ANN ALTHOUSE ON KEVIN WILLIAMSON AND THE ATLANTIC: “Ha. He gave them the anti-Trumpism they wanted. But it was not enough. Because the ladies rebelled.”

POLITICO: The Left’s Year of Magical Thinking: Fantasies about the Second Amendment, the Mueller investigation and Stormy Daniels threaten to sabotage the Democrats in November.

UPDATE: Missing CDC Employee Timothy Cunningham Found Dead Two Months After He Vanished.

Timothy Cunningham, a 35-year-old Harvard-educated leader within the nation’s health protection agency, was found dead late Tuesday night in the Chattahoochee River, which runs near his home, police said Thursday. A medical examiner identified his remains and said the cause of death was drowning.

Police said there is currently no indication that foul play was involved, and there were no signs of trauma on his body to indicate he died of anything but drowning.

“Barring new information coming forward, we may never be able to tell you how he got into the river,” Major Michael O’Connor of the Atlanta Police Department said at a press conference on Thursday. “We just don’t have those answers at this time.”

His job and the suddenness of his disappearance made this an odd case from the start, and now it seems we might never have answers.

MICHAEL BARONE: How genetic science is undercutting the case for racial quotas.

Reich obviously wishes to avoid the demonization endured by Murray, who was attacked by a mob at Middlebury College just last year. He is careful indeed to make clear that his findings should not be used to justify racist practices like the slave trade, the eugenics movement, and the Holocaust.

Reich also makes a point that is obvious to the ordinary person but which he — along with some of his critics who wrote to the Times — thinks needs reiteration. Which is, as one puts it, “differences in individuals vary far more widely than in populations.” When we are comparing traits of people with different genetic ancestry, we are looking at averages, like the differences between American whites’ and Asians’ IQ scores (Asians’ on average are higher). But within the white and Asian populations there is wide variety — which can be represented as an actual bell curve.

The assumption of “well-meaning people” is that ordinary Americans aren’t capable of grasping this. My view is that they understand it very well. They have learned, from school, from work, from everyday life, from public events, that there is a wider variation within each measured group than between measured groups.

Read the whole thing.

SOCIALISM IN SEVEN WORDS: ‘It feels like we’re all dying slowly.’

After six years of studying and working part-time jobs, Cristian Diaga, 24, will soon graduate from medical school in Caracas, Venezuela. But instead of continuing his training in a top hospital in the country, as he had hoped, he is taking a job in a fast-food restaurant in Argentina – a situation he says is much more preferable.

“I do feel bad leaving. I think everyone would like to give something back to their country, but right now it is my life and future and all my possibilities to help my family to get out of this madness,” he says.

More than half of Venezuelans between 15 and 29 want to move abroad permanently, according to a poll carried out by the US firm Gallup and shared exclusively with the Guardian.

“In Venezuela, it feels like we are all just dying slowly and there’s no hope for a change. I don’t care if I’m gonna work as a doctor or not. I just want to have food, medicines, security, a house, a car, and be able to give a good life to my loved ones,” he says.

Flipping burgers in Argentina is preferable to and more profitable than practicing medicine in Venezuela.

TOTALLY NONPARTISAN. STRAIGHT SHOOTER. Mueller will drop midterm Russia bombshells on GOP Congress.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Scott Pruitt is the greatest-ever Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

In the Obama era especially, the EPA was used to advance an anti-market agenda in the guise of environmental correctness. Obama’s various federal clean air regulations, for example, were justified by supposedly expert testimony from the EPA that fine particles of soot in the atmosphere were killing hundreds of thousands of Americans every year.

But there was no real evidence for this. Essentially the ‘proof’ had been rigged by parti-pris activist scientists at the EPA – who were permitted to keep their data and methodology secret so that they could not be found wanting in independent experiments.

Hence the new rule just introduced by Scott Pruitt that from now on the EPA cannot engage in “secret science”. Whatever side of the political debate you’re on, this ought to be a good thing: Pruitt is just insisting on something which should have been EPA policy from the start – rigorous observation of the scientific method (part of which stipulates that for any experiment to be valid it must, of necessity, be reproducible).

Pruitt is never going to get any credit for this, either from the greens or the left (not that there’s really much difference). That’s because his opponents recognise it as yet another assault by the Trump administration on the “consensus” science of the Climate Industrial Complex.

The “party of science” is actually the party of “science.”

I HAD BEEN EXPECTING AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: Did You Hear That? NASA Orders A Boomless Supersonic Jet.

NASA has just commissioned Lockheed Martin to design and build a new supersonic jet that could cut existing air travel times in half. In fact, if you flew one between, say, Milwaukee and Chicago, you might arrive before you left.

The new X-craft is called the LBFD for Low Boom Flight Demonstrator and it’s scheduled to fly by 2022. NASA awarded the $247.5 million contract this week.

It came only two weeks after President Trump signed the massive federal budget for the remainder of this fiscal year. Trump said the new plane “would open a new market for U.S. companies to build faster commercial airliners, creating jobs and cutting cross-country flight times in half.” It contained full funding.

Before flying commercially, NASA and Lockheed Martin must convince the Federal Aviation Administration and the International Civil Aviation Organization that they’ve reduced a supersonic jet’s loud boom to a softer, muffled one.

Not quite “90 minutes from New York to Paris,” but it would certainly be usable on far more routes than the Concorde was.

AMBER ATHEY: In Honor Of Kevin Williamson’s Firing: The Atlantic’s Worst Takes. My favorite is the one about the eclipse being racist. But who can forget Trump Is Probably Sleeping With His Daughter.

J.D. TUCCILLE: Don’t Look to the State to Keep Social Media Companies From Imposing Ideological Conformity.

Last week, former Google manager William Echikson wrote that his old employer has shifted from efforts in favor of free speech to trying “to convince authorities in Europe and elsewhere that the internet giant is serious about cracking down on illegal content. The more takedowns it can show, the better.” He added that out of eagerness to comply with increasingly draconian directives to suppress unpleasant and inconvenient messages, “legal content is being censored.”

Germany introduced a new Internet censorship law last year which requires cooperation from social media companies, and France and the UK are also tightening their online efforts against “hate speech.”

Picking up on our own President Trump’s insistence that hostile media outlets should be punished for spreading “fake news,” Malaysia plans prison terms for spreading “fake news” as defined by government officials.

And online publishers across the United States are busy shutting down sexually related online forums and even personals out of fear of the legal penalties against “sex trafficking” in the FOSTA bill.

That’s a big reason why we shouldn’t look to governments for solutions to the problem of social media companies imposing ideological conformity. It’s annoying when a social media site sidelines your politically incorrect post or boots you for an off-color joke. But when government agencies exercise muzzling power, they impose fines and jail time.

Governments may not target speech for the same reasons as tech-industry smugsters, but they do so vigorously, and with nastier tools.

“Celebrate diversity” always seems to devolve into “enforce conformity.”

JUSTICE: Chinese Scientist Gets 10 Years for Swiping GMO Rice in Ag Espionage. “In summer 2013, officials from a crop research institute in China visited the U.S., got facility tours and tried to smuggle stolen seeds out of the country.”

REPORTS FROM THE COLD CIVIL WAR:

STICKY DATE PUDDING:  Eat This While You Read That: Dave Freer.

BUT… BUT…. BUT… THEY’RE WOKE:  Democrats: The Party of the Super-Duper (Mostly White) Gazillionaires.

TRADITIONAL PUBLISHING CONTINUES CIRCLING THE DRAIN:  Bob Honey, Writing and Say What?

BECAUSE IT IS:  Why Sticking to the Truth Makes ‘Chappaquiddick’ So Chilling.

YES, UNFORTUNATELY:  Is the right to self-defense dead in England?

NOT GOOD:  The Russia investigation and the rule of law.

IT’S IRRATIONAL TO DISARM YOURSELF IN THE FACE OF DANGER:  Is the Fear of Mass Shootings Irrational?

YEAH, THAT’S REALLY SHOCKING:  President Trump Orders National Guard To Border And SUDDENLY The Caravan Invasion Halts.

HOW’S ABOUT NO?   Democrats’ Midterm Playbook: Repeal the GOP Tax Cuts…and the Second Amendment.

THE DISTANCE FROM PHOTOSHOPPING TO FULL ON CGI IS SHORT (AS IF MEN HAVEN’T BEEN OGLING ARTIFICIAL WOMEN FOR OVER A CENTURY):  The weird world of virtual models is full of very real money.

COMPLETE WITH HANDY CHECKLIST:  The 5 fights that can lead to divorce.

ANTHROPOMORPHIZE MUCH?   These whales improvise when they sing.

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