NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: ISIS Targeted by Cyberattacks in a New U.S. Line of Combat.

SALON’S H.A. GOODMAN: It’s not over until the FBI clears Hillary Clinton— which it absolutely shouldn’t.

When you’re a scandal-plagued Democrat and you’ve lost Salon…

TALES FROM THE WORKERS PARADISE: Venezuela cuts power for four hours a day to save energy.

Venezuela, it should be remembered, is an OPEC member and ranks number one in the world for proven oil reserves.

WHEN DOVES CRY: A very VodkaPundit farewell to Prince.

GIVE ‘EM HELL, BERNIE: $182 million: Bernie Sanders equals Hillary Clinton’s campaign fundraising.

ASIA PIVOT: China’s President, Xi Jinping, Gains a New Title: Commander in Chief.

Although predecessors like President Hu Jintao delegated operational responsibilities to professional soldiers, the new title reflects Mr. Xi’s desire to have a more direct role, said You Ji, who oversees the department of government and public administration at the University of Macau.

“Quite simply, it’s a symbol of ultimate command and control of the armed forces,” Professor You said.

Mr. Xi was shown speaking to officers and seated at a central dais, with other members of the military commission flanking him.

“The current situation requires battle command to be highly strategic, coordinated, timely, professional and accurate,” he said, according to Xinhua, the state news agency. “All must be done with the ultimate goal of improving battle command capacities and measured by the standards of being able to fight and win wars.”.

It would be nice to know how Xi defines “the current situation.”

USMC’S FLYING CIRCUS: Marines Are Flying Only 60% of F-18 Hornets They Need.

“I pulled up our readiness data just yesterday,” Lt. Gen. Jon Davis told the seapower subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “We have 87 aircraft that were mission capable. Out of those 87 airplanes, I put 30 airplanes in the training squadron and 40 airplanes deployed forward. There’s not a lot left for the [remaining] units to train with.”

How many Hornets should the Marine Corps have ready to go? Under the current, shrunken force structure, 150: a training squadron of 30 and 12 combat squadrons of 10 aircraft each. Until 18 months ago, that figure was 174 — 30 training aircraft and 12 squadrons of 12 aircraft each — but the Marines decided to shrink each squadron to reflect the reality of insufficient aircraft.

Even the Marines have been fundamentally transformed.

CAMILLE PAGLIA: Enough with the Hillary cult: Her admirers ignore reality, dream of worshipping a queen.

As a lifelong Democrat who will be enthusiastically voting for Bernie Sanders in next week’s Pennsylvania primary, I have trouble understanding the fuzzy rosy filter through which Hillary fans see their champion. So much must be overlooked or discounted—from Hillary’s compulsive money-lust and her brazen indifference to normal rules to her conspiratorial use of shadowy surrogates and her sociopathic shape-shifting in policy positions for momentary expedience.

Hillary’s breathtaking lack of concrete achievements or even minimal initiatives over her long public career doesn’t faze her admirers a whit. They have a religious conviction of her essential goodness and blame her blank track record on diabolical sexist obstructionists. When at last week’s debate Hillary crassly blamed President Obama for the disastrous Libyan incursion that she had pushed him into, her acolytes hardly noticed. They don’t give a damn about international affairs—all that matters is transgender bathrooms and instant access to abortion.

As always with Paglia, read the whole thing.

CHANGE: The $2 Trillion Project to Get Saudi Arabia’s Economy Off Oil.

On April 25 the prince is scheduled to unveil his “Vision for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,” an historic plan encompassing broad economic and social changes. It includes the creation of the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, which will eventually hold more than $2 trillion in assets—enough to buy all of Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Berkshire Hathaway, the world’s four largest public companies. The prince plans an IPO that could sell off “less than 5 percent” of Saudi Aramco, the national oil producer, which will be turned into the world’s biggest industrial conglomerate. The fund will diversify into nonpetroleum assets, hedging the kingdom’s nearly total dependence on oil for revenue. The tectonic moves “will technically make investments the source of Saudi government revenue, not oil,” the prince says. “So within 20 years, we will be an economy or state that doesn’t depend mainly on oil.”

If $2 trillion isn’t enough for Prince Mohammed bin Salman to end his country’s dependence on oil, American frackers will be happy to do it for him for free.

LIFE IS SO UNFAIR: Our DNA could be factor in age of losing virginity.

A study published this week in Nature Genetics suggests that being cool or uncool, morally liberal or conservative, or attractive or unattractive aren’t the only determining factors when we undergo that “passage to adulthood.” Based on data from 125,000 adults in the British Biobank, DNA could play a huge role, according to the researchers. There were 38 different genetic variants linked with the age of first sexual intercourse, and the researchers were able to discover similar links between one’s DNA and their age of puberty, as well as the age when they had their first child.

“This is hugely important as the timing of these events affects educational achievements as well as physical and mental health,” the U.K. researchers wrote in a press release.

While the researchers stressed that certain genes aren’t exactly surefire signs that one may lose their virginity at an early age or later in life than most others, they added that there are certain gene-based traits, such as impulsivity, that could influence sexual behaviors.

I can tell you from personal experience that losing one’s virginity isn’t necessarily a reliable marker for “passage to adulthood.”

THERE WAS SUPPOSED TO HAVE BEEN AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: A new theory for dinosaur extinction.

Scientists from the University of Reading and the University of Bristol claim that dinos had a longer goodbye than we’d thought. It’s possible that the group spent about 50 million years in decline before going extinct.

That isn’t to say that there wasn’t some massive eruption or collision that finally killed them. About three quarters of all the life on Earth went extinct in the same event, so we know that something big must have gone down (or, in the case of a volcanic eruption, come up). But it’s possible we can’t blame the demise of the dinos entirely on this one event.

After the last eight years, I have nothing but empathy for how the dinosaurs might have felt.

SHOCKER: NATO, Russia meeting confirms ‘profound disagreements’

CHANGE: ‘Deep And Disturbing’ Decline Found In World Media Freedom.

The United States was ranked 41st, up from 49th last year, while Russia’s placement rose from 152nd in 2015 to 148th this year.

Incidents of governments physically impeding access to media outlets increased by 16 percent between 2013 and 2016, according to the group’s “infrastructure” indicator. That includes governments blocking Internet access and destroying broadcast equipment and printing presses.

Other tools increasingly being used by governments to impede independent reporting include laws forbidding, for example, “insulting the president” or “supporting terrorism,” the group said.

“Growing self-censorship is the knock-on effect of this alarming situation,” it said.

How does a country with “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press” baked into its Constitution end up ranked down in the 40s?

Or maybe the question is old news, even to members of our White House Press Corps.

THAT MEANS IT’S WORKING: UnitedHealth Group to exit Obamacare exchanges in all but a ‘handful’ of states.

“We will be down to a handful of states that we will be actively participating in the exchanges,” Stephen J. Hemsley, chief executive officer of UnitedHealth Group said in an earnings call, noting that the small market size and greater expense of patients insured through the marketplaces led the insurer to make the decision.

UnitedHealth plans to withdraw from health insurance marketplaces in Arkansas, Michigan, Connecticut and parts of Georgia. The decision is a sequel to an announcement by executives late last year that the insurer had suffered financial losses and might leave the health exchanges altogether in 2017. UnitedHealth reported that it expects to lose $650 million in the exchanges in 2016.

UnitedHealth is only a minor player on the exchanges, yet the company still expects to lose most of a billion dollars just this year.

But UnitedHealth is hardly alone. Even the pro-ObamaCare Kaiser Family Foundation said that “Something has to give” on the exchanges, and that “Either insurers will drop out or insurers will raise premiums.”

HEATHER MAC DONALD: Back to Bedlam.

Chicago had a harbinger of its current depolicing situation in 2012. Chicago police superintendent Garry McCarthy had disbanded a city-wide, anti-gang task force that advocates had criticized for allegedly making too many stops in minority neighborhoods. Homicides soared, ultimately reaching 500 that year. South Side residents begged for the reconstitution of the task force and the resumption of stops. “We have had enough,” the grandmother of a murder victim told the Telegraph, afraid to give her name for fear of retribution. “The older folks are terrified. We need the police to crack down on them. Responsibly yes, but forcefully.” A local city councilman, Willie Cochran, said that his constituents “wanted a more aggressive force engaging these terrorists on the streets.” His community was “ready to stand by the police” in the face of complaints about “racial profiling,” Cochran added. McCarthy reconstituted the unit in 2013 and the shooting epidemic cooled. (This connection between depolicing and crime has been repeatedly confirmed empirically, most recently in a study of Justice Department police consent decrees.)

The activists’ standard charge against cops in the post-Ferguson era is that they are peevishly refusing to do their jobs in childish protest against mere “public scrutiny.” This anodyne formulation whitewashes what has been going on in the streets as a result of the sometimes-violent agitation against them. Cops are routinely cursed and screamed at; sometimes bottles and rocks are thrown. “In my 19 years in law enforcement, I haven’t seen this kind of hatred toward the police,” a Chicago cop who works on the South Side tells me.

Read the whole thing. But it shouldn’t surprise anyone that a return to ’70s-style policing and attitudes towards law enforcement would bring a return of ’70s violence.

THE BITTER FRUITS OF ONE-CHILD POLICY: China’s Grieving Parents Demand Compensation.

“I don’t have any hope anymore,” said Zhou Ru Xian, whose 24-year-old daughter died in 2013.

Zhou was among those at a Beijing protest highlighting the issue on Tuesday. Hundreds of police officers later herded many of the demonstrators onto buses.

The anger of such parents has intensified since the government last year announced it was reforming the one-child policy and giving couples the option of having a second baby. For decades, such an offense brought serious punishment including jail time, fines, or forced sterilization.

Critics claim changing family planning laws now may not be enough to stave off a demographic crisis in China. The population is expected to peak at 1.45 billion by 2050, when one-in-three Chinese will be over the age of 60 and a shrinking workforce may be unable to keep up.

Florida is this country’s most popular retirement destination, yet “only” about one in five people there are 65 or older.

MARC THIESSEN: Trump’s ‘voterless’ election myth.

This is dead wrong. In both Colorado and Wyoming, all registered Republican voters in the state had the chance to vote and participate in the delegate selection process.

The Wyoming Republican Party website explains the process clearly: “Delegates to the state convention are elected by the county conventions. Delegates to the county convention are elected by precinct caucuses in their respective counties. Any person registered to vote Republican as of the call for precinct caucuses in a given precinct may vote in that precinct’s caucus” (emphasis added).

In other words, there is a whole lot of voting going on. All Republicans in Wyoming had the chance to go to their precinct and vote for delegates who support their preferred candidate. And they did so in record numbers. In Laramie County, for example, the lines ran out the door on Super Tuesday, and turnout was up almost 400 percent compared with 2012. “The lines outside, they are amazing,” said Glen Chavez, a first-time caucus-goer. “If you’ve never taken part in something like this, get involved. If you want to make the difference, you make the change.”

The same was true for Colorado.

Read the whole thing.

“Voterless election” makes for great clickbait and angry social media chatter, but it just isn’t true.

ANOTHER INDICATION THAT THERE’S TOO MUCH MONEY IN POLITICS: Bernie Sanders Supporters Shower Hillary Clinton Motorcade With $1 Bills.

As the motorcade passed, Sanders supporters played the song “We’re In The Money.” After it was out of sight, they danced in the street and stomped on the dollar bills, according to CNN.

Sanders, who wants to reform the campaign finance system, has criticized Clinton for holding pricey fundraisers hosted by the Clooneys in both San Francisco and Los Angeles. Tickets for the Los Angeles event, which was co-hosted by Jeffrey and Marilyn Katzenberg, Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw and Haim and Cheryl Saban, were priced at $33,400 per person. A couple wishing to co-chair the event in San Francisco had to pony up $353,000.

Asked whether he thought the pricing was appropriate in an interview on “Meet the Press,” Clooney gave a convoluted explanation.

“Yes. I think it’s an obscene amount of money. I think that, you know, we had some protesters last night when we pulled up in San Francisco and they’re right to protest. They’re absolutely right. It is an obscene amount of money. The Sanders campaign when they talk about it is absolutely right. It’s ridiculous that we should have this kind of money in politics. I agree completely.”

It’s practically a given that Clooney has never devoted any real thought as to why people are eager to give so much money to politicians.

I HAD BEEN TOLD THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: New Research Shows Vegetable Oils Are Not Good for Heart Diseases.

The belief that vegetable oils replacing saturated fats improve heart health dates back to the 1960s, when studies showed that these oils lowered blood cholesterol levels. Several studies have been conducted since then that suggests the same conclusion.

However, the conclusion that linoleic-acid dietary interventions can reduce the risk of heart attacks have never been shown in randomized controlled trials, which is considered the gold standard in medical research.

The Minnesota Coronary Experiment (MCE) has unpublished results with the conclusion that the intervention lowered cholesterol levels, but it made no difference in heart attack risks, deaths due to heart disease or overall deaths.

Chris Ramsden, a medical investigator, and colleagues came across the study and recovered the data, Medical Xpress reported. They performed analyses which confirmed the results of the experiment. The autopsy reports they also uncovered revealed that the corn oil group has nearly twice the number of heart attack occurrence than the control group.

Why did those reports go unpublished for 50 years?

FRACK THIS: No Agreement on Oil Freeze at Doha Meeting.

The sticking point was Iran’s participation, or lack thereof:

Saudi Arabia’s position that Iran join the freeze or there would be no deal scuttled the discussions before they started, participants said, and the meeting descended into sniping and confusion.

On Saturday, the day before the meeting, Saudi Arabia’s powerful deputy crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, was quoted by Bloomberg News as ruling out any deal that didn’t include Iran.

Other Saudi officials in the delegation had signaled on Saturday evening that the kingdom would consider a freeze without Iran’s participation, and a draft agreement was circulated, according to participants.

Maybe this is one of those non-Kissingerian formulations where both sides can lose.

MODERN COCKTAIL CULTURE: This Vodka’s 200 Times Hotter Than Sriracha, And It’s Only Getting Hotter.

The 500,000 Scovilles bottle of Naga Chili Vodka is nearly as strong as the weakest pepper spray on the market, which is still ridiculously painful. Still think you can handle it? Yeah, everyone does.

If you order a bottle from the Masters of Malt and have an interesting, sad or crazy story to go along with it, let me know! Also, don’t be a hero.

If anyone offers you a Dirty Bomb Martini, take a pass.

THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: British hospital livestreams surgery in virtual reality.

LI’L KIM GETS SPANKED: North Korea’s failed missile launch prompts ‘saber-rattling’ jibe from China media.

“The firing of a mid-range ballistic missile on Friday by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), though failed, marks the latest in a string of saber-rattling that, if unchecked, will lead the country to nowhere,” China’s official Xinhua news agency said in an English language commentary.

“…Nuclear weapons will not make Pyongyang safer. On the contrary, its costly military endeavors will keep on suffocating its economy.”

Beijing has been beginning to enforce economic sanctions on Pyongyang, which as StrategyPage noted, “is very unusual.” And now comes this public rebuke from China’s state news agency.

Predicting the imminent demise of the Kim Regime has long been a fool’s errand, but maybe this is a good time to be a fool.

SHOCKER: Japan’s Negative-Rate Experiment Is Floundering.

Trading has withered in Japan’s money markets, where big banks and others usually park their excess cash hoping to receive some interest—despite predictions from the Bank of Japan that its latest easing of monetary policy would spark more activity. And there has been a rush in demand for Japanese government bonds even as many yields went below zero.

The unusual source: foreign investors, who in the past have largely stayed out of the low-yield market but have recently jumped in because of rising returns on Japanese-bond trades using cheaply-funded yen.

Such side effects have come as Japan’s currency, the yen, has also been on an unexpected tear, trading at around 18-month highs against the U.S. dollar in recent weeks. Lower interest rates normally lead a country’s currency to depreciate, helping its exporters—a key aim of so-called ‘Abenomics,’ the package of stimulus measures brought in by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

It’s almost as though central governments and central bankers can’t conjure up prosperity at will.

Or as though the Law of Unintended Consequences never gets the last laugh.

PRAISE WHERE IT’S DUE: Obama to Help Push for Open Market for Cable Set-Top Boxes.

In an unusual step, Mr. Obama will weigh in personally on a pending proposal at the Federal Communications Commission, filing comments that encourage it to loosen cable companies’ grip on the boxes. And he will sign an executive order calling on every federal agency to send him proposals within 60 days for steps they can take to promote competition in a range of industries and better protect consumers.

The F.C.C. proposal would allow subscribers to choose and purchase the devices they use to view television programming, instead of leasing the boxes from their cable companies at an average annual cost of $231. The F.C.C. approved the proposal in February, starting a 60-day comment period that will soon close.

Good.

The chairman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers said that “this just seemed like a clear-cut case where you could get a win for consumers and a win for innovation,” and he’s right.