REMEMBER THIS WHEN THEY TELL YOU THE SCIENCE IS INFALLIBLE: DNA Blunder Creates Phantom Serial Killer. “The only clues that ‘The Woman Without a Face’ left behind at 40 different crime scenes were DNA traces. These were collected on cotton swabs, supplied to the police in a number of European countries. Now police investigators have established that in all probability the DNA had not been left by their quarry but by a woman working for the German medical company supplying the swabs, who had inadvertently contaminated them.”

That’s right: Her DNA was on the cotton swabs they used to check for DNA, because she worked at the cotton swab factory.

HOW TO STOP THE WEST FROM COMMITTING CULTURAL SUICIDE:

The key factoid animating “Suicide of the West” is this: For 2,000 years, everywhere on earth, the large mass of humanity lived on the equivalent of $1.90 a day. “Near subsistence living,” Goldberg writes, “defined human habitats for almost all of human history.”

Then something happened. In the 18th century. In Great Britain. It was a complex phenomenon [Jonah] Goldberg [in Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy], calls the Miracle — a new way of thinking about humanity and human achievement and personal liberty that unlocked a hidden door in the possibilities of the species.

* * * * * * * *

The political liberty we were granted by the Miracle has freed humankind to pursue individual achievement — and it’s a series of unbroken individual achievements that have led the world to unprecedented bounty. But these achievements involve harnessing nature and improving on it. And it’s this aspect of the Miracle that creates a cognitive dissonance in us. It’s not so easy to transcend humanity’s hard-wired pre-modern drives.

As Goldberg says, we’re tribal creatures, intensely social and innately hierarchical, and we find greater meaning within groups. The great ideological fight in the Age of the Miracle is between those who see the rise of the West as a fulfillment of humankind’s potential and those who cannot reconcile themselves to the ways it seems to go against what they think is natural.

The problem is that the rejecters are themselves creating unnatural constructs to try and restore the existence that seems most real to them. They’re building fake tribes through the vehicle of what we now call “identity politics.” And these fake tribes and the demand that we adhere to the arbitrary rules they establish for who is in and who is out are the true drivers of the West’s suicidal impulses.

I’m about a third of the way through the Kindle edition of Suicide of the West and greatly enjoying it. Adam Keiper of the Weekly Standard dubs the book “a big, baggy, sometimes brilliant case for gratitude and perpetuation,” which seems apt.

MUTINY IN SPACE: Why These Skylab Astronauts Never Flew Again.

FREEMAN DYSON: The Key To Everything. I love that he’s still around and writing.

AT AMAZON, save in Women’s Lingerie, Sleepwear, and Loungewear.

AND WHAT A CRAZY WEEK IT WAS. The Week in Pictures: Yes, We Kanye Edition.

THE VIRTUES OF LIFE PRE-INTERNET: When we had to wait.

ROD DREHER: THE THERAPEUTIC IS OUR ULTIMATE TERRORIST.’

We are creating a fragilistic society. It is happening from the top to the bottom, from Yale to Appalachia. Yes, people in power are doing this to us, but we are also doing it to ourselves. All of us.

We can’t go on like this. Many of us won’t, because reality will smash them. Some of us won’t because we were able to see the ruin ahead, and turn away from it. Whenever people start telling you to be “inclusive,” you had better ask what, exactly, they are asking you to include. It could be the carrier of dysfunctional cultural practices that, if they spread within your community — and, most importantly, your family — could mean its downfall. Look around you: it’s happening everywhere.

Anyway, yeah, I’m cranky about this garbage. But I have my reasons.

Read the whole thing.

Related: Prof foretells dire consequences from PC academic culture.

HMM: Exactly What Kind of Deal Is a $30,000 Bentley, Anyway?

AT AMAZON, spring savings in Patio Lawn and Garden.

Plus, bestsellers in Sports and Outdoors.

PRIVACY: The Golden State Killer Is Tracked Through a Thicket of DNA, and Experts Shudder. “Even as scientific experts applauded this week’s arrest of the Golden State Killer suspect, Joseph James DeAngelo, 72, some expressed unease on Friday at reports that detectives in California had used a public genealogy database to identify him. Privacy and ethical issues glossed over in the public’s rush to embrace DNA databases are now glaringly apparent, they said.”

21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: A lot of Americans think they’d probably try sex with a robot.

Nobody tell notorious robophobe Matthew Yglesias.™

HMM: This engineered painkiller works like an opioid but isn’t addictive in animal tests. “Using pain-relieving peptides released by the brain as models, Fernandez and colleagues developed a library of ‘peptidomimetics.’ These agents were small enough to get into the brain, and they worked on different opioid receptors in different ways. When they tested one such compound in mice, they found that it not only relieved pain, it also induced less buildup of tolerance and less physical dependence than morphine. In other words, it was less addictive.”

THE MOB COLLECTS ITS SCALP: The Little Tragedy of Hank Azaria.

OOPS: Tesla Loses Its Self-Driving Architect: As Autopilot comes under increasing fire.

RIP: ALFIE EVANS FINALLY YIELDS TO WHAT THE GOVERNMENT SAID WAS IN HIS ‘BEST INTEREST.’

I wonder if the NHS is familiar with the words “Lebensunwertes Leben?”

I WAS EXPECTING AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: 9 Times The World Almost Had Nuclear War Without Us Knowing.

OH TO BE IN ENGLAND: Aliens, conspiracies, and the top five zaniest Labour Party candidates.

But how is Tarquin Fin-Tim-Lim-Bim-Lim-Bin-Bim-Bin-Bim Bus Stop F’tang F’tang Olé Biscuit Barrel of the Silly Party doing in this election cycle?

NBC’S JOY REID: I DID NOT HAVE TEXTUAL RELATIONS WITH THOSE BLOG POSTS.

“I genuinely do not believe I wrote those hateful things because they are completely alien to me. But I can definitely understand, based on things I have tweeted, have written in the past, why some people don’t believe me,” she said. “For that, I am truly, truly sorry.”

Or as Dan Rather said in September of 2004, when Rathergate first broke and was struggling (in vain as it ultimately turned out) to save his gig at CBS, “If the documents are not what we were led to believe, I’d like to break that story.”

Related: Joy Reid’s Old Blog Posts Are Forgivable. Her Response Isn’t.

(Headline by the Columbia Bugle.)

QUESTION ASKED AND (POSSIBLY) ANSWERED: What Does the RedState Purge Mean for Conservatism?

JACK DUNPHY: Ignorant Police Chief Spotted in America’s Heartland.

THE GUILD PROTECTS ITS OWN: Female journos suspend Hillary’s ‘believe all women’ rule, sign letter of support for Tom Brokaw.

Much like Brokaw and the late Peter Jennings rushed to Dan Rather’s defense the month before the 2004 presidential election.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Judge rules Ohio State Title IX official can be personally liable for helping rape accuser lie.