YEAH, MY EYES SHOW THE SAME THING: Sharp Increase in Obesity Rates, Over Last Decade, Federal Data Show.

CIVIL WAR ON THE LEFT, PART 55: DEMOCRAT DILEMMAS:

One of the central problems of liberalism is that its operating dogmas sooner or later collide with each other. Take the way antitrust operated for decades: if you charged the same price as your competitors, you were guilty of collusion and price-fixing. But if you charged less than your competitors, you were guilty of predatory pricing. (Indeed this is exactly how antitrust investigations began decades ago before we came to our senses.) Or take bank lending: if a bank doesn’t lend to the urban poor and minorities, it is guilty of “red-lining.” But if a bank does lend to poor and minority customers who default at high rates (as happened in 2008), then you’re guilty of predatory lending.

And don’t even get me started on Starbucks. They deserve every bit of pain they have invited by their proud virtue signaling of the last few years. Anyone remember Starbucks’s “talk about race campaign” from a few years ago? If they start serving popcorn, I might wander by.

The great thing about being a liberal is the permanent state of cognitive dissonance it allows. Instead of pondering these kind of contradictions and perhaps, in good Marxist fashion, reaching some kind of new synthesis, liberals just dust themselves off and move on as though nothing has happened.

Which helps to explain this headline: Caucus Chairman: Midterms Could be for Dems Like 2010 Rout was for GOP.

DRAIN IT FASTER, PLEASE. Spengler on President Trump vs. the Foreign Policy Swamp.

WHAT KIND OF KNIFE WOULD Sherlock Holmes carry?

BARBARA BUSH: A Loud, Proud, Unapologetic Traditional Feminist.

MICHAEL WALSH ON THE FIERY ANGEL, WESTERN CULTURE AND ITS (DIS)CONTENTS:

In Monday’s speech in the beautiful new Visitor Center, I located a signal change in the Western education system that, at the time, looked like an advance: the American reaction to the launch of Sputnik in 1957. Suddenly, America felt it was losing its technological edge over the Soviets so American schoolchildren became acquainted en masse with the wonders and joys of the slide rule and the hard sciences. The effect was immediate: we quickly regained and maintained our advantage over our antagonists, but it came with a price: the downgrading of the importance of the arts as a civilizing and ennobling force in American public (and private) life.

So while the emphasis on tech eventually resulted in the creation of the personal computer and the iPhone, it also reduced the literary and plastic arts from essential elements of nationhood to “entertainments” for the wealthy; triggered the coarsening of society and, worst of all, cut both America and, shortly thereafter, the Western European nations from the wellsprings of their shared patrimony. This may not entirely have been by design, but it was seized upon by the nascent philosophy of the Frankfurt School, which by this time had been transplanted from pre-Nazi Germany to Columbia University in Manhattan and quickly spread throughout the American system of higher education.

The result? To take just one example, the New York City public school system went from offering a model education in music and the arts to needing police officers in the schools—a reflection of the overall changes in demography, to be sure, but also of the decivilizing effect the loss of a democratized high culture entails. More Mozart, fewer metal detectors…

Walsh’s new book, The Fiery Angel: Art, Culture, Sex, Politics, and the Struggle for the Soul of the West, his sequel to The Devil’s Pleasure Palace, debuts next month.

ANDREW FERGUSON ON BARBARA BUSH’S SUBVERSIVE SECRET TO HAPPINESS:

These seemingly anodyne, Hallmark-y words, when taken seriously, are the most subversive words that could be uttered, then or now, on a college campus—a place where subversive words are supposed to be prized and protected but often aren’t. Mrs. Bush’s subversion wasn’t a matter of left or right, or even of feminism or traditionalism. She cut much deeper, into an American faith that transcends political categories.

Read the whole thing.

HMM: Carver County closes Prince death investigation with no criminal charges.

Metz said county, state and federal investigators undertook an “extensive, painstaking and thorough” investigation but were unable to determine who provided Prince the fentanyl painkillers, disguised as counterfeit prescription medication, that killed the megastar on April 21, 2016.

Metz said there was no evidence that Prince or his associates knew that Prince had taken counterfeit pills marketed under the trade name Vicodin, or that anyone had conspired to kill him.

“There is no reliable evidence showing how Prince obtained the counterfeit Vicodin containing fentaynl,” he added. “The bottom line is that we simply do not have sufficient evidence to charge anyone with a crime related to Prince’s death.”

That’s that then.

WELL: DOJ watchdog sends criminal referral for McCabe to federal prosecutor.

REVIEW: 2019 Volkswagen Jetta.

AT AMAZON, Shop Amazon Warehouse Deals – Deep Discounts on Open-box and Used Tools & Home Improvement.

Plus, Shop Amazon Devices – Save $15 Certified Refurbished Fire HD 8.

MATT MARGOLIS: David Hogg Gets a Book Deal. “Just how much fame can one person milk simply for witnessing a tragic event?”

HMM: ‘White coat hypertension’ may be sign of a real problem, study finds. Maybe a blood-pressure boost in response to stress means something else.

CHANGE: US steel prices up ‘dramatically’ due to Trump tariffs.

But: Ditch steel stocks as the industry nears ‘the end of the line’ despite Trump’s efforts, says UBS. “Tariffs imposed by President Trump should do little to delay a 17 percent slip in U.S. steel prices through the end of 2019, UBS wrote.”

AN (IL)LIBERAL ARTS EDUCATION: At Wellesley College, self-expression is rapidly being replaced by self-censorship. FIRE’s video team investigates.

OUT FROM THE SHADOWS OF MOTOWN: The brilliant, crowd-pleasing 2002 documentary on the Funk Brothers, the Motown house band, Standing in the Shadows of Motown, is now streaming free for Amazon Prime members on their Prime Video service. Here’s my 2003 interview with Allan Slutsky, the musician-author whose book on bassist James Jamerson inspired the movie, and who conducted the Funk Brothers during some of the more intricate arrangements in the film, such as the movie’s show-stopping rendition of “What Becomes of the Broken Hearted,” sung in the film by Joan Osborne, who also helped champion its production.

I HAD NO IDEA THE AVERAGE AMERICAN SLEPT UNTIL 10:53 AM: The average American utters their first curse word of the day at 10:54 am, according to new data.

FASTER, PLEASE: Compound treats psoriasis, may curb autoimmune diseases, researchers say.

NANNYSTATISM: California Bill Would Force Businesses To Submit Data on Pay and Gender.

WHO’D BE A COLLEGE ENTERTAINMENTS OFFICER?: Oxford College cancels marijuana-themed social event over fears of cultural appropriation. I suppose you could call this endless trumping that goes on in leftist circles wokemanship.

Inside Katie Couric’s Disastrous Yahoo Experiment. “She moved to online with great fanfare, but quickly became the forgotten woman of journalism. How did it all go so wrong for Katie Couric at Yahoo?”

Earlier this month—nine months after resigning from the company—Couric summed up her four years at Yahoo on a Recode Decode podcast.

“I wouldn’t say it was an unhappy marriage, but it certainly was not fulfilling for me,’’ she said. “I had all this great content, I was getting big interviews—and it was sort of like a tree falling in the forest.”

Part of the problem, according the Post’s Oli Coleman, was that Couric was fighting for traffic with one hand tied behind her back, as Yahoo’s CEO, Marissa Mayer, had set up Yahoo News to be “a slave to an algorithm: If you read Kardashian stories, you’d be fed more pop culture; if you read Tom Brady stories, you’d get more NFL news.”

Unfortunately for Couric, the Yahoo algorithm bestowed no preferential status on Yahoo content. If Couric had assumed that at least regular Yahoo users—and there were of course millions of them at the service’s height—were automatically going to be seeing more of her, she was wrong, as users were much more likely to be pointed to non-Yahoo sites based on their browsing history.

That’s the kind of thing a more internet-savvy TV star should look into before making a career-changing move into a new medium.

AVIATION: What We Already Know About the Southwest Airlines Engine That Failed. “Industry experts point out that flying is still incredibly safe: It was the first in-flight fatality due to an accident in Southwest’s 47-year history, and it ended a nearly ten-year period of zero passenger fatalities aboard U.S. airlines.”

LET’S GET FRACKING: Oil Rallies to More Than Three-Year High as Supply Tightens. “OPEC members are expected to renew their commitment to draining global inventories at Friday’s meeting.”

One of the biggest surprises in a surprising couple of years is that OPEC members haven’t been cheating (much) on their production quota cuts.