HUMAN SPEECH IS SPECIAL:

Humans have a unique anatomy that supports our ability to produce complex language. The elastic recoil of the lungs provides the necessary acoustic energy, while the diaphragm, intercostal muscles, and abdominal muscles manipulate how that air is released through the larynx, a complex structure that houses the vocal cords, and the supralaryngeal vocal tract (SVT), which includes the oral cavity and the pharynx, the cavity behind the mouth and above the larynx.

When air from the lungs rushes against and through the muscles, cartilages, and other tissue of the vocal cords, they rapidly open and close to produce what’s known as the fundamental frequency of phonation (F0), or the pitch of a speaker’s voice. The principal sounds that form words—known as formant frequencies—are produced by changes to the positions of the lips, tongue, and larynx.

In addition to the anatomy of the SVT, humans have evolved increased synaptic connectivity and malleability in certain neural circuits in the brain important for producing and understanding speech. Specifically, circuits linking cortical regions and the subcortical basal ganglia appear critical to support human language.

The article’s a good read.

MICHAEL WALSH: The Shame of the Church.

Even in a faith founded upon the notion that there is no such thing as an unforgivable sin, should the penitent be sincere, what has been occurring in the church over the past 70 years or so would surely test the mercy of Christ himself.

No need to go over the nauseating details. The Church—and clearly not just in Pennsylvania—has descended into a nest of predatory perverts, largely but not exclusively homosexual, but child-molesters all. Even worse, its upper administrative reaches, the bishops, have conducted a cover-up under the guise of “compassion” and “protecting the Church,” denying, obfuscating, and lying about the extent of the problem—even as some of them were charter members of the racket. Their sanctimony is even more sickening than the sins they concealed, if such a thing is possible.

Sexual peccadilloes have always been part of every human institution, including the Catholic Church. The priapic cleric has been a staple of creative pornography since Rabelais and de Sade, and the list of sins attributable to the popes alone would make a harlot blush. Such tales of dissipation and license fueled the animosity against the Church, especially in France, and the French Revolution’s violent destruction of the ancient regime was as much directed against the Church as it was against the monarchy. To this day, laïcité is one of the French Republic’s guiding principles, and it’s no accident that into the Gallic spiritual void left by ostracized Christianity has rushed recrudescent Islam. Satan, like Nature, abhors a vacuum.

Read the whole thing.

HOW ABOUT THAT: Americans value good reviews and higher safety levels over gas mileage when buying a car.

NOW DO ISLAM: This school year, colleges and universities across the country will be offering courses on “queering” children, the Bible, and theology in general.

AT AMAZON, Today’s Kindle Deals.

Plus, Hot New Releases, Updated Every Hour.

And, save Big on Clearances, Overstocks, and Markdowns at the Amazon Outlet Store.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Brennan, Manafort and Much, Much More. “Twelve senior intelligence officials issued a statement late yesterday butt-hurting (I just made that verb up) about Trump’s decision to yank the security clearance from MSNBC star and Twitter celebrity John Brennan.”

It’s a good verb, Liz.

CORRUPT AGENCY FACES MORE CHARGES OF CORRUPTION: Whistleblower Accuses IRS Of Tipping Off Members Of Congress In Insider Trading Ring.

HMM: SEC Probes Tesla Over Model 3 Production Disclosures. “The investigation began before Elon Musk’s tweets about taking the auto maker private.”

Securities regulators last year subpoenaed a parts supplier for Tesla as they looked at whether the auto maker misled investors about Model 3 car production problems, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Both issues are being handled by the SEC’s San Francisco office, one of the people said.

The Wall Street Journal reported in October that the Tesla assembly plant’s body shop wasn’t fully installed until around September and that major portions of the Model 3 were being hand built weeks after Mr. Musk announced production had begun in July 2017. As production started, he claimed about 1,600 cars would be made in the third quarter of 2017 before reaching 20,000 in December. Those forecasts were far below what he predicted roughly a year earlier, when he said as many 200,000 Model 3s would be made in the second half of 2017.

Instead, Tesla made 2,700 Model 3s during 2017. The sedan, priced to start at $35,000, is designed to propel the luxury electric-car maker into the mainstream.

Model 3 production has ramped up in recent months after long delays, but it’s still unclear by exactly how much, or if corners were cut to get the cars out the factory door without actually being ready for retail sale.

PAUL BEDARD: Boom: Trump’s handling of economy ‘exceeds’ average of Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan.

President Trump’s push to build on the nation’s financial recovery has won solid support from Americans, giving his handling of the economy a higher approval rating the the average of his five predecessors.

Gallup on Thursday said, “He has averaged a 48 percent approval rating for handling the economy thus far in office, which exceeds the combined average 45 percent economic approval for his five immediate predecessors across their entire terms.”

For Trump, who helped push through massive tax cuts and promised that trade wars will help return U.S. jobs, the top issue is the economy followed by his handling of North Korea. . . .

The survey also validated the nation’s split personality on party and Trump politics. “No fewer than 74 percent of Republicans approve of Trump on any issue, and no fewer than 79 percent of Democrats disapprove of him,” said Gallup.

It suggested that the public’s view of Trump, while high on the economy, is being kept from rising by other issues and traits.

Stay tuned.

NOT AMERICA’S FINEST MOMENT: The Deportation of Mexican-Americans in the 1930s: Putting aside the merits of deporting legal immigrants during the Great Depression, the failure to give American citizens a reasonable opportunity to prove their citizenship was criminal. What’s odd about this otherwise informative article, however, is that while it’s about deportations that continued through the late 1930s, somehow Donald Trump is mentioned three times but Franklin Roosevelt not at all.

At almost the same time the deportations began, Congress passed the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, meant to prop up union wages, in part by preventing itinerant African-American workers from getting jobs on federal construction projects. When a southern Congressman noted with amusement that his northern colleagues were enthusiastically discriminating against blacks, a supporter of the bill from the north responded that it wasn’t about blacks, he’d also support the bill if it were “Mexicans” taking the jobs!

RELEASE THE TAPES! Who Was Top Gun In This Epic F-35 vs. F-22 Stealth Fighter Showdown?

An F-35 vs. F-22 dogfight pitted two Lockheed Martin (LMT) stealth aircraft against each other in Norway on Wednesday, but the winner is a mystery.

Norwegian Air Force Major Morten Hanche, who flew one of the F-35s, told Reuters that the dogfights were good practice as the F-35 has been able to overpower non-stealth aircraft.

However, he played coy on who won the F-35 vs. F-22 matchup, where two of the most advanced U.S. fighter jets faced off against each other.

“The F-22 is a very formidable opponent,” Hanche said.

So who won? I’m dying to know.

HOWIE CARR: Peter Strzok Got His Start in Boston’s Dirty FBI Office.

Yesterday I called the office of special counsel Robert Mueller, the former U.S. attorney for Boston, who knew all of the six or seven FBI agents who were accused in federal court of taking payoffs from gangsters.

Some of them were the agents who framed four innocent men for a murder they did not commit, while taking cash from Stevie Flemmi, whom they refused to arrest for 30 years while he was, by his own account, committing 50 murders in four different states.

Yes, the Boston office was the perfect place to train “Special” Agent Strzok.

My question for Mueller was, after he hired Strzok for his witch hunt, did they ever talk about how the FBI allowed the four innocent men to languish in prison for 35 years?

Mueller’s office declined to comment.

But it makes perfect sense that Mueller would want somebody from the Boston office to handle his frame-up, I mean investigation. Who knows more about railroaded people who didn’t commit a crime than the Boston FBI office?

Just ask former U.S. District Court Judge Nancy Gertner. In 2003, she threatened to cite Mueller for contempt of court for his refusal to turn over exculpatory evidence when the wronged men sued. (She eventually awarded them $107 million.)

“The position the FBI is taking is chilling,” she informed Mueller. “This Court is not remotely satisfied.”

Remember what Strzok had to say to his married girlfriend about Trump voters? He called them “ignorant hillbillies.” He said that he could “smell” them in the local Walmart.

So I was surprised yesterday when I began researching his years in Massachusetts and discovered that he apparently lived not in Cambridge or Brookline, but in North Attleboro. Amazing — a snob who lived in North Attleboro.

Read the whole thing.

OF COURSE SHE DID: Minnesota Dem Candidate Ilhan Omar Voted Against Bill to Stop Insurance Payments to Convicted Terrorists.

CHANGE: This Bill In Congress Could Bring Top Marijuana Companies To The U.S.

While more states are legalizing cannabis, the uncertainty at the federal level has kept some marijuana companies and their partners on the sidelines.

In January, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinded the laissez-faire Obama-era guidance that enabled many states to move forward with some form of pot legalization.

But a sharp backlash followed and Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Cory Gardner introduced the STATES Act, which would ensure that “each State has the right to determine for itself the best approach to marijuana within its borders,” according to a one-page description.

“The U.S. has had a history of, ‘When we can’t agree, let’s just allocate the authority to the state, and if they say it’s OK, it’s OK,’ ” Canopy Growth CEO Bruce Linton said at MJBizCon in Toronto on Thursday, according to Bloomberg. “That would be an outcome which would allow us to move ahead.”

Federalism — an idea so crazy it just might work.

VOXERS GONNA VOX: Vox’s Consistent Errors on Campus Speech, Explained. “Beauchamp concludes (on the basis of what seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of the data), that there really is no free speech problem at universities. This is a strange takeaway, given that Dr. Ungar himself reached basically the opposite conclusion in the very report that Beauchamp based his story on.” Well, if you take Beauchamp’s research skills seriously, I’ve got a bridge to sell you. . . .

ASHE SCHOW: Feminist Admits Anti-Sex Discrimination Law Is Actually Anti-Men.

A feminist administrator has finally admitted what many men and women who have woken up to the abuses of Title IX have known for a while: It was always intended as a weapon against men.

Diane Davis, chair of the department of rhetoric at the University of Texas-Austin, had signed onto a letter defending New York University professor Avital Ronell, a well-known feminist and lesbian, from accusations of sexual harassment. As The Daily Wire previously reported, feminists rushed to back one of their own after she faced accusations of sexual misconduct from a former student. They even went so far as to impugn the motives of the accuser, a gay male, using the same tactics they would otherwise condemn if the accuser were a woman and the accused were a man.

But Davis went a step further when she responded to a New York Times inquiry.

“I am of course very supportive of what Title IX and the #MeToo movement are trying to do, of their efforts to confront and to prevent abuses, for which they also seek some sort of justice,” Davis wrote in an email to the Times. “But it’s for that very reason that it’s so disappointing when this incredible energy for justice is twisted and turned against itself, which is what many of us believe is happening in this case.”

Turned against itself? Title IX is gender neutral, so how can it be “turned against itself”?

We all know.

NO, AND YOU’D HAVE TO BE AN IDIOT TO THINK SO: Is It Racist to Refer to Space ‘Colonization’?

That said, I remember PC ninnies at a Smithsonian conference on space governance making that claim way back in the 1980s. This is more a testament to the thoughtless character of “anti-colonialism” as taught in colleges than anything else.

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Swamped in Inflation, Venezuela Will Cut Five Zeros From Currency.

“I imagine if we keep like this we’re going to have to do the same thing in December,” said Ms. Nowak, who has been forced to raise prices in her cafe at least 40 times this year.

Slashing zeros from Venezuela’s inflation-cursed currency, the bolívar, is the tent-pole of a set of economic changes by President Nicolás Maduro as he tries to right his country’s capsized economy. The five-digit inflation has earned Venezuela comparisons to the hyperinflation of Zimbabwe and Weimar Germany from the International Monetary Fund.

The newly minted currency, which will be known as the “sovereign bolívar,” will be rolled out on Monday. In addition, the president has ordered measures that his United Socialist Party has been loath to consider in the past: An increase in gas prices for some drivers and a modest ease in the currency controls that have made dollars inaccessible to most Venezuelans for years.

Madura knocked three zeros off the currency as recently as March of this year.

TODD BENSMAN: Texas Juvenile Jihadi Shows Why We Need State-Level Terrorism Statutes. “The Lone Star State and 16 others have work to do.”

KIMBERLEY STRASSEL: What Was Bruce Ohr Doing?

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and Justice Department have continued to insist they did nothing wrong in their Trump-Russia investigation. This week should finally bring an end to that claim, given the clear evidence of malfeasance via the use of Bruce Ohr.

Mr. Ohr was until last year associate deputy attorney general. He began feeding information to the FBI from dossier author Christopher Steele in late 2016—after the FBI had terminated Mr. Steele as a confidential informant for violating the bureau’s rules. He also collected dirt from Glenn Simpson, cofounder of Fusion GPS, the opposition-research firm that worked for Hillary Clinton’s campaign and employed Mr. Steele. Altogether, the FBI pumped Mr. Ohr for information at least a dozen times, debriefs that remain in classified 302 forms.

All the while, Mr. Ohr failed to disclose on financial forms that his wife, Nellie, worked alongside Mr. Steele in 2016, getting paid by Mr. Simpson for anti-Trump research. The Justice Department has now turned over Ohr documents to Congress that show how deeply tied up he was with the Clinton crew—with dozens of emails, calls, meetings and notes that describe his interactions and what he collected.

Mr. Ohr’s conduct is itself deeply troubling. He was acting as a witness (via FBI interviews) in a case being overseen by a Justice Department in which he held a very senior position. He appears to have concealed this role from at least some superiors, since Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein testified that he’d been unaware of Mr. Ohr’s intermediary status.

Lawyers meanwhile note that it is a crime for a federal official to participate in any government matter in which he has a financial interest. Fusion’s bank records presumably show Nellie Ohr, and by extension her husband, benefiting from the Trump opposition research that Mr. Ohr continued to pass to the FBI. The Justice Department declined to comment.

But for all Mr. Ohr’s misdeeds, the worse misconduct is by the FBI and Justice Department. It’s bad enough that the bureau relied on a dossier crafted by a man in the employ of the rival presidential campaign. Bad enough that it never informed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of that dossier’s provenance. And bad enough that the FBI didn’t fire Mr. Steele as a confidential human source in September 2016 when it should have been obvious he was leaking FBI details to the press to harm Donald Trump’s electoral chances. It terminated him only when it was absolutely forced to, after Mr. Steele gave an on-the-record interview on Oct. 31, 2016.

But now we discover the FBI continued to go to this discredited informant in its investigation after the firing—by funneling his information via a Justice Department cutout. The FBI has an entire manual governing the use of confidential sources, with elaborate rules on validations, standards and documentation. Mr. Steele failed these standards. The FBI then evaded its own program to get at his info anyway.

And it did so even though we have evidence that lead FBI investigators may have suspected Mr. Ohr was a problem.

Indeed.

FLASHBACK: The Atlantic: “This is the story of John Brennan’s CIA spying on Congress and getting away with it.”

IN MANY WAYS, IT IS IN FACT THE OPPOSITE:  Sympathy is Not Respect.

THE NEW JOURNOLIST, BACK IN BUSINESS:  Media Issues Collective Pearl Clutching Editorials Lambasting Trump Attacks On #FreePres.   (Dear journalists, these displays only lose you power.  I know.  Hard to believe, since toddlers get whatever they want by screaming and flinging poo– Oh, wait.  No they don’t.  Not with sane adults around.  Sit up, stop screaming, and don’t even think of digging in your diaper.  We’ve had enough of you.)

THIS IS MY SHOCKED FACE:  It Seems Twitter’s ‘Trust and Safety Council’ Is Working Overtime to Ban Conservatives.