLISTIC MISSILES: North Korea is also angry that the State Department has blacklisted dictator Kim Jong Un for human rights abuses. The missile system is the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-ballistic missile. (Here’s a photo.)

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1159.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Universities’ war against truth.

MAKING THE WORLD SAFE FOR SOCIALISM: Sanders’ dark horse candidacy stripped socialism of its fringe labels and, culturally speaking, ended the Cold War.

I’m so old I remember when we’d won the Cold War.

HEATHER MAC DONALD: The Myths Of Black Lives Matter:

Apparently the Black Lives Matter movement has convinced Democrats and progressives that there is an epidemic of racist white police officers killing young black men. Such rhetoric is going to heat up as Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders court minority voters before the Feb. 27 South Carolina primary.

But what if the Black Lives Matter movement is based on fiction? Not just the fictional account of the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., but the utter misrepresentation of police shootings generally.

To judge from Black Lives Matter protesters and their media and political allies, you would think that killer cops pose the biggest threat to young black men today. But this perception, like almost everything else that many people think they know about fatal police shootings, is wrong.

The Washington Post has been gathering data on fatal police shootings over the past year and a half to correct acknowledged deficiencies in federal tallies. The emerging data should open many eyes.

For starters, fatal police shootings make up a much larger proportion of white and Hispanic homicide deaths than black homicide deaths. According to the Post database, in 2015 officers killed 662 whites and Hispanics, and 258 blacks. (The overwhelming majority of all those police-shooting victims were attacking the officer, often with a gun.) Using the 2014 homicide numbers as an approximation of 2015’s, those 662 white and Hispanic victims of police shootings would make up 12% of all white and Hispanic homicide deaths. That is three times the proportion of black deaths that result from police shootings.

The lower proportion of black deaths due to police shootings can be attributed to the lamentable black-on-black homicide rate. There were 6,095 black homicide deaths in 2014—the most recent year for which such data are available—compared with 5,397 homicide deaths for whites and Hispanics combined. Almost all of those black homicide victims had black killers.

Police officers—of all races—are also disproportionately endangered by black assailants. Over the past decade, according to FBI data, 40% of cop killers have been black. Officers are killed by blacks at a rate 2.5 times higher than the rate at which blacks are killed by police.

Some may find evidence of police bias in the fact that blacks make up 26% of the police-shooting victims, compared with their 13% representation in the national population. But as residents of poor black neighborhoods know too well, violent crimes are disproportionately committed by blacks. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, blacks were charged with 62% of all robberies, 57% of murders and 45% of assaults in the 75 largest U.S. counties in 2009, though they made up roughly 15% of the population there.

Such a concentration of criminal violence in minority communities means that officers will be disproportionately confronting armed and often resisting suspects in those communities, raising officers’ own risk of using lethal force.

She has a book out, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe. But remember, facts don’t matter, because this is all about energizing black turnout in November. Nothing less, and nothing more.

COMPUTER VISION SYNDROME: THE ‘EYES’ HAVE IT.

I know mine do – I have to adjust a large LCD television very careful to watch it without headaches (particularly something like a football game, with lots of intense colors and fast action) after staring at a pair of computer monitors for most of my waking hours.

FRACKING: Another Sign That Shale Is Rebounding.

If, as the old saying goes, two out of three ain’t bad, then five out of six has to be verging on being downright good. That’s welcome news for the embattled American shale industry, which has seen the number of active rigs currently in operation increase for five of the last six weeks. Frackers have had to endure a price collapse that at one point sent the cost of a barrel of oil below $28 per barrel, but now that prices have seemed to stabilize around $50 per barrel, all signs are pointing towards a rebound. . . .

The rig count was closely tracked these last two years as a bearish crude market slowed and eventually curbed the shale boom, but it shouldn’t be considered a perfect metric. When faced with a cash crunch, drillers will naturally shut down their least productive rigs first while leaving the real gushers in place, so the drop in rigs didn’t tightly track with a drop in overall production.

That said, it’s undoubtedly good news that the rig count is once again rising. It’s a sign that, should prices hold, the worst is over for U.S. shale. Analysts expect the rig count to continue to rise, too, topping 600 next year and averaging just shy of 1,000 in 2018. Step one for rekindling the shale revolution is drilling more wells, and five of the last six weeks we’ve seen evidence of just that.

Frackers are doing more to save western civilization than most of those charged with its defense.