DOES IT COME WITH A FLUX CAPACITOR? Resurrecting The DeLorean.

THE MYTH OF CUBAN INFANT MORTALITY:  The NYT gets it wrong again.

THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME:

● Shot:

A hamburger a week, but no more — that’s about as much red meat people should eat to do what’s best for their health and the planet, according to a report seeking to overhaul the world’s diet.

Eggs should be limited to fewer than about four a week, the report says. Dairy foods should be about a serving a day, or less.

The report from a panel of nutrition, agriculture and environmental experts recommends a plant-based diet, based on previously published studies that have linked red meat to increased risk of health problems. It also comes amid recent studies of how eating habits affect the environment. Producing red meat takes up land and feed to raise cattle, which also emit the greenhouse gas methane.

—“The world needs a diet overhaul, expert panel says,” CBS News, Thursday.

● Chaser:

By the end of [1969], [lefty historian Douglas] Brinkley writes, “now that Neil Armstrong had walked on the Moon, Cronkite sensed that ecology would soon replace space exploration as the national obsession.” It certainly became, for a time, Cronkite’s obsession, often crowding out other more newsworthy stories during the critical year of 1970. At the beginning of the year, Cronkite jumped onboard the radical environmental movement wholeheartedly — “God damn it, we’ve got to get on this environmental story” — and as his producer Ron Bonn said at the time, “We wanted to grapple first with air pollution, the unbreathable air. But then we wanted to deal with the primary underlying problem, which was overpopulation.”

In April of that year, two days before the first “Earth Day” Cronkite began a regular series on the CBS Evening News portentously titled, “Can The World Be Saved?,” as the American left first began to dial up the volume of its eco-crankery to 11. To accompany those segments, Bonn created a backdrop consisting of the legendary photograph the astronauts of Apollo 8 took of planet earth, with his hand placed in front of the photo clutching the globe. “We were trying to show humanity squeezing the Earth to death,” according to Bonn.

Brinkley notes that this photo quickly became informally known as “The Hand Job” amongst the backstage production crew of Cronkite’s broadcast, much to its true-believer host’s chagrin. “We’ll need the hand job, tonight!” Which in retrospect, seems like the perfect description of the masturbatory nature of radical environmentalism.

—“Walter Cronkite: Liberalism in the Guise of Objectivity,” quoting from Douglas Brinkley’s 2012 biography of Walter Cronkite, Ed Driscoll.com, March 16, 2014.

● Hangover: And That’s the Way It Was: In 1972, CBS’s Walter Cronkite Warned of ‘New Ice Age.’

—NewsBusters, March 5, 2015.

As Glenn wrote last night, “It doesn’t matter what the problem is, the solution is always for us to give the government more money and power, while we eat less meat.”

No wonder that Sonny Bunch wrote a couple of weeks ago in the Washington Post, “Environmentalists make good movie villains because they want to make your real life worse.”

THE POWER LINE WEEK IN PICTURES: House of Carbs Edition.

CNN’S TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE, NO GOOD, VERY BAD DAY:

● Shot: CNN Does Not Know How To Question Ilhan Omar’s Conspiracy Theories And Anti-Semitism.

—The Federalist, yesterday.

● Chaser: CNN’s John King: Should Pence Family’s Christianity Disqualify Them from Secret Service Protection?

—NewsBusters, yesterday.

● Hangover: ‘You fail your profession’: Chris Cuomo says ‘Mueller didn’t do the media any favors tonight.’

—Twitchy, yesterday.

● The D.T.s: “‘The larger message that a lot of people are going to take from this story is that the news media are a bunch of leftist liars who are dying to get the president, and they’re willing to lie to do it,’ [CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin says of BuzzFeed]. ‘And I don’t think that’s true.’”

 —The Washington Free Beacon, yesterday. 

Narrator voice: It’s very much true. Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines, and yesterday’s meltdown all makes sense.

I HAD MISSED THIS STEP FORWARD FOR VOTING RIGHTS: Voter ID Becomes Law In North Carolina As House Overrides Veto. A fraudulent vote cancels out a legitimate vote; if you care about voting rights, you have to care about stopping fraud.

AS THE FEDERAL SHUTDOWN CONTINUES: I can’t help it. Yesterday morning when I ran across the shutdown notice on the web site of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (of which I am a member), I smiled so much I spilled my coffee. So far, I am enjoying the break from writing dissents.

If you’d like to get a sense of how the Commission works, check out my dissent on immigration detention centers or on environmental justice. My guess is that after reading them you won’t shed any tears over the Commission’s failure to issue reports over the last few weeks.

While I am waiting for things to start up again maybe I’ll have some time to tend to my cactus garden.  Dealing with prickly plants is good practice for Commission work.

TRADE WARS ARE FUN AND EASY TO WIN: Bye Bye Trade War? China Plans $1 Trillion Buying Spree to Reduce US Trade Deficit.

GOOD: Many universities tell students to report ‘bias.’ This university tells them to report speech suppression.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: “Killing some white people isn’t genocide; it’s killing some white people.”

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SHORTER VERSION: “WILL ELITES EVER RESPECT VOTERS?” Michael Barone: Will elites ever respect voters’ decisions on Brexit and Trump?

As the gifted British political analyst Douglas Murray writes in National Review, “Instead of accepting the votes and trying to learn from them, elites have expended almost all their available energies trying to pretend that voters in 2016 were bad or duped. The past two years could have been spent trying to learn something or build something. Instead, the best minds of Left and Right have spent their time making claims of ‘racism,’ ‘Russia,’ and ‘Cambridge Analytica.’”

The unlearning continues. Here, the government (actually, less than one-quarter of the federal government) is “shut down” over Democrats’ resistance to Trump’s demand for funding the border wall — er, barrier — which he negligently failed for two years to obtain from the Republican-majority Congress.

Most Democratic politicians — and, polls show, many Democratic voters — favored border barriers before Trump’s victory. Now, they insist walls are “immoral” and ineffective.

The struggle over Brexit is more complex in Britain. One thing is clear: the incompetence of Prime Minister Theresa May. May voted against Brexit and her pledge that “Brexit means Brexit” has been undermined, purposefully or by blunder, in her negotiations with the European Union.

The EU’s unelected leaders are loath to see Britain leave, and insisted on terms including a 39 billion pound exit fee and a binding customs union with a backstop preventing Britain from leaving without EU approval: more like “No Exit” than “Brexit.”

May’s deal was voted down Tuesday in the House of Commons by an astonishing vote of 432-203, the biggest rebuke for a government for a century, and she survived a no-confidence vote Wednesday by a pathetic 325-306 margin.

What comes next is unclear. Under 2017 legislation, Britain leaves the EU next March 29 and, if there’s no agreement with the EU, will come under the low-tariff rules of the World Trade Organization. Elites predict this “hard Brexit” will produce dreadful economic woes. Their similar predictions after the 2016 referendum conspicuously failed to come about.

The problem with “elites” on both sides of the Atlantic is that they’re not especially elite. As Peggy Noonan says, we are despised by our inferiors.

HARSH BUT FAIR:

Background here.

DOING SOMETHING ABOUT THE OVERPROTECTED AMERICAN CHILD:

A few weeks ago I left my 9-year-old daughter home alone for the first time. It did not go as planned.

That’s because I had no plan. My daughter was sick. My husband was out of town. And I needed to head to the drugstore—a five-minute walk away—to get some medicine for her. So I made sure my daughter knew where to find our rarely used landline phone, quizzed her on my cellphone number and instructed her not to open the front door for anyone. Then I left. Twenty minutes later I was back home. Both of us were a bit rattled by the experience—her first time completely alone, with no supervising adult!—but we were fine.

I had been postponing this moment of independence for my daughter for months, held back by worry over the potential catastrophes. But I know that this way of thinking is part of a larger social problem. Many have lamented the fact that children have less independence and autonomy today than they did a few generations ago. Fewer children are walking to school on their own, riding their bicycles around neighborhoods or going on errands for their parents. There have been several high-profile cases of parents actually being charged with neglect for allowing their children to walk or play unsupervised. We’re now seeing a backlash to all this pressure for parental oversight: Earlier this year, the state of Utah enacted a new “free-range” parenting law that redefined neglect to specifically exclude things like letting a child play in a park or walk to a nearby store alone.

Overzealous parenting can do real harm. Psychologists and educators see it as one factor fueling a surge in the number of children and young adults being diagnosed with anxiety disorders. According to a study published this year in the Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics, the number of children aged 6 to 17 whose parents said they were currently diagnosed with anxiety grew from 3.5% in 2007 to 4.1% in 2012. And in a 2017 survey of more than 31,000 college students by the American College Health Association, 21.6% reported that they had been diagnosed with or treated for anxiety problems during the previous year. That is up from 10.4% in a 2008 survey.

A big 2007 study, published in Clinical Psychology Review, surveyed the scientific literature on how much parenting influences the development of anxiety in kids. The parenting behavior that had the strongest impact of any kind was “granting autonomy”—defined as “parental encouragement of children’s opinions and choices, acknowledgment of children’s independent perspectives on issues, and solicitation of children’s input on decisions and solutions of problems.” More autonomy was associated with less childhood anxiety. . . .

Giving children more independence outside of the house can be more of a challenge—especially if you live in a neighborhood of worrywarts and you’re the only parent letting your kid bike to the park alone. That’s why Lenore Skenazy, a former journalist and mother of two now-grown sons, is trying to convince entire communities to give their kids independence with her nonprofit Let Grow. “It takes away the stigma of being a daredevil parent,” she says.

2019, when “daredevil parent” means letting your kid play outside like a normal kid.

WHY IS THE GOVERNMENT SUBSIDIZING BIGOTRY? Taxpayers Funded Shrinks Who Deem Masculinity Harmful to Health: Professors involved in crafting guidelines received $4.4 million from taxpayers.

Taxpayers helped finance research used by the American Psychological Association to label traditional masculinity harmful.

The APA’s “First-Ever Guidelines for Practice with Men and Boys” received input from dozens of psychoanalysts who believe masculinity is a social construct, are passionate about social justice, and think there is a danger in a role model like John Wayne.

Several contributors to the guidelines have received federal funding from the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Education, totaling more than $4.4 million.

The guidelines not only suggest “traditional masculinity” limits the “psychological development” of men and harms their mental and physical health, but that it is “critical to acknowledge” gender as a “non-binary construct.”

Critical.

THIS IS MOSTLY A MATTER OF INTERNAL DEM POLITICKING: Will Tulsi Gabbard’s Anti-LGBT Past Sink Her Presidential Candidacy? And Should It?

#JOURNALISM:

More here.

HMM: Supreme Court Drops February Argument on Census Citizenship Question.

FRANCE 24: Same old elite? Macron’s ‘revolution’ fails with fed up French.

OPEN THREAD: Ring in the weekend!

BUZZFEED SHAT THE BED, BUT HERE’S A STORY: Transcripts of Former Top FBI Lawyer Detail Pervasive Abnormalities in Trump Probe.

Former top FBI attorney James Baker admitted to House lawmakers in October last year that the investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump 2016 presidential campaign and Russia was riddled with abnormalities.

Confronted with a damning summary of abnormalities, bias, and omissions, which transpired during the investigation, Baker told Congress that the investigation indeed was “highly unusual.” . . .

As general counsel, Baker advised senior FBI leaders on the legal aspects of key investigations and served as the liaison with the Department of Justice (DOJ). In testimony, he detailed a series of unusual steps he took in the Trump-Russia investigation, including serving as the conduit between Perkins Coie—the firm working for the Clinton 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC)—and the FBI.

Baker left his position as general counsel in early January 2018 and then resigned from the FBI in early May 2018.

Baker testified that it was Michael Sussman, a partner at Perkins Coie, who shared with him information that detailed alleged communications between servers in Trump Tower and servers located in Russia at Alfa Bank, which were eventually debunked. Sussmann was also the lawyer who spearheaded the handling of the alleged hack of the DNC servers. Baker admitted that it was highly unusual to interact with an outside counsel.

Read the whole thing, which has an actual named source and everything.

WE GOT HIM NOW! WE GOT HIM NOW! How many times are we going to hear this? “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” And yet, this. The same guy that is hailed as the savior of the nation says “um, actually, no” and the brave Buzzfeed stands by a story in which the two writers have made completely conflicting statements about whether they’ve ever seen the supporting documents upon which the story was built.
I think in law school we called this a “shitshow.” More details here.