PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: Cory Booker: I am not Spartacus.

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: Trump Derangement Syndrome Reaching Epidemic Levels as We Head Toward Midterms.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Staring at boobs is just one of six easy ways men can live longer.

SPACE FORCE: New Pentagon memo lays out action plan to establish Space Force by 2020.

AT AMAZON, browse cool deals in Industrial and Scientific.

Plus, save in Storage and Organization.

BRUCE BAWER: On Election Day, the Swedes Disappoint.

ANN ALTHOUSE: “I find the Democrats’ fight against Kavanaugh so irksome. Have you seen Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s denouncement of the ‘highly partisan show’?”

HAVE THEY NO DECENCY? NO DECENCY AT ALL? (SPOILER: NO.) Now Even Evidence of Brett Kavanaugh’s Good Character Is Used Against Him.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How to Clean Your Guns: Tips from an Expert.

MORE ON THE EARTHSHAKING MATTER OF NIKKI HALEY’S CURTAINS: So the decision to buy was made in 2016, but the “action date” on the contracts — here and here — seems to be late March/early April 2017. Given the speed at which government operates, that doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but just fyi. (Links via Eugene Volokh, and the UCLA law library reference department.)

UPDATE: Meanwhile, here’s the NYT correction:

The new, accurate headline: State Department Spent $52,701 on Curtains for Residence of U.N. Envoy. But the old, inaccurate — by which I mean flagrantly and deliberately dishonest — headline has circled the social-media globe three times, which was, I believe, the intent all along.

FLASHBACK: Hypocritical politically motivated feminism is killing #MeToo.

WELL, THIS IS GOING TO HARSH SOME PEOPLE’S MELLOW: NPR: “Paul Manafort’s cooperation agreement with the special counsel does not include matters involving the Trump campaign, according to a person familiar with the case.”

Manafort is pleading to things that had nothing to do with the campaign, but that he almost certainly never would have been prosecuted for if he hadn’t managed the Trump campaign. But no witchhunt.

“BUT THE EVIDENCE IS AS THIN AS CAN BE:” Ronan Farrow spells out unnamed woman’s claim that Brett Kavanaugh tried to force himself on her in high school. “One of the most powerful aspects of Farrow’s previous #MeToo reporting is the contemporaneous corroboration he cites from friends and family of the alleged victim. In nearly every case he’s covered (maybe every single one, in fact), a woman who was assaulted or harassed ended up confiding in others about it years ago, sometimes on the very day of the incident. That’s a strong defense to the inevitable claims that the accusation has been concocted belatedly because the “victim” wants attention or money or, in this case, maybe to take down a public official whose politics she abhors. It’s hard to accuse someone of making up a story to shake down Harvey Weinstein in 2018, when he’s an easy target, if they were telling the very same story in 1988. All of that is missing here.”

I suspect that this late hit is mostly about easing the pressure on red-state Dems, plus allowing Dems to call Kavanaugh “illegitimate” for the next 40 years a la Clarence Thomas.

WHOLE FAT: Dietary guidelines suggest substituting fat-free or low-fat dairy for full-fat products, but a new study questions those recommendations.

UGH: Lawnmower Parents: A New Low in Parenting Philosophies. “Some parents must want their kids living with them for the rest of their life.”

My wife and I are still a few years away from this — our oldest is only 12 — but I have to believe the most rewarding part of parenting is seeing your kids make it on their own in the real world. How else can you know you’ve done a good job of it?

HMM: The Air Force Will Treat Computer Coding Like a Foreign Language.

DAVID SOLWAY: Silicon Valley’s Futile Search for Utopia Via the ‘Perfect Algorithm.’ “The tech is new; the lure of false prophets is ancient.”

Sooth.

SKYNET SMILES: Coming to an Aircraft Carrier Near You: Robot Sailors.

IMPRESSIVE. MOST IMPRESSIVE. SpaceX block 5 reusability results better than expected which could mean costs could eventually drop in half.

How are you going to compete with somebody who has stopped building the rockets which are already cheaper than yours (because they’re reusable) and is plowing the profits into developing the next generation of even bigger reusable rockets?

#FIGHTFOR15: Venezuela Raises Minimum Wage 3,000% and Lots of Workers Get Fired.

Wow, that’s really a lot of “bad luck.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES GETS IT JUST PLAIN WRONG: I posted on Wednesday about the claim that the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights’ new voting rights report was adopted “unanimously.” The claim was made in the Commission’s press release and in the Chair’s transmission letter to President Trump. But as I wrote in the post:

This is technically true, but highly misleading. My mother died about an hour before the telephonic meeting at which the vote was taken, so I was unable to call in. As I wrote in my Commissioner Statement, if I had been present, “I would have voted no.” I believe the same is true of my colleague Peter Kirsanow, who was stuck in a deposition at the time. Only Commissioners appointed by Democrats voted to approve the report.

The New York Times story parrots the claim of unanimity. But it does so in a way that is not even technically true. Under the headline, Protection of Voting Rights for Minorities Has Fallen Sharply, a New Report Finds, it states that the report’s “key recommendations were unanimously supported by the commission’s eight members—six Democrats and two Republicans.” That is just plain false.

For the reasons stated above, I didn’t have sufficient time to take on the report point by point (and, to be fair, not everything in the long report is bad). But I managed to discuss some of the issues raised in the report (and make a few historical points) in my Statement, which I have now posted as a separate document on SSRN.

UPDATE: EVEN THE NEW YORK TIMES CORRECTION NEEDS CORRECTING: The NYT’s story now states: “In a foreword to the commission’s latest report, Ms. Lhamon wrote that the panel unanimously supported the report’s key recommendations, a claim that some conservative advocacy groups said was untrue. A publicist for the commission, Vincent Eng, later said that the panel’s six Democratic members all approved the recommendations, but that its two Republican members either did not attend the session at which the vote was taken or left the room during the vote.”

This is deliberately misleading. The New York Times reporter for this article was informed via Twitter by my special assistant of the truth. She is not an advocacy group. I have no idea who Vincent Eng is, but he doesn’t work at the Commission, and when Eng’s statement was drawn to the Staff Director’s attention by my assistant, he denied that we even have a publicist. In any event, nobody “left the room” when the vote came up. Indeed, there was no room. The vote was taken on the telephone.  And by the way, I’m not a Republican. I was appointed by a Republican.

UPDATE TO UPDATE:  The Staff Director now admits that he hired Eng as a “media consultant,” which in his view is not a publicist.

#METOO: Army Wants 120mm Mortar Systems That Can Fire Out to 12 Miles.

HERE’S WHY THE NFL’S PROBLEMS ARE FAR FROM OVER: If the poo-bahs running the National Football League (NFL) think they have put the Kapernick Kneelers problem behind them, former Maryland Gov. Robert Ehrlich explains why their product is becoming America’s former favorite sport.