AT AMAZON, Grow Your Garden. I planted a peach tree, and some blackberries and raspberries this year.

Plus, up to 50% off Spring Styles.

THE HILL: Former Defense secretary: Obama ‘double-crossed’ me.

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates says he felt President Obama “double-crossed” him during his tenure over budget cuts to the Pentagon.

In a Fox News report Friday that explored the president’s approach to the military, Gates said Obama had promised him that there wouldn’t be any “significant changes” in the defense budget for a while.

When asked by Fox whether Obama kept to his word, Gates replied, “Well I think that began to fray. ‘Fray’ may be too gentle a word.”

According to the report, Gates was told to cut hundreds of billions of dollars from the defense budget after already having slashed it.

“I guess I’d have to say I felt double-crossed,” Gates said. “After all those years in Washington, I was naïve.”

The former defense secretary added that he advised Obama to slow the cuts to the military because it would endanger U.S. troops.

The tipoff should have been when he said, “If you like your world’s-best military, you can keep your world’s-best military. Period.”

OH, HONEY, BLESS YOUR HEART. You really don’t want to accuse John Hinderaker of libel.

YES, ACCORDING TO TODAY’S YOUNG WOMEN: Do Today’s Young Men Cry Too Much?

WHY MILEY CYRUS MUST GO THE FULL LADY GAGA: The singer dashed off an angry anti-Trump missive this week, but she’s running out of ways to grab our attention.

That usually happens once you’ve gone full Weimar.

THAT’S WEIRD. WHAT COULD HAVE HAPPENED 7 YEARS AGO? Military Suicides Remain High For Seventh Year In A Row.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: College endowments under scrutiny.

The tax-exempt endowments of colleges and universities are coming under scrutiny in a presidential election year where the cost of higher education has become a top issue.

Leading Republican tax-writers in Congress have sent questions to 56 private institutions with endowments of over $1 billion, giving them until April 1 to respond. The answers they receive could lead to legislation.

The letters — which were sent in February and signed by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady (R-Texas) and Ways and Means Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) — stated that many colleges are raising tuition at rates above inflation despite having large and growing endowments.

The five private colleges with the largest endowments in fiscal year 2015 were Harvard University ($36.4 billion), Yale University ($25.6 billion), Princeton University ($22.7 billion), Stanford University ($22.2 billion) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ($13.5 billion), according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) and the Commonfund Institute.

Private colleges are generally established as nonprofits, which means their endowments are tax-exempt. Unlike private foundations, there is no requirement that the colleges spend a minimum percentage of their endowments each year.

Critics have denounced the schools as hoarding cash, and lawmakers are taking note of that argument.

Populism is blooming, and established institutions won’t like it.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: Obama Nixed CIA Plan That Could Have Stopped ISIS: Officials.

The CIA in 2012 proposed a detailed covert action plan designed to remove Syrian President Bashar Assad from power, but President Obama declined to approve it, current and former U.S. officials tell NBC News.

It’s long been known that then-CIA Director David Petraeus recommended a program to secretly arm and train moderate Syrian rebels in 2012 to pressure Assad. But a book to be published Tuesday by a former CIA operative goes further, revealing that senior CIA officials were pushing a multi-tiered plan to engineer the dictator’s ouster. Former American officials involved in the discussions confirmed that to NBC News.

In an exclusive television interview with NBC News, the former officer, Doug Laux, describes spending a year in the Middle East meeting with Syrian rebels and intelligence officers from various partner countries. Laux, who spoke some Arabic, was the eyes and ears on the ground for the CIA’s Syria task force, he says.

Laux, an Indiana native who joined the CIA in 2005 at age 23, says he wrote an “ops plan” that included all the elements he believed were necessary to remove Assad. He was not allowed to describe the plan, but he writes that his program “had gained traction” in Washington. His boss, the head of the Syria task force, regularly briefed members of the Congressional intelligence committees on what Laux was seeing, hearing and suggesting.

A former senior intelligence official said Laux’s ideas—many of them shared by other members of the CIA’s Syrian task force–were heavily represented in the plan that was ultimately presented to Obama.

But the president, who must approve all covert action, never gave the green light. The White House and the CIA declined to comment.

It’s almost as if Obama has never really wanted to stop ISIS.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Number Of LSAT Test-Takers Increased For First Time In Six Years.

THEODORE DALRYMPLE: Could a Genetic Mutation Lower Your Risk of Coronary Artery Disease?

PARENTING: High-Achieving Women Find They’re Not Prepared for Motherhood.

NEW FROM SARAH HOYT: Sword And Blood (Vampire Musketeers Book 1). Sarah emails: “These vampires are 100% guaranteed non-sparkling.” I would have expected no less! (Bumped).

A MODEST PROPOSAL: How to improve Twitter… and destroy the curse of Left-wing virtue-signalling.

LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Scripps students protest Madeleine Albright as speaker because she’s a ‘white feminist.’

KILL THE MOSQUITOES: 5 Reasons to Think the Zika Virus Causes Microcephaly.

A reader says that this stuff works better than DDT. Well, bring it on.

AT AMAZON, there are now over 100 DASH Buttons to choose from.

PAPER RECORDS ARE MORE STABLE: Libraries Go From Paper To Digital Records.

WE MAY NEED THEM AGAIN, SOONER THAN YOU THINK: The Arizona Boneyard Where Old Warplanes Go To Die.

SIX STARTLING CONTRASTS BETWEEN THE BIBLE AND THE QURAN.

Related flashback: From 2003, Kay Hymowitz on Why Feminism is AWOL on Islam.

DAVID SOLWAY IS HAVING “A Conversation with My Guitar.” Click to listen in.

THE BIGGEST (AND BEST) DIFFERENCE BETWEEN MILLENNIALS AND MY GENERATION:

A big part of what makes us the square peg in the round hole of named generations is our strange relationship with technology and the Internet. We came of age just as the very essence of communication was experiencing a seismic shift, and it’s given us a unique perspective that’s half analog old school and half digital new school.

If you can distinctly recall the excitement of walking into your weekly computer lab session and seeing a room full of Apple 2Es displaying the start screen of Oregon Trail, you’re a member of this nameless generation, my friend.

Heck, I can distinctly recall the excitement of walking into my afternoon math class at St. Mary’s and seeing a brand new Altair 8800 hooked up to a used teletypewriter and paper tape reader the math teacher (a chain-smoking buzz-cut coiffed retired Air Force captain) had assembled in 1975 or ’76 from a kit and kluged together. The used black and white TV and cassette recorder to load programs would arrive a few months later, and we would have weekly afternoon Computer Club meetings where we learned BASIC and other rudimentary computer skills. But just seeing the lights flashing on the Altair and the teletypewriter banging out program changes was the day The Future began to arrive.

And then, the future became part of the past. Which itself is even further in the past. The photo above, taken by a friend in May of 2001 of the rows of Altairs and similar Imsai 8080s in storage in the Quonset hut adjacent to the giant airship hanger at Moffitt Field that the Computer History Museum in Mountain View was working out of, before moving into their current location at a former office campus location of Silicon Graphics. It accompanied an article I wrote called “Raiders of the Lost Mainframes” that ran in the July issue of electronic hobbyist Nuts & Volts magazine. I reworked that piece into an article for National Review Online, which an early blogger named Glenn Reynolds linked to on September 2nd 2001, which I found while doing a Google vanity search on my name to see who was discussing my articles. Which became another moment when it was obvious the future of the Internet had now arrived — but that’s an entirely different story altogether.

But to get back to the Altair and the Apple 2E, did you have a similar transformative moment, either in school, or when you or your parents purchased your first personal computer? Let us know in the comments.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1059.

DIVERSITY IS OUR STRENGTH: 10,000 Millionaires Flee France.

French millionaires fled the country in droves in 2016 in an attempt to escape taxes and terror, a new study shows. . . .

As we have noted before, polls have shown that about 50% of all French people 18-34 years old, not just the millionaires and billionaires, would leave France if they could for another country. Meanwhile, at the low extreme of the wealth scale, the migrants of Africa huddled in containers and lean-tos in Calais (until they were recently removed) in hopes of getting to England, rather than accept long-term residence in France. From top to bottom, the desire to get out is, it would seem, widespread.

And it is notable that for those with means—the millionaires cited in this study—Anglosphere nations top the list of destinations.

Thought the Anglosphere has plenty of leftists trying to ruin things here, too.

This is nothing short of a cry for help. Blue model rot, deeply set in across Europe, is pervasive in France. When semi-literate refugees and the well-heeled and well-educated alike are scrambling to get out in these numbers, something is deeply wrong. And as France, for all the occasional lovers quarrels, is a deeply important ally to the U.S., we need to notice and be concerned.

Meanwhile, it’s a sign of health for the Anglosphere (and for Israel) that it continues to draw people from all over the world in search of a better life—even if the one they have is already pretty good. For all our troubles, English-speaking countries in the common-law tradition continue to be better situated than any others to meet the trials of the 21st century.

The thing is, the “Blue Model” may be rotting, but it offers more opportunities for graft and self-importance than the traditional Anglosphere approach. Which explains both the rot, and the rot’s popularity among the rotten sectors of American politics.

UNIVERSITIES NOT INTERESTED IN ACTUAL DIVERSITY: “In my experience, no search committee has ever been instructed to increase political or ideological diversity. On the contrary, I have been involved in searches in which the chairman of the selection committee stated that no libertarian candidates would be considered. Or the description of the position was changed when the best résumés appeared to be coming from applicants with right-of-center viewpoints. Or in which candidates were dismissed because of their association with conservative or libertarian institutions.”