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FASTER, PLEASE: Dad battling brain cancer shows no sign of tumor regrowth after clinical trial.

THIS HAS GOTTEN A LOT LESS ATTENTION THAN IT DESERVES: Sports Tickets, Other Freebies for FBI Leakers Raise ‘Bribery’ Issues, Legal Experts Say. They raise ‘bribery’ issues because, you know, they’re bribery. Both the bribed, and the bribers, should be prosecuted.

(Bumped, because it’s getting a lot less attention than it deserves.)

UPDATE: From the comments: “They go after Trump for the emoluments clause and end up revealing a bunch of Trump haters for bribery.”

Plus: “It’s not bribery bribery if you’ve got a friend in the prosecutors’ office. Especially, when bringing you up on charges will call into question all your sworn ‘testimony’ in trials to put people disfavored by the powers that be in prison.”

NOT SURPRISING: Millennials may be less happy and healthy than their parents by middle age. It’s as if our modern social structures aren’t optimal for human happiness.

FASTER, PLEASE: Brain stimulation restores movement in rats after stroke.

NEW YORK’S SMARTEST LIBELS NEW YORK’S BRAVEST: A Harvard-educated fact-checker for the New Yorker is being excoriated by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency for “baselessly slandering” a Marine veteran — by falsely accusing him of having a Nazi tattoo, according to reports.

Just an accident. Never mind. Nothing to see here. Doesn’t indicate any confirmation bias. Nope.

THOUGHTS ON TRUMP’S SPACE FORCE IDEA. First, what a bureaucratic defeat for the Air Force. Wow! Their series of procurement debacles has a stiff price. (Though to be honest, the Navy’s been at least as bad). Second, what’s the model for a space force? More like the Air Force, or like the Navy? Or something else? Right now the missions will be unmanned and near to earth, but how long will that last? Will there be Space Marines? (There really need to be Space Marines).

Personally, I think they should drop the normal government procurement model and just contract with SpaceX for launch services in the near future. Also: One reason for a Space Force might be that a new bureaucracy can be really creative and productive for a decade or so before it ossifies into normal bureaucracy. Is there something coming that makes it important that the next decade be that decade?

Discuss these, along with service songs, uniforms, or whatever, in the comments.

IVY LEAGUE ADMISSIONS POLICIES INSPIRE STILL MORE CYNICISM: “And — ironically — when you picture those thousand competition-winning orchestra kids, what ethnicity are you picturing? I’ll bet classical music virtuosity counts for very little in the Ivy League admission process because it would help Asian American applicants. Or does it help a lot when you are not Asian-American but not at all when you are?”

WATCHING THE SAUSAGE GET MADE IN REAL TIME: Nets Flood Broadcasts With 176 Minutes of Separated Kids Coverage.

As the Federalist’s Jesse Kelly tweets, “The last 48 hours is exactly why people on the right are so distrustful of media. They’re extremely powerful and can manufacture outrage on a national level. It’s not journalism. It’s activism that influences policy.”

DENVER LGBT PRIDE FEST BANS LOCAL MEN’S GROUP, CITING — WAIT FOR IT — THE SOUTHERN POVERTY LAW CENTER:

In a rejection email dated April 11, organizers officially exiled Rocky Mountain MRA from PrideFest, citing for example the group’s one-time screening of the film “The Red Pill,” as well as the fact that the group posted news from The Daily Caller on Facebook.

Oh no, not the Daily Caller! To be fair, Tucker Carlson is almost as extremist as that legendary alt-right figure Dennis Prager – whose educational PragerU YouTube videos have also been added to the SPLC’s “Hate Watch” list.

As Glenn wrote last year, “Think of them as leftist propagandists and grifters and you won’t go far wrong.”

Related: SPLC Apologizes, Pays Settlement to Islamic Reformer It Wrongly Labeled ‘Anti-Muslim Extremist.’

A GERMAN AUTHOR IN THE NEW YORK TIMES: Trump Has A Point On Europe:

Mr. Trump’s anger at America’s allies embodies, however unpleasantly, a not unreasonable point of view, and one that the rest of the world ignores at its peril: The global world order is unbalanced and inequitable. And unless something is done to correct it soon, it will collapse, with or without the president’s tweets.

While the West happily built the liberal order over the past 70 years, with Europe at its center, the Americans had the continent’s back. In turn, as it unravels, America feels this loss of balance the hardest — it has always spent the most money and manpower to keep the system working.

The Europeans have basically been free riders on the voyage, spending almost nothing on defense, and instead building vast social welfare systems at home and robust, well-protected export industries abroad. Rather than lash back at Mr. Trump, they would do better to ask how we got to this place, and how to get out.

The European Union, as an institution, is one of the prime drivers of this inequity. At the Group of 7, for example, the constituent countries are described as all equals. But in reality, the union puts a thumb on the scales in its members’ favor: It is a highly integrated, well-protected free-trade area that gives a huge leg up to, say, German car manufacturers while essentially punishing American companies who want to trade in the region.

The eurozone offers a similar unfair advantage. If it were not for the euro, Germany would long ago have had to appreciate its currency in line with its enormous export surplus.

Indeed.

IS ALBERT EINSTEIN NEXT TO MEET THE BIG PC AIRBRUSH? Calling Einstein A Racist Is Perfect For Those Who Can’t Compete With His Accomplishments:

So what does Einstein say in his diaries? “This theory of relativity thing could come in really handy at eliminating inferior races with an atom bomb?” “Let’s enslave uppity Chinese women who want to study quantum mechanics?”

No. Of the Japanese, he says, “Intellectual needs of this nation seem to be weaker than their artistic ones — natural disposition?” Of the Chinese, he considered some that he saw to be “industrious, filthy, obtuse people” and said “it would be a pity if these Chinese supplant all other races. For the likes of us, the mere thought is unspeakably dreary.”

To recap, unlike Columbus, Washington, or Jefferson, who inflicted real pain upon many people through real actions, in 1922, Einstein had some private thoughts that are roughly as offensive as the 15 RealPatriotsAgainstMexico.blogtown.net articles your aunt shared on Facebook last week. Einstein then wrote those unsavory thoughts in a private journal, never spoke them aloud publicly, and never lived a life in accordance with them. The horror…Why is this news for the Knights of Akshully? The answer is fairly simple. Their goal is not to eliminate injustice. If it were, they’d spend their time fighting against the slavery, oppression, and racism that still run rampant in the world instead of attacking historical figures who were increasingly less guilty of perpetuating slavery, oppression, and racism.

Likewise, it’s hard to believe they’re seeking a genuine debate about how much a man’s moral failings ought to affect his legacy, since the answer is always the same: “Terminate with extreme prejudice the one with extreme (or modest) prejudice.” Rather, it seems the Knights of Akshully’s goal is to devise an ethical system that gives them bragging rights over the far more accomplished figures of history.

Read the whole thing. As Paul Johnson wrote in Modern Times:

At the beginning of the 1920s the belief began to circulate, for the first time at a popular level, that there were no longer any absolutes: of time and space, of good and evil, of knowledge, above all of value. Mistakenly but perhaps inevitably, relativity became confused with relativism.

No one was more distressed than Einstein by this public misapprehension. He was bewildered by the relentless publicity and error which his work seemed to promote. He wrote to his colleague Max Born on 9 September 1920: ‘Like the man in the fairy-tale who turned everything he touched into gold, so with me everything turns into a fuss in the newspapers.’ Einstein was not a practicing Jew, but he acknowledged a God. He believed passionately in absolute standards of right and wrong.

He lived to see moral relativism, to him a disease, become a social pandemic, just as he lived to see his fatal equation bring into existence nuclear warfare. There were times, he said at the end of his life, when he wished he had been a simple watchmaker.

The public response to relativity was one of the principal formative influences on the course of twentieth-century history. It formed a knife, inadvertently wielded by its author, to help cut society adrift from its traditional moorings in the faith and morals of Judeo-Christian culture.

A century later, is the age of moral relativity about to devour the legacy of the man who invented the real theory of relativity? The PC police will likely give it their best shot, if only because, as Kevin Williamson wrote last week, in an article ominously titled, “Watch What You Say. Someone Else Is.”

The generation that reached what passes for maturity in the age of social media is the most status-obsessed—and hence etiquette-obsessed—since the ancien régime. They are all miniaturists: There hasn’t been an important and original book of political ideas written by an American Millennial, and very few of them have read one, either. But they are very interested in individual pronouns and 280-character tweets. It is extraordinarily difficult for any one of them to raise his own status through doing interesting and imaginative intellectual work, because there is practically no audience for such work among his peers. Worse, the generation ahead of him stopped paying attention to Millennials years ago, and the generation behind him never started.

What that leaves is the takfiri tendency, scalp-hunting or engineering a court scandal at Versailles. Concurrent with that belief is the superstition that people such as Harvey Weinstein or Bret Stephens take up cultural space that might otherwise be filled by some more worthy person if only the infidel were removed, as though society were an inverted game of Tetris, with each little disintegration helping to enable everybody else to move up one slot at a time. Status obsession does funny things to one’s map of social reality. It leads to all manner of bizarre thinking.

Not least of which is the continuous search for the next great man to airbrush from history for the tiniest flaws in his thinking, if only out of jealousy.

FASTER APPROVAL, PLEASE: Promising New Technology on Tobacco Harm Reduction Front Awaits FDA Approval.

CHANGE: A Movement Arises To Take Back Higher Education.

They started insisting on “trigger warnings” and demanding that controversial speakers be disinvited from campus. In fall 2015 a wave of highly publicized protests over racial issues hit Yale and the University of Missouri. In 2016 the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education recorded 43 attempts to disinvite speakers from campus. Then in 2017, mobs at Berkeley and Middlebury rioted against provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos and social scientist Charles Murray.

Data back up these anecdotes. A 2017 survey by FIRE and YouGov found that 58% of students said it was “important to be part of a campus community where they are not exposed to intolerant or offensive ideas.” In a Brookings Institution survey from the same year, 1 in 5 students said using violence to stop a speaker was sometimes acceptable.

But we may be turning a corner. According to FIRE, disinvitation demands dropped to 36 in 2017, and only nine have been issued so far this year. At the same time, academics and administrators—some of whom spoke at the Heterodox Academy conference—have taken steps to increase viewpoint diversity on their campuses.

In 2015 the University of Chicago issued a statement validating the importance of free speech in education. To date 42 schools, from Columbia to the University of Minnesota, have adopted the Chicago principles or a statement like it. Last year Mr. George, the Princeton conservative, authored a statement with Cornel West, a Harvard leftist, asserting that “all of us should seek respectfully to engage with people who challenge our views.” It has thousands of signatories, inside and outside academia.

Michael Roth, the progressive president of Wesleyan University, last year announced an “affirmative action” program to bring conservative faculty and ideas to campus. Heterodox Academy has created an educational app called OpenMind to help students learn virtues like intellectual humility and empathy so that they can speak to one another across the divide. So far it has been used in over 100 classrooms.

As encouraging as these initiatives are, there’s a more fundamental shift that needs to take place—a rethinking of identity politics. Rather than promoting a “common-enemy identity politics” that admonishes white people and others with “privilege,” Mr. Haidt said Friday, professors and administrators should embrace a “common-humanity identity politics.” Isn’t that what liberal education is all about?

Yes, but it offers insufficient opportunities for graft and lefty politicking.

VENOM ON A NIGHT EXERCISE: A Marine UH-1Y Venom refuels at a forward arming and refueling point in Yuma, Ariz. Stunning color photo taken by a USMC corporal.

GREAT: The natural gas revolution is a uniquely American story.

EVERY COUPLE OF WEEKS, IT’S A “YOU MUST HATE CHILDREN” MEDIA MELTDOWN: Desperate Democrats bedazzled at political prospect of crying kids.

ARE YOU AN ALTER?

From Scientific American:

In 2015, doctors in Germany reported the extraordinary case of a woman who suffered from what has traditionally been called “multiple personality disorder” and today is known as “dissociative identity disorder” (DID). The woman exhibited a variety of dissociated personalities (“alters”), some of which claimed to be blind. Using EEGs, the doctors were able to ascertain that the brain activity normally associated with sight wasn’t present while a blind alter was in control of the woman’s body, even though her eyes were open. Remarkably, when a sighted alter assumed control, the usual brain activity returned.

More:

Now, a newly published paper…posits that dissociation can offer a solution to a critical problem in our current understanding of the nature of reality. This requires some background…

Perhaps we are all alters. So read the whole thing for background and explanation.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The University of Denver is expanding its female-only programming, even though women now account for 57% of Bachelor’s degrees awarded by the school.

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FROM JEFF FOUST, more on the Space Force.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Border ‘Crisis,’ Senate Hearing Tooth Fairy and Much, Much More. “The elevator pitch version of the IG report can be summarized as follows: the investigation found there was mind blowing bias among senior officials in the FBI/DOJ against Trump and his moron supporters but the officials claimed it didn’t effect any of their investigations so it’s all good.”