MEGAN FOX: It’s Better Being A Mom Than A Movie Star.

MAYBE THIS IS WHY MORE MEN ARE OPTING TO BE THE “PREVIOUS BOYFRIEND:” I told my boyfriend that I want to marry about the sexual things I did for previous boyfriends that I won’t do for him and now he’s mad.

TEN YEARS AFTER: Dale Amon and Rand Simberg remember the flight of SpaceShip One. Jeff Foust has a new book out.

POLITICO: Barack Obama: The Man Who Broke The Middle East.

The Middle East that Obama inherited in 2009 was largely at peace, for the surge in Iraq had beaten down the al Qaeda-linked groups. U.S. relations with traditional allies in the Gulf, Jordan, Israel and Egypt were very good. Iran was contained, its Revolutionary Guard forces at home. Today, terrorism has metastasized in Syria and Iraq, Jordan is at risk, the humanitarian toll is staggering, terrorist groups are growing fast and relations with U.S. allies are strained.

How did it happen? Begin with hubris: The new president told the world, in his Cairo speech in June 2009, that he had special expertise in understanding the entire world of Islam—knowledge “rooted in my own experience” because “I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the region where it was first revealed.” But President Obama wasn’t speaking that day in an imaginary location called “the world of Islam;” he was in Cairo, in the Arab Middle East, in a place where nothing counted more than power.

Hey, he’s a better speechwriter than his speechwriters, a better policy analyst than his policy analysts, and a better Muslim than the Muslims. It’s not his failure. It’s the world of Islam that let him down. Poor Barack. The world just isn’t up to his standards.

IT MAY HAVE BEEN A BAD IDEA, BUT THE B-70 VALKYRIE WAS BEAUTIFUL: Five Revolutionary American Weapons of War That Never Happened.

CHANGE: Taxi medallions have been the best investment in America for years. Now Uber may be changing that. “In New York, taxi medallions have topped $1 million. In Boston, $700,000. In Philadelphia, $400,000. In Miami, $300,000. Where medallions exist, they have outperformed even the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index. In Chicago, their value has doubled since 2009. . . . Deep pockets run this market. The system in Chicago and elsewhere is dominated by large investors who rely on brokers to sell medallions, specialty banks to finance them and middle men to manage and lease them to drivers who own nothing at all.” And their value comes solely from excluding competition. Interesting that the big fear of the medallion owners isn’t losing passengers to Uber, but losing the drivers they gouge. Hey guys, just wait for the self-driving cars. . . .

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IMMIGRATION BRINGS VIBRANCY TO SWEDEN: Swedish health authorities discover every girl in one class had undergone genital mutilation: report. We can learn so much from other cultures, which have different values than ours. “Of the 60, nearly half of the girls had undergone the most extreme form of female circumcision, in which the clitoris and labia are cut off and the vagina is sewn up to leave just a small opening. . . . A common practice is for immigrant parents to take their young girls to their home country, where the ritual is performed. Most often it is done with a razor blade or a knife, and without anesthesia.”

YA THINK? Missing IRS Emails Reflect Pattern Of Non-Phony Scandals. “It is amazing how these emails have just disappeared and we’re all supposed to believe that.”

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: New Bionic Suit Helps Stroke Survivors To Walk Again.

SEE, UNLESS ENOUGH PEOPLE DO THIS, I THINK IT JUST MAKES YOU MORE CONSPICUOUS: How To Anonymize Everything You Do Online.

CANDID CAMERA: 5 Times Video Footage Showed Police Misconduct.

That’s why you have a due process right to record the police. Of course, many police favor having their activities recorded, as it also guards against false accusations of misconduct.

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AN OLD-FASHIONED FISKING: Wal-Mart Fact-Checks The New York Times.

“CRIMINAL DISHONESTY:” Clayton Christensen Responds to New Yorker Takedown of ‘Disruptive Innovation.’

24 THINGS NO ONE TELLS YOU about leaving Texas. I don’t recall leaving Texas being all that traumatic, but then, I was 3.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: 7 Awesome Astronomical Sights You Can See With Just Binoculars.

I have these.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: 7 Secrets for Using Professional Movers.

THE SCIENCE OF HANGOVERS. My approach to not getting them: (1) Always eat something when you drink: (2) Don’t drink too much. Works pretty well . . .

HISTORY AND FABLE: The fable of the burning river, 45 years later. It supported the Earth Day narrative, so we got the fable instead of the history. Because journalism.

HOW CONVENIENT: IRS CANCELLED Contract with Email-Storage Firm Weeks After Lerner’s Computer Crash. This is starting to look absurdly big.

TAXPROF UPDATE: The IRS Scandal, Day 409.

PARTISANSHIP AND SELF-SORTING:

If we’re going to have a more partisan geography — and it does seem as if we are — then what we also need is more federalism. Push as many decisions as possible down to the local level — not whether Colorado can pollute rivers that run through California, but decisions about taxes, social spending, health care and regulation.

Unfortunately, the very process of sorting seems to make federalism less, not more, likely. Once you’ve got a good, strong, group consensus on health-care spending or abortion, then allowing those cretins over there to force their horrible views on the people of their benighted states seems completely intolerable. Nothing will suffice but to use federal power to keep their morally obtuse desires from ever being made into law.

And so, even nominal advocates of localism frequently end up trying to centralize issues, instead of pushing them down to the level where a genuine consensus exists. We may need federalism more than ever, but we’re going to get it less.

Well, that’s bad. Personally, I don’t think we’ll fix America’s political problems until we fix its media problem.