HMMM … BRAZILIAN ANTHROPOLOGISTS SAY KILLING TWIN, DISABLED, OR TRANSGENDER CHILDREN (EVEN WHEN THEIR PARENTS OBJECT) OUGHT TO BE TOLERATED … so long as the perpetrators are from one of those … er … unassimilated indigenous tribes. And woe to anyone who attempts to inform tribal members that there may be alternatives to their traditional practices.

The Kamayurá are among a handful of indigenous peoples in Brazil known to engage in infanticide and the selective killing of older children. Those targeted include the disabled, the children of single mothers, and twins—whom some tribes, including the Kamayurá, see as bad omens. [A Kamayurá man] told me of a 12-year-old boy from his father’s generation whom the tribe buried alive because he “wanted to be a woman.”

Suruwaha are another such group. According to the article, a few years ago, a couple there to study the Suruwaha language took a 5-year-old Suruwaha child who had hypothyroidism (an easily treated condition) to the state capital for medical attention. The child’s parents had committed suicide rather than kill their child, and the tribe’s efforts to kill her by burying her alive had failed. When the couple brought the now-treated girl back to her tribe, nobody wanted her, so the couple adopted her themselves. Meanwhile, the public prosecutor had banished them from the Suruwaha territory. The anthropologist’s report that undergirded the prosecutor’s injunction argued that they were wrongdoers because they had let the Suruwahas know that there are alternatives to their traditional practices. Apparently, if you are unlucky enough to have been born to the Suruwahas, you must be kept in the dark.

As of April, the Brazilian legislature was trying to do something about this issue. The Brazilian Association of Anthropology was opposing the proposal, arguing that “the most repressive and lethal actions ever perpetrated against the indigenous peoples of the Americas … were unfailingly justified through appeals to noble causes, humanitarian values and universal principles.”

Call me a cultural bigot if you will, but I am so glad to have been born in a community where the city council members figured they’d get in trouble if they starting insisting that I be killed.

THE LAST MUNCHKIN IS GONE:  Jerry Maren, the last surviving munchkin from the Wizard of Oz, dies.

NORMANDY LANDINGS: Today is the 74^th anniversary of D-Day. Thank your lucky stars you weren’t there (unless, of course, you were there … in which case I thank you).

“CHRISTMAS IS A BLOW TO OUR MUSLIMHOOD”:  Turkey is increasingly unsafe for its tiny Christian minority.

CAN MATT ROSENDALE DEFEAT INCUMBENT JON TESTER?:  Montana State Auditor Matt Rosendale has won the GOP primary for U.S. Senate.  This will be a race to watch.  Trump won Montana by 20 points.  Meanwhile, Tester has been a thorn in Trump’s side.

MORE ON DC’s WOKEST RESTAURANT: Ed Driscoll posted on the wokest restaurant in Washington earlier this afternoon. It’s called Busboys & Poets. As Ed wrote, among its many “woke” innovations is its practice of handing out “Race Cards” to patrons, with questions like “How often do you discuss race with your family and friends?”

What caught my eye about the Washington City Paper article was a statement by a “core organizer of Black Lives Matter DC,” who is decidedly unenthusiastic about the restaurant. It’s not woke enough for her. And here’s the reason why:

“The Core Organizers of Black Lives Matter DC will no longer accept speaking engagements, participate on panels, or otherwise patronize any Busboys & Poets or Mulebone restaurant based on our past experiences,” she wrote. “Andy Shallal has used Busboys & Poets to commoditize racial history by having panels with local radical activists while making money from food and drink sales of attendees but not paying them, profiting on the history of Black DC while contributing to ‘revitalization’ that is fueling displacement, and posturing as a radical while being a capitalist.”

To put it a bit more succinctly: You’re doing it wrong. You were supposed to pay us.

NOT A PIECE OF CAKE: I am of two minds about Masterpiece Cakeshop. On the one hand, I’m sure it’s not comforting for the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop to think that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission might have won if its members had only disguised their contempt for people of faith a bit better. On the other hand, as my colleague Maimon Schwarzschild has written in “Do Religious Exemptions Save?,” the alternative—a Constitutionally-mandated duty to accommodate religion—may not work so well either.

In the end, there is no substitute for living in a country where people (and hence legislators) want to accommodate the sincerely held religious and moral views of others and don’t want to dragoon them into actions to which they have such objections unless it’s really necessary.

BIRTH OF THE MARSHALL PLAN: On June 5, 1947, Gen. George C. Marshall, then Secretary of State, gave a speech at Harvard University at which he called for what came to be called “the Marshall Plan.” Said he: “The truth of the matter is that Europe’s requirements for the next three or four years of foreign food and other essential products—principally from America—are so much greater than her present ability to pay that she must have substantial additional help or face economic, social, and political deterioration of a very grave character.”

It seems to have worked pretty well. One downside: Many later policymakers saw the Marshall Plan’s $13 billion lesson as throwing very large sums of money at a problem—no matter how different from postwar Europe—will solve that problem. No such luck.

IF YOU LIVED IN BOTSWANA, YOU COULD HAVE SEEN THE FIREBALL:  Six-foot asteroid–small enough to disintegrate in the Earth’s atmosphere–was spotted hours before impact.  Message to Outer Space:  Please don’t send us any bigger ones.

DOES THE MASTERPIECE CAKESHOP DECISION STRENGTHEN THE CASE AGAINST THE TRAVEL BAN?: Ilya Somin argues that it does.

WE SHALL NEVER SURRENDER: On June 4, 1940, Churchill gave his famous “We shall fight on the beaches” speech before the House of Commons:

I have, myself, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once more able to defend our island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone. At any rate, that is what we are going to try to do. That is the resolve of His Majesty’s Government – every man of them. That is the will of Parliament and the nation. The British Empire and the French Republic, linked together in their cause and in their need, will defend to the death their native soil, aiding each other like good comrades to the utmost of their strength.

Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.

Not too shabby.

ON THIS DAY IN 1539: Hernando de Soto claimed Florida for Spain. Then, 461 years later, he published the highly influential book—The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Succeeds in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. No … wait … my mistake. That was a different Hernando de Soto. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t read his book. It’s a classic.

ON THIS DAY IN 1692, Bridget Bishop was convicted of witchcraft. Days later, she was executed, making her the first of 14 women and 6 men to suffer that fate during the witchcraft panic then gripping Salem, Massachusetts. Among other things, Bishop was accused at one point of having three nipples—a sure sign of being in league with the devil.

Thankfully, panics like that don’t happen anymore … except when they do.

MUTUALLY NONCONSENSUAL SEX:  Even the Atlantic is noticing the excesses of Title IX.

THE GERMAN ATTACK ON BOAC FLIGHT 777: On this day in 1943, eight German Junkers Ju 88s shot down a civilian airline flight en route from Lisbon to Whitchurch Airport near Bristol. The plane crashed into the Bay of Biscay, killing all 17 on board.

Portugal was a neutral state, and the attack was considered unusually aggressive. Why would the Germans want to violate Portugal’s neutrality?

One theory is that they mistakenly believed Winston Churchill was aboard. Churchill had been in Algiers, so it wasn’t crazy to think he might return via Lisbon, and a man who looked somewhat like Churchill was among the passengers. Churchill himself seems to have accepted this theory.

Another theory is that the Germans correctly believed that Leslie Howard was aboard. Yes, that Leslie Howard—the actor. Howard (born Leslie Howard Steiner) sometimes played seemingly ineffectual men who were either really ineffectual (Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind) or really heroes (the title character in The Scarlet Pimpernel or the Nazi-fighting archeologist in “Pimpernel” Smith). During the war, Howard had devoted himself to making anti-Nazi feature films and documentaries. The story goes that he made fun of Goebbels in one of those films and that Goebbels considered him an exceptionally effective propagandist. He therefore wanted him dead. Another version of the story argues that Howard was on a top-secret mission that involved persuading Franco to stay out of the war. There is enough to “Howard theory” to put it in the “not crazy” category too.

Other passengers included Wilfrid Israel (department store scion of Kindertransport fame), oil businessman Tyrrel Shervington, and engineer Ivan Sharp. A case can be made for why the Germans would have liked to see any of them dead.

Is it all just rubbish? Was the attack on BOAC Flight 777 just a mistake?  An “error in judgment” (as the lead German pilot later put it)? Maybe. But the mystery continues to fascinate many.

VOTE FOR THE BARONESS FOR CONGRESS: Hey, Baron von Steuben worked out pretty well. But then, he wasn’t really a Baron ….

TRANSGENDER BATHROOM CASE HEADED BACK UP ON APPEAL?: Last week, Federal District Court Judge Arenda Wright Allen ruled in Grimm v. Gloucester County School Board that Title IX requires schools to permit an anatomical female who identifies as male to use the boys’ room (and presumably vice versa).

To understand why Judge Allen is wrong, you could do worse than reading the Amicus Curiae Brief filed by Peter Kirsanow and me back when this case was last in the Supreme Court. As you may recall, the Supreme Court remanded the case to the lower courts in light of the Trump Administration’s decision to withdraw the Obama-Era “Dear Colleague Letter” that had instructed schools that they must allow transgender students to use the showers, locker rooms and toilets of the sex they identify with rather than the sex that corresponds to their anatomy.

“IF [THE TOMMY ROBINSON CASE] DOESN’T BOTHER YOU, YOUR CIVIL LIBERTARIAN INSTINCTS HAVE ATROPHIED”: And yet the media seem to think that only “right wingers” care. If they are right, we are doomed, doomed, doomed. Alas, that doesn’t necessarily mean they are wrong.

HISTORY LESSON: On May 31, 1852, Julius Richard Petri was born.  He was the inventor of the … uh … Julius dish … something like that.

YOU CAN HAVE MY KIDS’ LEMONADE STAND WHEN YOU PRY IT FROM OUR COLD, DEAD FINGERS:  Steve Hayward is ready to bring out the pitchforks.

ON THIS DAY IN 1787: Five days into the Constitutional Convention, Virginia Governor Edmund Randolph offered the “Virginia Plan” to the delegates. The plan, which was primarily the work of James Madison, was no mere tinkering around at the edges of the Articles of Confederation. It called for a wholly new structure of government (which … uh … isn’t what the state legislatures that sent the delegates thought they were going to be getting).

The Constitution ultimately produced by the Convention differed in significant ways from Madison’s scheme. But the Virginia Plan nevertheless set the tone for the gathering: The Articles of Confederation are fatally flawed. Start from scratch.

#COFFEEWOKE – I was reminded today that I can make a better cup of coffee at home than Starbucks can make for me.  Cheaper too.

SYRIA? ARE YOU SERIOUS? SYRIA?:   The United Nations is beyond parody, says Paul Mirengoff.

THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE, CLASSED AS ONE OF THE “SEVEN WONDERS OF THE INDUSTRIAL WORLD,” OPENED ON THIS DAY IN 1883: The brainchild of German immigrant John Augustus Roebling, it took 14 years to build, and Roebling himself died as a result of an on-the-job injury before the project was completed. Instead, it was his son, Washington Roebling, who saw the bridge to completion.

The old line about “if you believe that, I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you” is based on truth. At least two con men—George C. Parker and William McCloundy—did time in Sing Sing for “selling” the Brooklyn Bridge to naïve purchasers.

IF HALF THE EFFORT CURRENTLY PUT INTO COMING UP WITH CUTE ACRONYMS WERE PUT INTO COMING UP WITH GOOD POLICIES INSTEAD, WE MIGHT BE IN MUCH BETTER SHAPE:  The House Committee on the Judiciary recently approved the proposed “Formerly Incarcerated Reenter Society Transformed Safely Transitioning Every Person Act”  “FIRST STEP Act.”  I’d really like to wring the neck of the folks who come up with these acronyms, but … well … if I did I’d end up in prison, so I guess I won’t.

Like most “nice sounding” stuff that comes out of Congress, this one should be looked at with a critical eye.  Paul Mirengoff talks about some of the downsides.

Meanwhile, here’s an interesting statistic from the new Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report on prisoner recidivism:  “An estimated 68% of released prisoners were arrested within 3 years, 79% within 6 years, and 83% within 9 years.”  Yes, it’s a complicated subject.  But make sure your eyes are wide open, before you start thinking that de-incarceration is the answer to our problems.