ON THIS DAY IN 2005,  Fred Korematsu died after a long and full life.  He lost his famous lawsuit in the Supreme Court, but he eventually won in the court of public opinion.  In Justice Robert Jackson’s dissent to Korematsu v. United States, he acknowledged that courts should ordinarily avoid second guessing military decisions, but nevertheless wrote:

Korematsu was born on our soil, of parents born in Japan. The Constitution makes him a citizen of the United States by nativity and a citizen of California by residence. No claim is made that he is not loyal to this country. There is no suggestion that apart from the matter involved here he is not law abiding and well disposed. Korematsu, however, has been convicted of an act not commonly a crime. It consists merely of being present in the state whereof he is a citizen, near the place where he was born, and where all his life he has lived. […] [H]is crime would result, not from anything he did, said, or thought, different than they, but only in that he was born of different racial stock. Now, if any fundamental assumption underlies our system, it is that guilt is personal and not inheritable. Even if all of one’s antecedents had been convicted of treason, the Constitution forbids its penalties to be visited upon him. But here is an attempt to make an otherwise innocent act a crime merely because this prisoner is the son of parents as to whom he had no choice, and belongs to a race from which there is no way to resign.

Anyway, what could be more American than suing the pants off the federal government for a breach of your civil rights?

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Plus, savings on Pet Supplies.

COURTNEY KIRCHOFF: Dear Parkland Activists: You Admit to Bullying the Shooter, But Have the Gall to Blame Guns and the NRA?

Related: Jim Treacher: David Hogg Is Quickly Learning How to Be a Bully.

THE 21st CENTURY IS NOT TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: Sarah Hoyt on the Making of Toxic Masculinity.

ACCOUNTABILITY: A Kansas bill could make schools liable for shootings if they don’t arm teachers.

OPEN THREAD: Carpe sequela.

I RECOMMEND EUGENE VOLOKH TO FILL HIS SEAT: Judge Stephen Reinhardt, a judge on the San Francisco-based 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and a champion of liberal causes on the court, died Thursday at the age of 87.

And if the Republicans are smart (I know, I know) they’ll fill all the outstanding vacancies before the midterms, whatever it takes.

HOW TO LOSE WEIGHT FAST: Man Frustrated with Stubborn Belly Fat Learns It’s a 30-Lb. Tumor.

Kevin Daly was always tall and slim, thanks to a history in athletics and his 6’3″ frame. But he, like many men in their 60’s, just couldn’t lose weight from his stomach.

The estate planner from Hoboken, New Jersey, started to notice that his stomach was bigger than ever after undergoing heart surgery for a calcified valve in Dec. 2015.

“I came home a week after the surgery, and I looked in the mirror for the first time and I was all upset,” Daly, 63, tells PEOPLE. “This thing was growing, but my shoulders and chest had atrophied from the surgery, so it made my stomach protrude more. I brought it to the attention of my doctor, but [any] doctor would say the same thing — you’re in your 60’s, low testosterone, visceral fat. You’re fine; it’s just how it is.”

Daly’s doctor did, however, encourage him to lose weight for his heart health, and over two years, he dropped 34 lbs. But frustratingly, the belly fat remained.

“When I went back to him in October 2017, he said ‘I’m so proud of you, you’ve reinvented yourself, your heart and valves sound like a twenty year old,’ and I said ‘Great, I’m thrilled with all of that, except how did I lose 34 lbs. and not lose an ounce off of my stomach?’ ” Daly recalls.

Wow.

SCHOOL DISCIPLINE SHOULD BE  A LOCAL ISSUE:  I have a USA Today op-ed today.

HMM: DA won’t say whether charges are being considered for officers who killed Stephon Clark.

Plus, The Police Shooting of Stephon Clark Is Deeply Problematic.

I don’t know whether the shooting was justified, though it looks very much like it wasn’t. But I do know that if an armed citizen, rather than a police officer, had shot someone under similar circumstances, there wouldn’t be any doubt about filing charges. I understand that sometimes the decision to shoot is easy to second-guess, but the standard should be the same — in theory, the law is the same — whether it’s a police officer or a civilian doing the shooting. In fact, of course, police get special treatment, because they’re an arm of the state, just like the judges and prosecutors involved are.

LUCK ISN’T SO DUMB AFTER ALL: I’ve been enjoying reading about the science of lucky breaks, as explored by Janice Kaplan and Barnaby March in How Luck Happens. They take a critical look at some of the legends of luck, like the story of Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin when he came from vacation to find that a petri dish he’d left on a windowsill had been contaminated with mold:

And lo and behold, the bacteria surrounding the mold had been destroyed.

He didn’t shout, “Eureka!” or go running naked through the streets (as Archimedes reportedly once did),* but he did realize that the mold might have inhibited the bacterial growth. And there you have it— one lucky break and millions of people have been saved from diseases like strep throat and scarlet fever, as well as wound infections.

“When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn’t plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world’s first antibiotic, or bacteria killer. But I suppose that was exactly what I did,” Fleming said later.

The revolution wasn’t quite as casual as all that. During World War I, Fleming had been in the Royal Army Medical Corps doing research into wound infections and antiseptics. After the war, he returned to his lab at St. Mary’s Hospital at the University of London, and by 1921, he had made his first big discovery, finding an enzyme that fights bacteria.

That research reportedly began when Fleming had a cold and dropped some mucus into one of his bacteria cultures. Are you starting to see a pattern here? The dropped mucus and the plopped mold were serendipitous, but they were common events. It wasn’t their occurrence that was so lucky and magical, but what Fleming made of them.

At the time of his family vacation, Fleming had been working on questions about bacteria and the human immune system for more than a decade. As is often the case in science, he had many small breakthroughs and lots of incremental steps. Many of the things he tried didn’t lead anywhere. When one does pay off, it’s not random luck— it’s the result of months and years of focused energy, and plenty of experiments that didn’t pan out.

You get lucky only when you know what you’re looking for. Someone else coming into Fleming’s lab after that vacation might have tossed away the contaminated petri dish without a second thought. One man’s scientific breakthrough is another man’s yucky, moldy mess.

Their conclusion: “Luck occurs at the intersection of random chance, talent and hard work.”

I SUPPOSE THIS COULD BE A HINT AS TO WHAT’S COMING NEXT: Fired FBI official Andrew McCabe soliciting online donations for legal defense fund.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Asian Powers Step Up Their Readiness For Space Warfare.

DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF 21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS AND NAME THAT PARTY: “A grand jury Thursday indicted Bryon Hefner, the husband of [state] Senator Stanley C. Rosenberg, on multiple charges of sexual assault, criminal lewdness, and distributing nude photographs without consent,” the Boston Globe reports, “unexpectedly” omitting Rosenberg’s party affiliation.

KURT SCHLICHTER: Every Word Liberals Say About Guns Is A Lie.

JOHN HAWKINS: Confessions of a Clickbait Guru: 5 Ways Social Media is Destroying Journalism and Politics.

UNEXPECTEDLY: IS HE FOR REAL? DAVID HOGG HAD CHANCE TO TAKE THE HIGH ROAD WITH LAURA INGRAHAM AND ROYALLY BLEW IT.

It’s almost as old as Ezra Klein thinks the Constitution is, but Hogg might want to watch Elia Kazan’s cautionary 1957 film A Face in the Crowd a few times. He’s the boy band version of Lonesome Rhodes.

THE LEFT’S DECONSTRUCTION OF THE GOOD WAR CONTINUES APACE. Actual Salon headline today:

Rosie the Riveter isn’t a universal icon: “That was a white woman’s story”

“It simply had nothing to say to me,” says WW II Home Front park ranger Betty Reid Soskin.

Flashback to 2012: VJina: Feminist Website Declares Famous WWII Kiss, Between Sailor and Nurse, a “Sexual Assault.”

How long before FDR statues start getting pulled down?

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Heart disease risk may show in your earlobes, eyes, fingers.

YES, NEXT QUESTION? Time for Blogs Again?

Related: “Should these social media outlets, which have now made clear that they see their mission not as platforms but as publishers, be given legal exemption as platforms? Or should they be held accountable as publishers? This is a question that bears severe fiscal ramifications.”

21st CENTURY HEADLINES: Atlanta Still on Its Knees, a Week After Ransomware Attack Crippled City’s Computers.

YOUR DAILY TREACHER: David Hogg Is Quickly Learning How to Be a Bully.

EXPLORATIONS IN LIFTING AND LIBERTY: A Free Market Look at the Fitness Industry.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: Five ’80s Staples We Never Want to See Again.

I, too, could do without the shoulder pads and mullets, but do we really need to swear off the low-budget slasher movies?

IT WILL SNEAK IN AT NIGHT: This spacecraft will get closer to the Sun than any before it—without melting.

Kidding aside, if everything works we’re going to learn a lot from this probe:

This summer, NASA will launch the Parker Solar Probe, an impressively heat-resistant spacecraft destined to glide closer to the surface of the Sun than any spacecraft before it. It will fly within about 6 million kilometers of the searing surface, more than seven times closer than earlier craft. If all goes to plan, the craft will be hurtling at 724,205 km per hour and have its one-of-a-kind heat shield perfectly facing the surface as it makes those closest approaches. In about seven years, it will complete 24 orbits around the Sun and pass by Venus seven times.

All the while, the Parker probe will collect a constellation of data to help answer scientists’ burning questions—and solve some sizzling mysteries—about the orb of hot plasma that lights up our Solar System. Namely, it will try to help us finally understand why the Sun’s atmosphere is 300 times hotter than its surface, which itself is a balmy 5,727°C. This fact defies basic physics and to this day is unexplained. One of the leading hypotheses to account for the heat shift comes from famed physicist Eugene Parker, after whom the probe is named. In the mid-1950s, Parker theorized that the Sun’s super-heated corona could be explained by a complex system of plasma, magnetic fields, and energetic particles that spark solar explosions called “nanoflares.”

Scientists are thirsty for close-up data on those potential explosions as well as the cascade of energy called solar wind. With that data, they can put their hypotheses to the test. And in addition to helping us understand coronal heat, data on these sunny phenomena could help clear up poorly understood space weather, which can wreak havoc on satellites and power lines here on Earth.

Lots of great photos at the link, too.