I have good news for you, Mr. Obama!  You don't have to worry about "climate change" being the "greatest national security threat our country faces" anymore!  In your Coast Guard Academy speech on May 20, you said that "severe drought helped to create the instability in Nigeria that was exploited by the terrorist group Boko Haram."  You can retract that now - because the latest evidence, published yesterday (6/02), is that northern Nigeria and the entire area of the southern Sahara Desert is getting greener because of more CO2 in the atmosphere. Yes!  Rising greenhouse gases -- all that CO2 which we've been pumping into the atmosphere that's been frightening you so much - has caused rains to return to the "Sahel" or southern Sahara from Senegal to Sudan, Aren't you overjoyed?  Absolutely thrilled for those Africans who've been starving, scraping a marginal and precarious living on the edge of the desert?  What's that?  You're not?  You think this is terrible news - because it threatens your narrative of climate change as a national security threat bogey-man?

Despite a generation in which radical anti-crime policies such as enforcing the law and locking up criminals slashed murder rates, there's still plenty of debate over whether anti-crime policies work. But no one can argue over whether pro-crime policies work. 108 people were shot in New York, Baltimore and Chicago over this past weekend. Many of the casualties were thus saved from that terrible "school-to-prison pipeline" that bedevils promising young crack dealers and instead went straight to the morgue. Baltimore has just racked up its deadliest month since 1999. The fascist pigs no longer go down to the ghetto to hassle misunderstood youth who are just protesting police brutality by shooting each other. When they do, they're confronted by angry mobs brandishing ObamaPhones set to record outrageous police misconduct such as arresting career criminals and drug dealers like Freddie Gray. The Baltimore cops got Obama's message loud and clear. So did the gangs.

History is full of instances where a rising power, aggrieved and dissatisfied, acts aggressively to obtain new borders or other international concessions. In Russia today we see a much more unusual case: This increasingly menacing and ambitious geopolitical actor is a state in decline. Notwithstanding Russia's nuclear arsenal and its vast territories, the distinguishing feature of the country today is its striking economic underdevelopment and weakness. For all Russia's oil and gas, the country's international sales of goods and services last year only barely edged out Belgium's - and were positively dwarfed by the Netherlands'. While Russia's childbearing patterns today look entirely European, its mortality patterns look Third World - and in some ways worse. According to estimates by the World Health Organization, a 15-year-old youth has worse survival chances today in Russia than in 33 of the 48 places the United Nations designates as "least developed countries," including such impoverished locales as Mali, Yemen and even Afghanistan. Russia's "high education, low human capital" paradox also shows up in Russia's extreme "knowledge production" deficit. Long-term economic progress depends on improving productivity through new knowledge - but this is something Russia appears mysteriously unable to do. In the modern era, the ultimate source of national wealth and power is not natural resources: It is human resources. And unfortunately for Russia, its human-resource situation is almost unrelievedly dismal - with worse likely in the years to come.

If you are reading this before breakfast, please consider having an egg, yolk included. Any day now, the US government will officially accept the advice to drop cholesterol from its list of "nutrients of concern" altogether.  A sixty-year torrent of bad dietary advice is coming to an end. The evidence has been building for years that eating cholesterol does not cause high blood cholesterol.  It's not some vile poison but an essential ingredient of life, which makes animal cell membranes flexible and is the raw material for making hormones, like testosterone and estrogen. Your liver manufactures most of the cholesterol found in your blood from scratch, and adjusts for what you ingest, which is why diet does not determine blood cholesterol levels. Lowering blood cholesterol by changing diet is all but impossible. From the very first, the studies that linked the ingestion of cholesterol and saturated animal fats to cardiovascular disease were not just flawed, but fraudulent.