#EUROFAIL: German euro founder calls for ‘catastrophic’ currency to be broken up.

MORE REVELATIONS: Hillary Clinton sought end-run around counter-terrorism bureau on night of Benghazi attack, witness will say.

BUT FILMMAKER NAKOULA IS STILL IN JAIL: Benghazi Whistleblower: ‘My Jaw Hit the Floor’ as White House Blamed YouTube.

THE NEW CIVILITY: Dan Savage Wishes Cancer on Sarah Palin.

ALSO, PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN: Obama to College Students: ‘Reject These Voices’ That Warn of Big Government & Tyranny.

ANN ALTHOUSE: “Interesting that Keynes pictured ‘pseudo-moral principles’ as female demons.”

AND NOW FOR THE REALLY IMPORTANT MEDIA NEWS: ‘Myrtle Manor’ gets second season.

CANADA: Free speech? It appears guest speakers at synagogues now have to register their opinions in advance with police. Well, only for some opinions.

IN LIGHT OF THIS AFTERNOON’S POST ABOUT THE WISCONSIN FALLOUT SHELTER DISCOVERY, Popular Mechanics Editor Jim Meigs writes:

The story about the Wisconsin family that discovered a fallout shelter in their backyard shows just how far we’ve come from the days when death by nuclear fallout seemed a very present risk to many American families. That’s a good thing. But the author’s tone, which suggests that such worries were quaint and misguided, reveals a typically modern lack of historical perspective. The various ICBM fields to the west of Wisconsin would have been the focus of massive nuclear attacks in an all-out exchange. Attempting to protect one’s family from the inevitable downwind fallout might have meant accepting long odds, but it certainly wasn’t paranoid or irrational.

Here’s another thing too many people today have forgotten: Those ICBM fields are still there, manned by dedicated airmen of the US Air Force’s Global Strike Command. Two years ago, Joe Pappalardo spent time in one of these bunkers—65 feet underground, in an installation near Great Falls Montana—for a story in Popular Mechanics. It is both sobering and inspiring to realize that US servicemen continue to man a weapons system that everyone in the chain of command profoundly hopes will never be used. To some, deterrence might seem like an outdated concept. But it has worked so far.

Excellent point.

UPDATE: Reader Jon Marr writes:

Regarding the writer’s apparent ignorance of the very real dangers of the time and place when the shelter was built, I’ve always felt the same about how progressives ridicule the pointlessness of ‘duck and cover’. It’s as if they assume everyone is at ground zero rather than living miles away from the blast zone where quickly finding cover and avoiding looking at the blast would save thousands of lives and help hundreds of thousands from being rendered instantly blind. Indeed, fools mock.

Well, yes.

BILL RICHARDSON: Hey, that Ted Cruz guy definitely shouldn’t count as a Hispanic.

IT’S NOT TERRORISM WHEN RICH LEFTIES DO IT: Bill Ayers Defends Weather Underground Bombings.

MICHAEL WALSH: Benghazi Blues. “No matter what happens with Darrell Issa’s congressional committee meetings this week, we are witnessing the beginning of the end of the Obama Administration, and the cause is Benghazi. It’s impossible to underestimate the blowback that has been gathering steam for the past seven months, now about to erupt with full force. Few reputations will emerge unscathed, Obama’s presidency will be crippled, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 candidacy will be destroyed — and perhaps some new heroes will be born.”

DISASTER PREP: This Box Keeps Information Flowing During a Crisis. “The people behind Ushahidi, a software platform for communicating information during a crisis, have now developed what they are dubbing a ‘backup generator for the Internet’—a device that can connect with any network in the world, provide eight hours of wireless connectivity battery life, and can be programmed for new applications, such as remote sensing.”

SO IS EVERYTHING ELSE. MATHEMATICS IS THE LANGUAGE OF NATURE. Life In The City Is Essentially One Giant Math Problem.

AT AMAZON, Hot New Releases in Movies & TV.

Also, Mother’s Day Deals & Markdowns.

CHARLIE MARTIN: 13 Weeks: Is Health a Thing of the Spirit?

WOULD MAKING BIRTH-CONTROL PILLS AVAILABLE OVER THE COUNTER REDUCE ABORTIONS? Yes, but probably not a lot.

I’m torn on this. On the one hand, I’d make most prescription drugs OTC — the ones I’d regulate hardest would be antibiotics, since misuse is dangerous not just to the taker, but potentially to millions of others if you breed a resistant strain. On the other hand, birth control pills are more dangerous than generally recognized — they most likely caused the Insta-Wife’s heart attack, and I hear of similar stories pretty regularly. But, on the gripping hand, doctors tend to pass them out pretty casually anyway, so what’s really gained by requiring a prescription?

NOW THIS IS JUST SAD: Charity for troops instead spent money on liquor, movies. “The head of a local charitable organization claiming to help soldiers incarcerated for crimes allegedly committed during combat instead used donated funds at liquor stores, Redbox kiosks and for other personal purposes, the Ohio Attorney General said Friday. Riverside resident Cari Johnson, head of the charity A Dollar to Care, signed an agreement with the attorney general’s office to cease operations. She will also pay a $20,000 fine, half of which the attorney general will distribute to charity. Half will pay for the cost of the investigation.”

GRAPHIC: Fewer Guns, More Killings.

WHY WE CAN’T TALK ABOUT GUNS: “I’ve come to realize after the Sandy Hook shooting that the reason we can’t have a rational gun debate is because the anti-gun side pre-supposes that their pro-gun opponents must first accept that guns are bad in order to have a discussion about guns in the first place. Before we even start the conversation, we’re the bad guys and we have to admit it. Without accepting that guns are bad and supplicating themselves to the anti-gunner, the pro-gunner can’t get a word in edgewise, and is quickly reduced to being called a murderer, or a low, immoral and horrible human being. You might think that’s hyperbole too, but I’ve experienced it personally from people I considered friends until recently. . . . How can we ‘gun people’ honestly be expected to come to the table with anti-gunners when anti-gunners are willfully stupid about guns, and openly hate, despise and ridicule those of us who own them? There must first be respect and trust — even just a little — before there can be even the beginnings of legitimate discussion of the issue.”

As with most lefty causes, the key driver is a craving for moral superiority, usually driven by oikophobia.

UPDATE: Prof. Stephen Clark writes: “This part of Snell’s column bears repeating: Gun people don’t trust anti-gun people because they lie to us. Yes, they do. For that reason alone, I will not trust them. Period.”

AT AMAZON, 40% off in Home Improvement.

Also, Bestsellers in Toys & Games. I notice that those radio-controlled helicopters that were so popular with InstaPundit readers a while back are still high on the list.

THE ROAD OF EXCESS LEADS TO THE PALACE OF WISDOM. This was pretty much my story, actually. Of course, when you drive the road of excess, you can easily wind up in the ditch. That was what I observed, growing up, in my parents’ generation.

THAT’S BECAUSE IT’S AWESOME: Hummus Is Conquering America. I make a pretty good hummus, but my mother-in-law’s is to die for. The Sabra stuff is pretty good for store-bought, though.

LIKE A TIME CAPSULE: Wisconsin family discovers fully-stocked fallout shelter in their back yard 50 years after it was installed at the height of the Cold War. “Everything remained remarkably well-preserved, thanks to the airtight containers the supplies were kept in.”

Plus this bit of post-Cold War journalistic ignorance: “The idea of a fallout shelter was not to protect from a nuclear blast, but rather from the radiation that would likely contaminate the surrounding area. It’s unknown what fallout the late Dr Pansch was expecting in Neenah. The small Wisconsin city is 100 miles from Milwaukee and nearly 200 from Chicago – the population centers that might have been targeted by the Soviets.” Had those targets been hit — or missile fields farther west — there would have been plenty of fallout.

UPDATE: Reader Gerald Hanner emails:

I spent seven years serving in the SAC Airborne Command Post System, aka the Post Attack Command Control System. Even now my recollections of that time are clear.

Somebody in Neenah Wisconsin definitely wouldn’t have been worried about the blast effects of a nuclear weapon. The town is on the northern end of Lake Winnebago, and there is a regional airport northwest of the town, near Appleton, that might once have been a base for air defense interceptors. I doubt the Soviets would have gone to the trouble to take out a runway as small as Outagamie Regional Airport. However, based on what we knew of their political thinking, we expected them to hit every state capital because in the minds of the Soviet planners that is where all the command and control would be. As far as missile fields further west, yes, there were some. Grand Forks and Minot, both in North Dakota, had 150 Minuteman missiles each, as did Ellsworth near the Black Hills of South Dakota. F. E. Warren, near Cheyenne, had 150 Minuteman missiles, and Malmstrom, near Great Falls Montana had 200 Minuteman missiles. Everybody expected some or all of the launch control centers to be hit. It was even deemed possible that the Soviets might be inclined to hit the silos themselves. Fortunately we never got to find out.

As insurance against the Soviets successfully attacking the Minuteman launch control centers, there was a backup system known as the Airborne Launch Control System (ALCS). We in the SAC ABNCP System had the capability of commanding Minuteman missile launches from our ABNCP aircraft. I served as a deputy missile launch officer for part of my time the SAC ABNCP. The ALCS remains operational.

It’s amazing how much people have forgotten in the twenty years or so since the Cold War ended. Though there are still plenty of nuclear weapons around. Also, read this. Also, here’s a video.

UPDATE: Reader Matt Kreutzmann writes:

Regarding the fallout shelter in Neenah, WI, there was plenty of risk of fallout. As you and other readers have noted, the major cities WI and the missile silos in the Dakotas could have brought fallout to Neenah.

Much closer, there were ELF stations in the Chequamagon National Forest and the Escanaba River State Forest that were used to communicate with submerged submarines. They were likely pretty soft targets, but still strategic. It’s an energy intensive and SLOW way to communicate, but it worked. They were decomissioned in 2004, I believe. The Cold War was much more pervasive than people tend to recall.

That would have been the old Sanguine system, I believe. Or, rather, its successors.

ARGUMENT: Conservatives Should Endorse The “Nudge” Approach.