STONE AGE GRAFFITI: Ancient religious stones hiding secret message only visible at night.

CUTTING THROUGH THE CRAZY: Treason.

DIY MUSIC UPDATE: Over at the PJ Lifestyle blog, I have a review of the book Analog Recording, Using Analog Gear in Today’s Home Studio by David Simons. If you remember, we linked to this video at Instapundit back in April:

This is the book on how to build such a studio. However, as I explain in my review, it’s definitely possible to go too far back to the future implementing all of the author’s suggestions. What do I mean? Read on here.

CHARLIE MARTIN: Five Questions to Ask About the Current Trump Kerfuffle.

THE CORRECT ANSWER, OF COURSE, IS THAT IT’S ONLY A CRIME IF A REPUBLICAN DOES IT. Can it be a crime to do opposition research by asking foreigners for information?

Say that, in Summer 2016, a top Hillary Clinton staffer gets a message: “A Miss Universe contestant — Miss Slovakia — says that Donald Trump had sexually harassed her. Would you like to get her story?” The staffer says, “I’d love to,” and indeed gets the information, which he then uses in the campaign.

Did the staffer and the Miss Universe contestant just commit a crime? Yes, under the analysis set forth in the past couple of days by some analysts, such as my University of California colleague and leading election law scholar Rick Hasen (UC Irvine School of Law) and by Common Cause; Hasen was cited by the Wall Street Journal and CNN; similar arguments were quoted by Dahlia Lithwick (Slate).

Foreigners who aren’t U.S. citizens or U.S. permanent residents, the argument goes, are barred from providing candidates any “thing of value” in connection with any American election campaign. Campaign staff are barred from soliciting any “thing of value” from such foreigners. And, the argument goes, valuable political information about an opponent’s misdeeds is a “thing of value.” . . . Can Americans — whether political candidates or anyone else — really be barred from asking questions of foreigners, just because the answers might be especially important to voters?

Read the whole thing, by Eugene Volokh.

SHOULD FOX GIVE SCOTT ADAMS HIS OWN SHOW?

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THE VAST MAJORITY OF INMATES ARE MEN, so there’s a push to go easier on incarcerated women.

MSNBC, CHANNEL THAT EMPLOYS AL SHARPTON AND BRIAN WILLIAMS, Consults Disgraced Dan Rather on ‘Ethics.’

TO BE FAIR, I’D LOVE TO SEE DAVID BROOKS TAKE HIM OUT TO DINNER: Claudia Rosett on Taking Out Kim Jong Un — and Not for Dinner.

SEE, THIS IS WHY CNN SHOULDN’T HAVE THREATENED TO DOX “HAN ASSHOLESOLO.” “How a Montana mom became the target of a neo-Nazi troll,” reports CNN. A Colorado real estate agent named Tanya Gersh was bombarded with threatening emails and phone calls, “after contacting tenants of a local building:”

Gersh says she was then called by the building’s owner, Sherry Spencer, the mother of white supremacist Richard Spencer.

Gersh says she warned Sherry Spencer about looming protests at the building in Whitefish, a Montana town of 7,300 where both women live.

Gersh says she advised Spencer to disavow the views of her son, including that the United States is a country for white people.

She says she offered to sell Spencer’s property as a way of defusing tensions in town. Gersh suggested Spencer donate money to a human rights group.

Sherry Spencer refused to speak to CNN when we reached her on the phone. Earlier, she wrote in a blog post that Gersh, a Realtor, had threatened her, saying protesters and media would turn up and drive down the building’s value if she didn’t sell.

That’s when, according to CNN, “DailyStormer.com, which spews neo-Nazi propaganda” went into full-on #hastanyalandedyet mode:

Andrew Anglin, the site’s founder, accused Gersh of extortion in a blog post. And he exhorted readers to send Gersh — whom he also identified as Jewish — enough messages to make a point.

“Let’s hit ’em up,” he posted. “Are y’all ready for an old-fashioned Troll Storm?”

He then told them: “(I)t’s that time.”

Obligatory reminder: it is never that time. And it shouldn’t be for CNN either, which makes their putting their mafia-like warning that “CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change” into their piece on the now infamous “Han Asshole Solo” all the more abhorrent.

“Now, before we move on, someone is going to point out that the meme guy is kind of a jerk and said stuff that offends decent people,” as Kurt Schlichter wrote last week. “So? How is that the point? This is a multi-billion dollar media corporation using all its power to threaten an individual into not criticizing it. How is that ever okay? And don’t pretend for a minute this media extortion precedent gets limited to outlier Reddit guys. Normal Americans are next.”

But normal Americans have already gotten the full troll storm from the left. Just ask the owners of Indiana’s Memories Pizza, who had the mob from a 1930s Universal Frankenstein movie dropped onto them as a result of badthink in response to a hypothetical question by a local journalist. Or Elizabeth Lauten, the low-level Republican staffer who had the temerity to write on her Facebook page that Obama’s daughters should “try showing a little class. At least respect the part you play,” and ultimately quit her job, after social media was whipped into a frenzy by the DNC-MSM (including, of course, CNN):

Or Justine Sacco, which brings us back to last week’s threatened doxxing by CNN:

This isn’t [senior CNN editor Andrew] Kaczynski’s first attempt at destroying a private citizen’s life. As a BuzzFeed reporter, he gained notoriety for publicizing a lame joke Tweeted by a 30-year-old PR director named Justine Sacco. As Sacco was boarding a plane from London to Cape Town, South Africa, she poked fun at many people’s poor understanding of the continent. Kaczynski decided the joke was racist and helped gin up a digital lynch mob while she was in the air for 11 hours sans internet. By the time Sacco landed, she was mobbed by reporters, was fired from her job, and had to go into hiding. [Update: Another link demonstrating Kaczynski’s role is here.]

If it’s wrong for an alt-right group to combine doxxing with intimidation – and it is – it’s also wrong for CNN to threaten the same tactics, knowing full well, as Kaczynski does, that outing Mr. AssholeSolo will send up the Batsignal for the Twitter mobs. Or as CNN contributor Mary Katharine Ham wrote yesterday at the Federalist, “Going To The Mats For Free Speech Sometimes Means Letting Trolls Go Unpunished:”

HanA**holeSolo isn’t some great modern-day pamphleteer whom we should ensure at all costs can keep delivering us (and the president) hot memes from his den of racist sh*tposters. He’s not, and the fact that the White House finds inspiration in these corners of the Internet is newsworthy. Some of his other creations, including a a composite with Stars of David next to the Jewish CNN employees, are truly disgusting.

But media should be very careful about when they expose private citizens for the sin of political speech. They should be especially careful not to imply that content of political speech that crosses a big media entity is the reason for exposure. The media don’t owe every troll on the Internet his or her anonymity, but doing disproportionate warfare with them can endanger and chill the speech of others.

As Vox’s German Lopez put it simply, “The Internet is not proportional.”

“The problem here is that the internet is not proportional. People wouldn’t merely react to this guy making some offensive remarks on the internet by making some offensive remarks to him. They would react as the internet has reacted before to these kinds of situations — with potentially thousands of hateful messages, death threats, attempts to get him fired, and harassment not just against him but also his family. Lines would quickly be crossed.”

And it’s not just the Internet that’s not proportional. Media has shown an inability to gauge its coverage of the online speech of private citizens.

Bravo for CNN for reporting on Tanya Gersh – but their reasons for doing so appear to be more than a little self-serving. And in threatening “HanA**holeSolo” with doxxing – and with it, the implicit threat that they would the sturm und drang of social media down upon his life, they are yet the latest reminder that the left shouldn’t be surprised when the alt-right adopts the odious tactics they themselves popularized.

OVERWEIGHT MOTHERS RAISE RISK FOR BABIES: “Risks of any major congenital malformation and several subgroups of organ specific malformations progressively increased with maternal overweight and increasing severity of obesity.”

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AMONG TRUMP VOTERS, IS THERE A TIPPING POINT? Not, I think, if things hinge on mainstream media reporting. Trump voters don’t trust them, and know they’ve been out to destroy him by fair means or foul since he was elected. (Those articles by mainstream journalists saying that they should jettison traditional notions of fairness when covering Trump didn’t help).

And this remains evergreen: The Basic Formula For Every Shocking Russia/Trump Revelation.

The basic formula for every breaking Trump/Russia story is essentially as follows:

The New York Times or Washington Post releases an article that at first blush appears extremely damning.
Anti-Trump pundits and Democrats react reflexively to the news, express shrieking outrage, and proclaim that this finally proves untoward collusion between Trump and Russia — a smoking gun, at last.
Aggrieved former Clinton apparatchiks *connect the dots* in a manner eerily reminiscent of right-wing Glenn Beck-esque prognostication circa 2009.
Self-proclaimed legal experts rashly opine as to whether the new revelation entails some kind of criminally actionable offense. (Recall the now-laughable certitude that felled National Security Advisor Mike Flynn violated the 200+ year old Logan Act.). . .
The notion of Russian “collusion” being key to toppling Trump becomes further implanted in the minds of the most energized Democratic activists. . . .
Pointing out these glaring flaws in the latest anti-Russia frenzy is immediately construed by cynics as “defending Trump” or “defending Sessions” when it most assuredly is not. At least in my own case, it’s a defense of not getting enraptured by irrational hysterics to further short-term political aims.
People who’d spent the past 12 hours frothing at the mouth gradually come to realize that their initial furor was probably overblown, and that a more sober look at the actual facts at hand reveal that the anti-Trump chorus probably got ahead of itself…again.

Read the whole thing.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: American University Provost Denies Tenure To Latina Prof Based On Standard Deviation Of Her Student Evaluations, Rather Than The ‘Tyranny Of The Mean.’ “By American’s own standards on tenure, assessments of one’s teaching should not hinge on students’ evaluations alone. That’s partly because numerous studies suggest that student ratings are inherently biased, particularly against women and minority faculty members.”

BEST TIPPERS: Men, Republicans.

THE KIDS ARE ALT-RIGHT: Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies Explores Alt-Right’s Roots & Rise:

Nagle has many arch observations. This right wing learns quickly from the online Left and imitates or parodies its tactics. The movement’s transgressive performances are a way of effecting its “final detachment from any egalitarian philosophy of the left or Christian morality of the right.” And its commitment to itself as a vanguard means it has rejected Buckleyite conservatives’ belief that “the masses were their naturally traditionalist allies.” (“If one imagines where Milo would line up politically in terms of the infamous William F. Buckley v. Gore Vidal televised presidential debates of 1968,” Nagle writes at one point, “It would probably be closer to that of Vidal, whose libertinism and mischievous gay rhetorical style was so abhorrent to Buckley.”)

Kill All Normies is just as sharp, and perhaps twice as cutting, when it observes the young online Left. At points, Nagle dances close to suggesting that the Left brought this on itself: “After crying wolf throughout these years, calling everyone from saccharine pop stars to Justin Trudeau a ‘white supremacist’ and everyone who wasn’t With Her a sexist, the real wolf eventually arrived.”

Even as they pose as owning the moral high ground, the left runs around shouting “white privilege” at everyone from college students to Hollywood and Sillicon Valley moguls, while calling its own middle class supporters “bitter,” because “they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” It increasingly believes (once again) in separate but equal education. Last year, multiple leftwing sources offered cheers and guffaws in response to the North Koreans’ slow-motion murder of Otto Warmbier because, as Comedy Central host Larry Wilmore told his audience last year, “You’ve got to read the fine print on your American frat bro warranty. It says, ‘Frat Bro Privilege not valid in totalitarian dystopias” – or as Steve Green summed up the left’s tone regarding Warmbier, “White men deserve whatever happens to them, because justice.” More recently, CNN employees alternately hold up a severed head of the president and threaten to dox his supporters.

Naturally, like Claude Rains in Casablanca, leftists are shocked – shocked! – that some on the right have begun imitating their tone and tactics. As Kurt Schlichter warned them, the left isn’t enjoying living under the rules, and morality, they created.

IT’S THE GOLDEN AGE OF MUSCLE CARS, BUT… Fiat Chrysler to close Dodge Viper plant in August.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: This New MIT Master’s Program Doesn’t Require A College Or High School Degree. “Ten percent of the students are from China, and then there is a big group of them from India. In total, there are 182 countries represented as part of the program, even some from the U.S.”

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: What’s With All the Satanic Crap Everywhere?

I’m old enough to remember when openly worshiping Satan was limited to late night public access cable.

HMM: Navy Fired Whistleblower Who Uncovered Serious Fuel Safety Risks.

The Navy fired a civilian whistleblower who uncovered life-threatening safety risks to pilots and others from the improper testing of aircraft fueling equipment and jet fuel itself that could degrade aircraft engines, cause engine surging and, in worst-case scenarios, flameouts.

The firing came June 8, the same day Rep. Walter Jones (R., N.C.) sent the Office of Special Counsel (OSC), an internal federal government watchdog, a letter asking it to investigate the whistleblower’s remaining concerns about his treatment at his workplace, the Navy’s Fleet Readiness Center-East (FRC-E).

The whistleblower, Glenn Schwarz, is one of Jones’s constituents, and FRC-E in Cherry Point, N.C., is located in his district.

More to come, I’m sure.

OH: The awesome, unstoppable revolutionary electric-car revolution that doesn’t actually exist.

Going by the ballyhoo, you’d think EVs were an unstoppable juggernaut. But it’s one that has yet to even get started. In his 2011 State of the Union address, then president Barack Obama predicted one million electric cars on the road by 2015. Four years later, there wasn’t even a third that many. California offered so many different subsidies for electric vehicles that low-income families could get rebates of up to US$13,500, but it still isn’t even close to reaching its target of having zero-emission vehicles make up 15 per cent of California auto sales by 2025, being stuck at three per cent since 2014. Ontario’s Liberal government last year announced to much laughter its plan to ensure that every family would have at least one zero-emission vehicle (ZEV) by 2024, and Quebec made a plan to make ZEVs worth 15.5 per cent of sales by 2020. Let’s see how that’s going: Currently, ZEVs make up 0.16 per cent of new vehicle sales in Ontario and 0.38 per cent in Quebec.

I love the idea of electric, but until the problems of range, cost, and recharge speed are solved, I’m sticking with my diesel.

EPA’S PRUITT ASKS FOR TV CLIMATE DEBATE, Jon Gabriel writes at Ricochet:

The science may not be settled, but EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt wants it televised. He raised the idea of a TV climate change debate in an interview with Reuters:

“There are lots of questions that have not been asked and answered (about climate change),” EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt told Reuters in an interview late on Monday.

“Who better to do that than a group of scientists … getting together and having a robust discussion for all the world to see,” he added without explaining how the scientists would be chosen.

Asked if he thought the debate should be televised, Pruitt said: “I think so. I think so. I mean, I don’t know yet, but you want this to be open to the world. You want this to be on full display. I think the American people would be very interested in consuming that. I think they deserve it.”

We do deserve it, especially since every proposed solution involves raising our taxes, damaging our economy, and making citizens more submissive to federal and global bureaucracies.

Please make this happen — Pruitt will compile hours of potential footage for the Trump reelection campaign video b-roll. In addition to the smug condescension of haughty climate scientists speaking to Pruitt as if he’s Cletus The Slack-Jawed Yokel, the apocalyptic doomsday rhetoric and proposed solutions would be a riot. I wonder if John Holdren, Obama’s “Science” “Czar,” could be invited to discuss eugenics (i.e. forced abortions and mass sterilization) and shooting rockets into the atmosphere filled with pollution to blot out the sun?

FASTER, PLEASE: Cancer vaccines help patients get tumor-free in 2 studies.