A STRANGE FETISH FOR SKIN COLOR:  De Blasio’s war on meritocracy and the public exam schools of New York.

THIS IS MY SHOCKED FACE:  #IranDeal: Obama Tried To Give Iran Access To US Bank System.

IF IT IS IT WILL GO BROKE:  Is National Lampoon 2.0 Going Woke Already?

LONG AGO AND FAR AWAY:  How Reagan’s eldest son reminds us of stars who put their lives on the line to help the war effort.

OKAY, NOW THEY HAVE OUR ATTENTION:  Two meteors in two days lit up the sky in China and Botswana.

GOOD NEWS:  GM golden rice gets approval from food regulators in the US.

HE’S NOT WRONG: Gov. Candidate Blames ‘Progressive’ Policies for Making Calif. a Poverty-Stricken Racist Dystopia.

HMMM … BRAZILIAN ANTHROPOLOGISTS SAY KILLING TWIN, DISABLED, OR TRANSGENDER CHILDREN (EVEN WHEN THEIR PARENTS OBJECT) OUGHT TO BE TOLERATED … so long as the perpetrators are from one of those … er … unassimilated indigenous tribes. And woe to anyone who attempts to inform tribal members that there may be alternatives to their traditional practices.

The Kamayurá are among a handful of indigenous peoples in Brazil known to engage in infanticide and the selective killing of older children. Those targeted include the disabled, the children of single mothers, and twins—whom some tribes, including the Kamayurá, see as bad omens. [A Kamayurá man] told me of a 12-year-old boy from his father’s generation whom the tribe buried alive because he “wanted to be a woman.”

Suruwaha are another such group. According to the article, a few years ago, a couple there to study the Suruwaha language took a 5-year-old Suruwaha child who had hypothyroidism (an easily treated condition) to the state capital for medical attention. The child’s parents had committed suicide rather than kill their child, and the tribe’s efforts to kill her by burying her alive had failed. When the couple brought the now-treated girl back to her tribe, nobody wanted her, so the couple adopted her themselves. Meanwhile, the public prosecutor had banished them from the Suruwaha territory. The anthropologist’s report that undergirded the prosecutor’s injunction argued that they were wrongdoers because they had let the Suruwahas know that there are alternatives to their traditional practices. Apparently, if you are unlucky enough to have been born to the Suruwahas, you must be kept in the dark.

As of April, the Brazilian legislature was trying to do something about this issue. The Brazilian Association of Anthropology was opposing the proposal, arguing that “the most repressive and lethal actions ever perpetrated against the indigenous peoples of the Americas … were unfailingly justified through appeals to noble causes, humanitarian values and universal principles.”

Call me a cultural bigot if you will, but I am so glad to have been born in a community where the city council members figured they’d get in trouble if they starting insisting that I be killed.

OPEN THREAD: Atomic batteries to power. Turbines to speed. Roger, ready to thread out!

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Feminist Business School to Launch Anti-Capitalist ‘Summer Camp.’

THIS IS CNN: CNN’s Melania Truther Brian Stelter Defends Media After Trump Tweets About ‘Vicious’ Fake News.

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Plus, deals on Coffee, Tea, and Espresso.

THE LAST MUNCHKIN IS GONE:  Jerry Maren, the last surviving munchkin from the Wizard of Oz, dies.

YOUR DAILY TREACHER: Rise of the McRobots. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to go back to living in caves.”

CHIP COMPETITION FEELS LIKE THE ’90S AGAIN: AMD tops Intel with its 32-core Threadripper 2, which will ship this year. “Intel wowed the Taipei crowds on Tuesday with a 28-core Core chip, which the company promised by the end of the year. One day later, on Wednesday, AMD announced Threadripper 2—and at 32 cores and 64 threads, it will easily top what Intel promised.”

If you have the need and the means, it seems impossible to go wrong with either choice.

JEFF SANDERS: Six Facts About D-Day You Never Learned in School.

OH: Teacher Who Said ‘Lick Me Where I Fart’ Pleads Guilty to Misconduct Again, Can Still Get Job Back.

“Again.”

HEALTH: Broccoli coffee is a thing, because you’re not eating your vegetables.

Developed by Australia’s chief research organisation, the CSIRO, and Hort Innovation, the powder is produced by using a “combination of selected pre-treatment and drying processes” that help to keep the flavour, colour, and the nutrients from the vegetable.

The broccoli powder was tested at a Melbourne cafe, Commonfolk, with “mixed reviews” when the concoction was brewed into a latte. Sorry, a “broccolatte.”

If they could eliminate the flavor, they might be onto something.

BREAKING: DOJ watchdog finds James Comey defied authority as FBI director, sources say.

SUSANNAH BRESLIN: “Once upon a time, porn had led technology, adopting VHS over Betamax in the video-format wars of the late ’70s and ’80s. In the new millennium, technology was porn’s undoing.”

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SUSTAINABILITY: U.S. Student Loan Debt Hits Staggering $1.5 Trillion.

HMM: Poll shows Turkey’s Erdogan falling short of election majority in first round.

He looks safe in a potential runoff however:

Turks will vote in both parliamentary and presidential elections later this month after Erdogan, the president, declared a snap election in April. After the vote, Turkey will switch to a powerful executive presidency that was narrowly approved in a referendum last year.

The survey of 3,000 respondents in 26 of Turkey’s 81 provinces showed Erdogan receiving 48.3 percent of votes in the first round, with the main opposition party candidate, Muharrem Ince, seen at 31.4 percent. The poll was conducted between May 29 and June 3.

More than 53 percent of respondents said they would vote for Erdogan against Ince in the second round.

Flashback: “Democracy is like a streetcar. When you come to your stop, you get off.” -Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

SCOTUSBLOG SYMPOSIUM: Masterpiece Cakeshop — not as narrow as may first appear.

What the Supreme Court said was different but may ultimately come to nearly the same place. The court said that the inconsistent treatment of Phillips and the protected bakers showed hostility towards Phillips’ religious faith. Colorado had violated its duty “not to base laws or regulations on hostility to a religion or a religious viewpoint.” The state must “proceed in a manner neutral toward and tolerant of Phillips’ religious beliefs.” The commission had been “neither tolerant nor respectful”; it had proceeded on the basis of “a negative normative ‘evaluation of the particular justification’ for his objection” (quoting Lukumi).

There is a practical holding and an ideal holding here. The practical holding is that the unequal treatment of Phillips and the protected bakers is evidence of unconstitutional hostility. Conscientious objectors embroiled in litigation will have to send testers to smoke out uneven enforcement of anti-discrimination law. We expect that states are unwilling to require socially liberal vendors to produce goods with conservative religious messages they find offensive or against their conscience. If that is so, then those states cannot require religiously conservative vendors to produce goods in violation of their conscience.

The Supreme Court has announced a powerful ideal. Even when a law has no explicit exceptions, hostile enforcement is unconstitutional. Single-issue agencies that enforce state civil-rights laws must approach claims to religious exemptions with tolerance and respect. And this is apparently an absolute rule; the court does not consider whether hostility might be justified by some state interest, compelling or otherwise.

But a requirement of tolerance and respect, or even the avoidance of hostility, is difficult to enforce. The opponents of religious exemptions will now start doing the sorts of things done by many other government officials resisting constitutional mandates. They will seek doctrinal and rhetorical manipulations to cloak their hostility to the constitutional right, and their unequal treatment of objectors they agree with and objectors they don’t.

Colorado’s Civil Rights Commission will have to do a better job of hiding its hostility from now on, but I’m not sure they have it in them.