BUT THE NARRATIVE! HHS analysis finds Cruz amendment lowers premiums, boosts enrollment.

GIVE TO RECEIVE: Even the Smallest Acts of Generosity Make You Happier, New Study Reveals: It doesn’t matter how big or small your acts of generosity are, they result in a warm glow in parts of your brain.. So go with “small,” I guess. . . .

SMEARS ARE WHAT YOU USE WHEN YOU’VE LOST ON FACTS AND REASON: As Policy Shift Looms, Left Smears Campus Due Process Advocates As Rape Apologists.

Ashe Schow:

In addition to meeting families of students ultimately found falsely accused of rape, DeVos is meeting with several groups that insist this guidance has led to more false accusations and a culture on campus that sees anyone accused as guilty until proven innocent. Leftist articles about this meeting describe the groups as “men’s rights” groups.

Slate’s Christina Cauterucci described them as “trolls.” Cauterucci is the same writer who lambasted ESPN’s “30 for 30” documentary about the Duke Lacrosse rape hoax because “it’s a bizarre experience to watch a documentary that expects the viewer to root for a bunch of accused rapists.” But by now everyone knows they were falsely accused. Cauterucci wants us to root instead for someone who falsely accused people of a horrible crime.

Only one of the groups meeting with DeVos, the National Coalition for Men, could be considered under the “men’s rights” label. Now, the label is a smear for some, but shouldn’t be. Men do face issues specific to them, such as paternity fraud. They’re also largely ignored when we talk about rape or domestic violence. Trying to advocate for people who are suffering shouldn’t be a smear.

Harry Crouch, the president of NCM, has said some things I don’t agree with, like the widely circulated quote about Ray Rice’s then-fiancée having “aggravated him,” which led to him hitting her. But the articles from Slate, ThinkProgress, Mic, and others also lump in two other groups with the “men’s rights” label. Stop Abusive and Violent Environments do a lot of work on false accusations, which mostly happen to men, but believe in those protections for women as well.

The final group being smeared is Families Advocating for Campus Equality, a group started by mothers of students who have been accused of sexual assault and went through the campus process, finding they were unable to present evidence that proved their innocence. Members of FACE tell me some women have been falsely accused and joined their group.

None of these groups think rape is acceptable. They simply want protections for accused students put in place and for the hysteria surrounding the issue to stop.

Historically, those seeking control over others have often whipped up hysteria in order to get it.

SINGLE PAYER, SINGLE DECIDER: Charlie Gard is given legal permanent residence in US by Congress so ‘he can fly to the States for world class treatment.’ “But legal sources said Charlie is the subject of a High Court order and it made no difference what passport he held.”

INDEED THEY DO: On Three Year Anniversary Of Dan Markel’s Murder, Wheels Of Justice Continue To Turn Slowly.

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Why Does My Eye Twitch?

IT’S NOT ME; IT’S YOU: Saying goodbye (again) to the GOP.

“CIVIL FORFEITURE IS INHERENTLY ABUSIVE:” Institute for Justice Statement Responding to DOJ’s Announced Policy Change Increasing Use of Civil Forfeiture.

Sessions has been a big disappointment. He let Obama holdovers bully him into an unnecessary recusal, which let Comey fake DOJ into appointing Mueller, and is wasting time and trampling the Constitution with this sort of crap. Trump should replace him with somebody competent.

UPDATE: I incorrectly said that Sessions appointed Mueller. Fixed.

TRUE: “An increasingly urgent problem with Twitter is the way it messes with journalists’ sense of scale. . . . Twitter has low dynamic range; it’s easy for an utterly inconsequential voice to look and sound huge.”

OF COURSE THEY WILL: The Robots Will Make the Best Fake News.

SJW “SCHOLARSHIP” FAILS: Here are Two More Instances of Nancy MacLean’s Inexcusable Sloppiness. “These facts – and they are as straightforward and as accessible as facts about a scholar’s work get – are completely at odds with Nancy MacLean’s thesis.”

Aren’t we past the point were we’re just talking about “sloppiness,” really?

KYLE SMITH: The Left’s “Hamburger Problem” Is Not Going Away. Scroll down to the independent-bookseller post and you’ll see how right that is. . . . Key bit:

Just this week, the Women’s March celebrated a cop-killer; a self-proclaimed member of the “resistance” said, in Cosmopolitan, “My seven-year-old asked if the president was going to hurt him”; Phil Donahue called the election of Trump “the darkest political moment in American history” and USA Today complained that Dunkirk didn’t feature enough minorities and women. After using the term “fake news” while talking to a dinner companion in a Beverly Hills restaurant, the writer and non-Trump voter Bret Easton Ellis was accosted and yelled at by a total stranger who accused the novelist of “colluding with Russia” at a West Hollywood hotel. Asked Ellis on Twitter, “Is the Left f—ing NUTS?” Why, yes, Bret. Yes they are. Declaring hamburgers to be problematic is just the symptom, not the disease.

I like the term “Selma envy.” Thing is, my dad was at Selma, and people there were a lot more realistic than their degenerate successors.

OH: Turns Out T. Rex Would’ve Broken its Tiny Legs if it Tried to Run.

THE NAME GAME: Indonesia responds to China’s absurd claims in the South China Sea by referring to a sea area northwest of Borneo as the North Natuna Sea.

The renamed tract is near the Natuna Islands, an Indonesian chain of 272 maritime features, and overlaps the southernmost part of China’s so-called “nine-dash line” claim extending from its south coast.

This is diplomatic push back but push is on the way to becoming shove. The article notes that Chinese fishermen routinely violate Indonesian waters and claim they are fishing in a “traditional fishing ground.”

INDEPENDENT BOOKSELLER: I don’t like selling Hillbilly Elegy because it’s basically like Mein Kampf. From the comments: “And this is why people prefer Amazon. Great prices, awesome delivery, no judgment. No hectoring. No bullying. No preaching. Clickity-click, and I’ve purchased what I want.”

Flashback: Book ’em.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Navy Unveils World’s First Active Laser Weapon In Persian Gulf.

The LaWS, an acronym for Laser Weapons System, is not science fiction. It is not experimental. It is deployed on board the USS Ponce amphibious transport ship, ready to be fired at targets today and every day by Capt. Christopher Wells and his crew.

It costs “about a dollar a shot” to fire.

IN RESPONSE TO MY POST FROM YESTERDAY ABOUT TESTOSTERONE NOT PRODUCING AGGRESSION, READER JOHN STEAKLEY SENT THIS LINK: I lived like a man for a couple of weeks. It helped me understand my husband. Taking a dose of testosterone gave me a new sense of empathy.

UNION REP: Lawmakers Who Oppose Legalizing Ag Workers Should ‘Pick Watermelons.’

ALLIES: Turkey Leaks Secret Locations of U.S. Troops in Syria.

The list published by the Anadolu news agency points to a U.S. presence from one end to the other of the Kurdish self-administration region—a distance of more than 200 miles. The Anadolu news agency even listed the number of U.S. troops in several locations and in two instances stipulated the presence of French special forces.

Turkey has openly criticized the Trump administration—and the Obama administration before it—for relying in the battle against ISIS on a militia led by Kurds affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers Party or PKK. A separatist movement now at war with Turkey, the PKK has been listed by the U.S., EU, and Turkey as a terror organization.

To avoid the appearance of allying with such a group, the U.S. military set up the Syrian Democratic Forces, which have a large component of Arab recruits. But they are led by officers from the People’s Protection Units (YPG), the Syrian affiliate of the PKK.

Although Turkey’s powerful president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, regularly vents his anger at the U.S., it is still highly unusual for a NATO ally to reveal details of a U.S. military deployment during active operations in a war zone.

Ya think?

WE NEED A GOVERNMENT PROGRAM TO REDRESS “SEXUAL INEQUALITY:”

There is a curious contradiction in breathless media dispatches about millennial sex lives. On the one hand, dozens of reports have highlighted supposed sexual libertinism among young people: Reports of Tinder rampages, campus hookups, and casual dating.

More recently, though, this narrative has been called into question by a new set of articles insisting that actually, contrary to the caricature, millennials are having less sex than previous generations. What gives?

New data from the polling firm Ipsos helps to reconcile these two competing narratives. According to Ipsos, yes, millennials have fewer partners on average than Boomers or GenXers. But this conceals significant variation. Ipsos writes: “There is a divergence between extremes where more Millennials are not having sex at all, but also those who are having sex are more likely to have more sexual partners or to have started earlier.” . . .

Millennial sexual habits are understandably of keen interest to the media, but they are tough to generalize. Both the “hookup culture” narrative and the “sexually isolated” narrative communicate part of the truth.

Apps like Tinder and loosening sexual norms might be encouraging hookups even as some millennials delay serious dating for financial reasons, and others turn away from casual sex altogether. The Ipsos data provides ample room for speculation. In the meantime, though, it’s interesting to note that millennials are experiencing a certain kind of sexual inequality: On the high end, young people really are prolific, even though as a whole they are more restrained.

I would make a “Long Tail” pun here, but I’m much too proper for that.

RELIGION OF PEACE UPDATE: ISIS Lashes Teenage Boys for Crime of Playing Soccer.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The Fifth American War. “The country is coming apart, and the advocates of radical egalitarianism are winning.”

During the Jacksonian Revolution of the 1830s, factions nearly ripped the country apart over whether the East Coast Founders’ establishment of a half-century would relinquish its monopoly of political power to reflect the new demographic realties of an expanding frontier — and its populist champions often deemed unfit for self-governance. For the most part, the Jacksonians won.

Three decades later the nation divided over slavery, prompting the most lethal war in American history to end it and force the defeated Confederate southern states back into the Union.

The Great Depression, and the establishment’s inept responses to it, left a quarter of the country unemployed for nearly a decade — hungry and desperate to expand government even if it entailed curtailing liberty in a way never envisioned by the Founders. The result was eventually the redefinition of freedom as the right of the individual to have his daily needs guaranteed by the state.

In the 1960s, the hippie movement — fueled by furor over the Vietnam War, civil-rights protests, and environmental activism — turned holistic in a fashion rarely seen before. A quarter of the country went “hip,” grooming, dressing, talking, and acting in a way that reflected their disdain for the silent majority of “straight” or “irrelevant” traditional America. The hipsters lost the battle (most eventually cut their hair and outgrew their paisley tops to join the rat race) but won the war — as the universities, media, foundations, Hollywood, arts, and entertainment now echo the values of 1969 rather than those that preceded it.

Read the whole thing.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Democrats Will Soon Regret That Republicans Failed To Repeal ObamaCare. ObamaCare was never sustainable. Something that can’t go on forever, won’t.

OF COURSE, RACISTS WILL JUST CITE THIS AS PROOF THAT MINORITIES ARE TOO FRAGILE TO FLOURISH AT UNIVERSITY: UK University to Get Rid of Portraits of White Scholars Because They ‘Intimidate’ Ethnic Minorities.