HEALTH: Amazon tribe has lowest heart risk ever seen.

Known as the Tsimane, the small forager-farmer community in Bolivia was five times less likely to develop coronary atherosclerosis (artery hardening) than people in the United States — where it is a major killer, scientists wrote in The Lancet medical journal.

They pointed to the community’s low-fat, high-fibre diet and non-smoking, physically active lifestyle — factors which most scientists agree contribute to good health.

The study was an observational one, meaning it merely uncovered a correlation between lifestyle and heart health, and cannot conclude that one causes the other.

In that case, pass the bacon.

TIM MAK: Obama’s Imperial Presidency Now Is Trump’s.

Forever and evergreen:

Limited government, checks and balances, federalism — they don’t seem so old-fashioned now, do they, Tim?

ALLIES: Afghan soldier opens fire on U.S. service members, wounding 3.

Capt. William Salvin, a U.S. military spokesman in Afghanistan, said security forces on base killed the attacker to end the assault.

“The U.S. soldiers are receiving medical treatment at this time, and we will release more information when available,” he said.

The so-called “insider attack” happened around 1:30 p.m. local time at Camp Antonik in Washer District in Helmand.

It wasn’t immediately clear if the shooting involved a Taliban sympathizer, a personal dispute or a cultural misunderstanding.

Since 2008, there have been 94 insider attacks in Afghanistan, with at least 150 foreign soldiers killed and 187 wounded, according to the Long War Journal blog.

“Cultural misunderstanding?”

PROBABLY, BUT… Contrary to What We’re Being Told, Self-Driving Cars Are Still Years Away.

Self-driving cars will probably come about the same way Hemingway’s Mike Campbell went broke: “Gradually, then suddenly.”

ANALYSIS: TRUE. OPEC’s Cuts Are Treading Water.

The agreed cut of about 1.2 million barrels a day, if translated barrel-for-barrel into exports, means we ought to see the volume of oil in transit fall the same amount. So, in the first 70 days of this year, we ought to have seen it fall by about 84 million barrels — all other things being equal.

Data from U.K. research firm Oil Movements certainly shows the volume of oil in transit falling since the start of the year — a clear indication that cuts are happening. The amount is much less than OPEC would like. The volume of oil in tankers fell around 9 million barrels from Dec. 31 to March 11, which equates to 123,000 barrels a day. The forecast is for volumes to drop another 7 million barrels by April 1. But it’s still not enough to keep OPEC happy.One problem is that rising U.S. production has partly offset the reduction in flows from the OPEC countries in the Middle East.

The simplified version is that U.S. oil production is reaching a point where OPEC can choose to sell 100 barrels at $50, or 125 barrels at $40. They can choose between higher profit margins or larger market share, but the days of having both are over for now.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION (AND NEGLECT): Tammy Baldwin Paid Clinton Lawyer $90K For Crisis Control After VA Scandal.

Baldwin, who was first elected to the Senate in 2012, was the only member of Congress from Wisconsin to receive an official federal government inspector general report warning of the over-prescription of narcotics given to veterans at the Tomah VA facility in her state. The abuses at the facility ultimately led to the death of a Marine.

A memo was first circulated in 2009 warning of the dangerous amounts of narcotics prescribed to veterans at the Tomah VA facility by Dr. David Houlihan, the Tomah VA chief of staff.

Workers at the facility were hesitant to speak out against Dr. Houlihan, who earned the nickname “the candy man” from his prescriptions, due to fear of losing their jobs.

“It is a known fact that if providers or pharmacists refuse to follow Dr. Houlihan’s orders, they will be yelled at and perhaps fired,” the memo stated.

In 2014, five years after the initial warning, a Marine was prescribed a deadly amount of drugs by the medical center and overdosed. Dr. Houlihan was fired from the Tomah VA in 2015.

It was later discovered that Baldwin was the only member of Congress from Wisconsin to receive the inspector general report on the abuses at Tomah. Baldwin did not take action until it became public nearly four months later and the veteran had died.

Marquette Baylor, the former deputy state director for Baldwin, was fired from her position following the controversy. Baylor was offered a severance package if she were to sign a confidentiality agreement on the matter. Baylor rejected the offer.

Baldwin tapped Marc Elias, a partner at the D.C.-based Perkins Coie law firm, to help with crisis control on the scandal.

“Shameful” doesn’t even begin to cover Baldwin’s inaction, but give her credit for being pro-active enough to hire “the ‘go-to fixer’ for Democrats in trouble.”

SPLASHDOWN: SpaceX recovers Dragon capsule loaded with science and research from the ISS.

HOUSE INTEL CHAIR: ‘No Evidence of Collusion’ Between Russia and Trump Campaign.

ASTROTURF? Republican green groups seek to temper Trump on climate change.

President Donald Trump’s outspoken doubts about climate change and his administration’s efforts to roll back regulation to combat it have stirred a sleepy faction in U.S. politics: the Republican environmental movement.

The various groups represent conservatives, Catholics and the younger generation of Republicans who, unlike Trump, not only recognize the science of climate change but want to see their party wrest the initiative from Democrats and lead efforts to combat global warming.

Conservative green groups such as ConservAmerica and republicEn, along with politically neutral religious groups such as Catholic Climate Covenant and bipartisan groups such as the Citizens Climate Lobby, have ramped up efforts to recruit more congressional Republicans to work on addressing climate change since Trump’s election.

There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of there-there to this story, but I’m amazed that anything containing that second graf could be placed as straight news instead of on the op-ed page.

PROLIFERATION: North Korea’s Test of Rocket Engine Shows ‘Meaningful Progress,’ South Says.

North Korea said on Sunday that it had conducted a ground jet test of a newly developed high-thrust missile engine, which its leader, Kim Jong-un, called “a great event of historic significance.” Using the characteristic bombast of such announcements, he said that the test heralded “a new birth” of the country’s rocket industry and that “the whole world will soon witness what eventful significance the great victory won today carries.”

The North’s rival, South Korea, acknowledged on Monday that the test represented a breakthrough. Lee Jin-woo, a spokesman at the Defense Ministry, said it showed that the North was developing a more sophisticated rocket engine. The model that the North tested included a cluster consisting of a main engine and four vernier thrusters — smaller engines used to adjust the craft’s velocity and stability.

“Through this test, it is found that engine function has made meaningful progress,” Mr. Lee said during a news briefing, without divulging further details.

By welcoming Iran back into the “community of nations” while giving a wink-and-a-nod to its medium-term nuclear program, Barack Obama might have effectively killed the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. How China and the U.S. choose to deal with North Korea could determine whether there’s any life left in it.

HANS A. VON SPAKOVSKY: Why Trump’s Immigration Order Is Legal and Constitutional.

As I have written on a number of occasions, the district-court and appellate-court judges in these cases have ignored the federal immigration-law provision that gives President Trump the authority to issue this order. They’re also ignoring prior precedents from the U.S. Supreme Court upholding the power of presidents to suspend the entry of aliens into the United States. And they have made unjustified findings that the order violates the establishment clause of the Constitution and was intended to discriminate on a religious basis.

But there are also some very good federal judges, and five of the best joined together in a stirring dissent released March 15 that explained in detail why the president has acted fully within the law and the Constitution. Their dissent should be required remedial reading for the federal judges assigned to all of these cases. It was filed in a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision that denied en banc review (review by the entire court) of the astonishing recent decision by a three-judge panel; the three judges refused to throw out the injunction issued against the original executive order by a district-court judge in Washington State.

In a dissent written by Jay Bybee and joined by Alex Kozinski, Consuelo Callahan, Carlos Bea, and Sandra Ikuta, the judges explain why the panel’s decision was full of errors that “confound Supreme Court and Ninth Circuit precedent” that will make it impossible for the district courts “to know what law to apply in the future.” Moreover, they note, the personal views of federal judges should be “of no consequence.” “Whatever we, as individuals, may feel about the President or the Executive Order, the President’s decision was well within the powers of the presidency, and ‘[t]he wisdom of the policy choices made by [the President] is not a matter for our consideration.’”

Read the whole thing, but it’s obvious that en banc was denied solely because the decision would not stand greater scrutiny — pure politics.

ANALYSIS: HALF-TRUE. The smug style in American liberalism: It’s not helping, folks — but there’s a better way.

I’m not sure there’s a better way for the Progressive Left, but when even Salon is starting to notice that the smug style is counterproductive…

HEH: DHS Wants Proposals for a Border Wall ‘Aesthetically Pleasing in Color’. “But only on the side that faces America.”

If Mexico wants something nice on their side, they can pay for it.

CHANGE? Price rules out clean repeal of Obamacare.

“That is not something that the president is willing to do. It’s not something that he said he would do,” Price said of a clean repeal during an appearance on ABC’s “This Week.”

“Certainly what he has said is that repeal and replace need to occur essentially at the same time, concurrently, and that’s what we’re moving forward with in this first phase,” Price said.

Repeal-ish and replace-ish.

PROHIBITION: Mexico drug war investigators unearth 47 more skulls in mass graves.

Veracruz, on Mexico’s Gulf coast, has long been a stomping ground for criminal gangs, who fight over lucrative drug and migrant smuggling routes.

Giving details on the latest grisly find, Jorge Winckler said the skulls and remains of multiple body parts were unearthed from eight unmarked graves, clustered in a 120 sq metre area, about 10 kilometres (6 miles) from the town of Alvarado.

So far, Winckler said, investigators had positively identified one three-person family, missing since September 2016, and the remains of two other men.

“The work continues,” Winckler told a news conference, vowing to track down the perpetrators.

Just days earlier, investigators recovered more than 250 skulls from another unmarked grave 60 kilometres (37 miles)further north in the Gulf state of Veracruz.

That burial site was uncovered by relatives of missing family members, impatient with officials’ apathetic response, who launched their own search for missing family members.

All-too-believable.

BREXIT: Theresa May Will Trigger Article 50 On March 29.

IS THERE ANYTHING THEY CAN’T DO? Amy Schumer Blames ‘Alt Right Organized Trolls’ for Bad Netflix Show Reviews.

I have a deep appreciation for bad movies, so I tried watching Schumer’s special to see if it could be enjoyed as so-bad-it’s-good entertainment.

Nope. It’s just bad.

GM Tries a Subscription Plan for Cadillacs—a Netflix for Cars at $1,500 a Month.

After participating free of charge in a three-month pilot of General Motors Co.’s new Book by Cadillac subscription plan, Ms. Sandall said she is considering becoming a full-time member when it is time for a new vehicle. For $1,500 a month, the program covers ownership costs and lets members trade in and out of Cadillac’s 10 models up to 18 times a year.

The effort is the latest experiment by a car company to test whether people are willing to treat personal transportation like a Netflix account, where temporary, on-demand access outweighs the benefits of ownership.

GM has been among the industry’s chief tinkerers with the ownership model, anticipating that the century-old arrangement of consumers buying, insuring and repairing their own vehicles eventually will lose favor. In early 2016, it formed a car-sharing company called Maven and around the same time invested $500 million into ride-hailing service Lyft Inc., Uber Technologies Inc.’s main rival.

That’s pricey, but semi-autonomous cars which deliver themselves as needed should drive down costs to consumers.

NEED A LYFT? Uber’s President Is Leaving the Company After 6 Months.

Jones is the latest in a string of high-level executives to leave the company. Last month, engineering executive Amit Singhal was asked to resign due to a sexual harassment allegation stemming from his previous job at Alphabet’s Google. Earlier this month, Ed Baker, Uber’s vice president of product and growth, and Charlie Miller, Uber’s famed security researcher, departed.

Technology news site Recode first reported Jones’ departure on Sunday.

“It is now clear, however, that the beliefs and approach to leadership that have guided my career are inconsistent with what I saw and experienced at Uber, and I can no longer continue as president of the ride sharing business,” he said in a statement to Recode.

Uber, while it has long had a reputation as an aggressive and unapologetic startup, has been battered with multiple controversies over the last several weeks that have put Kalanick’s leadership capabilities and the company’s future into question.

Street level, I’ve never had anything but excellent service from Uber. C-level, this is a company with a toxic corporate culture.

JOHN STOSSEL ASKS THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Has the media gotten worse? Or am I just grouchier?

Embrace the healing power of “and!”

More:

Monday, The New York Times ran the headline “What Happens When You Fight a ‘Deep State’ that Doesn’t Exist?”

The article explained that unlike Egypt or Pakistan, America doesn’t really have a powerful deep state, and to claim that it does “presents apolitical civil servants as partisan agents.”

Give me a break. “Apolitical civil servants”?

A deep state absolutely exists. Some call it “administrative state” or “regulatory state.” These are the people who crush innovation and freedom by issuing hundreds of new rules. Regulators, if they don’t pass new rules, think they’re not doing their job.

Even “anti-regulator” President George W. Bush hired 90,000 new regulators. Calling them “nonpartisan” doesn’t make them harmless — it just means we put up with them through multiple administrations.

Even if you exclude the military and post office, more than 20 million Americans work for the government. Because of civil service rules, it’s almost impossible to fire them.

The Times calls these 20 million people “apolitical”. Please. Most are just as partisan as you or I. Maybe more so, as leaks and signs of bureaucratic resistance to presidential edicts demonstrate.

People who choose to work for, say, the EPA, tend to be environment zealots. This should surprise no one. Somehow, New York Times reporters don’t see it.

They see it — and approve of it, because they’re just as partisan and on the same side.

DEEP STATE: Five 9th Circuit Judges Eviscerate the ‘Fundamental Errors’ in Ruling Against Trump’s ‘Muslim Ban’

FEAR AND LOATHING FOR FUN AND PROFIT: The Hate Group That Incited the Middlebury Melee.

Morris Dees is a born salesman who was a committed capitalist before he entered elementary school. “When I was 5, I bought a pig for a dollar. I fattened it up and sold it for $12,” he once told People magazine. “I always had a feel for making money.”

When his mother sent him a fruitcake his freshman year in Tuscaloosa, Morris and classmate Millard Fuller wrote other students’ parents offering to deliver freshly baked birthday cakes. Soon they were selling 350 cakes per month. By the time they left law school, they were making $50,000 a year—$400,000 in today’s dollars.

After graduation, Dees and Fuller hung out a shingle and practiced law. But the real money came from their mail order business, peddling everything from cookbooks to tractor cushions. In 1969, Dees sold the direct-mail firm to the Times Mirror Co. for $6 million. By then, Fuller had cashed out, given away his money, and with his wife gone to live a Christian life building homes for the poor—efforts culminating in the creation of Habitat for Humanity.

Dees also started a nonprofit, which he named the Southern Poverty Law Center. But he gave up neither the high life nor the direct-mail business. He lives in luxury with his fifth wife and still runs the SPLC, which has used the mail-order model to amass a fortune. Its product line is an unusual one: For the past 47 years, Morris Dees has been selling fear and hate.

Read the whole thing.

SPENGLER: I denounce the shameful slanders against Sebastian Gorka, Friend of Israel.

LITERALLY HITLER: Anti-Trump Billboard In Arizona Goes Heavy On The Nazi Imagery.

THE MASTERS OF THEIR DOMAIN: 5 Most Politically Incorrect ‘Seinfeld’ Moments.