Steve Sailer goes to the theater.

A simple model that helps make much about the modern world easier to comprehend is that of a high-low tag team against the middle. As part of a time-tested strategy of divide and rule, the rich tend to push for policies and attitudes that increase identity-politics divisiveness—more immigration, more Black Lives Matter rioting, more transgender agitation, and so forth—which makes it harder for the nonrich to team up politically to promote their mutual economic interests.

You could call it: “Diverse and Conquer.”

As I have been saying for years.

A striking example of how identity politics turn in practice into the Zillionaire Liberation Front has emerged in the war over which Dead White Male to kick off the currency to make room for a woman: the $10 bill’s Alexander Hamilton or the $20’s Andrew Jackson. Bizarrely, the reactionary genius Hamilton, apostle of rule by the rich, is rapidly morphing in the conventional wisdom’s imagination into an Honorary Nonwhite.

…

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop musical Hamilton had already been a sensation when it debuted Off Broadway months before Lew’s announcement about the ten-spot. And it’s not hard to grasp how the show fits exactly what wealthy white New York liberals want to see: minorities defending Wall Street. It’s the Obama of musicals. (The president, by the way, made time in his schedule to see Hamilton twice last year.)

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The European Commission last week moved one step closer toward implementing a series of tax and regulatory proposals aimed directly at American businesses. This proposal is a thinly veiled tax grab at U.S. businesses and workers that will make it even harder for American businesses to operate across the world and could leave taxpayers on the hook for billions in retroactive payments.

This plan is being developed based on the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) project, a broader effort by tax collectors in many countries to surreptitiously extract more revenue from businesses operating across the world.

The European plan includes an information-sharing regime that will allow countries to trade sensitive tax information with each other and will designate many existing tax arrangements as “illegal state aid.” This could completely overhaul how business taxes are applied by unilaterally overriding existing tax agreements held between the U.S. and many of its trading partners and could force U.S. companies to pay taxes retroactively.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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Let that be a lesson to us all. Stick close to your desks, and never go to sea.

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What do you get if you preside over 15 straight quarters of shrinking sales, evaporating profit and a sliding share price? A seven figure bonus if you are Ginni Rometty, the chief exec at IBM.

Her base salary for 2015 remained unchanged at $1.6m, but the bonus swelled by $1m to $4.6m. Oh, and the long term incentives package (due to vest in 2019) was $13.3m, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

The package is up on the $3.6m of last year, with the exec refusing to take home a bonus in 2013 citing “disappointment at the company’s output.” No such gesture was made for 2015.

Sounds like a great post-President job for Obama. He’s got the right skill-set.

Put this with Carly Fiorina’s tenure at HP and Marissa Mayer at Yahoo, and maybe you can begin to see why there aren’t a lot of female big-corp CEOs. Just maybe.

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First vocalist with Jefferson Airplane. Died the same day as Paul Kantner, which probably means something.

Her best-known song was ‘Chauffeur Blues’, which appeared on the album ‘Jefferson Airplane Takes Off’ in 1966.  However, she left the band in the same year after becoming a mother.

And that speaks well of her.

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A passenger plane was forced to make an emergency landing because two stewardesses got into a mid-air fist fight, according to reports.

The brawl, which the company put down to ‘work issues’, happened on the Delta plane around 40 minutes into its journey from Los Angeles to Minneapolis.

A third female flight attendant, who tried to break up the brawl, was reportedly hit in the face.

It is so hard to get good help these days.

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After all, what could go wrong?

Ponder a world where it’s okay to genetically modify embryos but not crops.

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Is California the most conservative state?

Now that I have your attention, just how would California qualify as a beacon of conservatism? It depends how you define the term.

Since the rise of Ronald Reagan, most conservatives have defined themselves by pledging loyalty to market capitalism, supporting national defense and defending sometimes vague “traditional” social values. Yet in the Middle Ages, and throughout much of Europe, conservatism meant something very different: a focus primarily on maintaining comfortable places for the gentry, built around a strong commitment to hierarchy, authority and a singular moral order.

Until recently, modern California has not embraced this static form of conservatism. The biggest difference between a Pat Brown or a Reagan was not their goals – greater upward mobility and technical progress – but how they might be best advanced, whether through the state, the private sector or something in-between. Under both leaders, California evolved into a remarkable geography of opportunity.

In contrast, California’s new conservatism, often misleadingly called progressivism, seeks to prevent change by discouraging everything – from the construction of new job-generating infrastructure to virtually any kind of family-friendly housing. The resulting ill-effects on the state’s enormous population of poor and near-poor – roughly-one third of households – have been profound, although widely celebrated by the state’s gentry class.

Most people from a hundred years ago would look at the modern American ‘Left’ and call them dyed-in-the-wool reactionaries.

Ross Douthat at his best.

The state of the union isn’t all that one might hope, but it could clearly be a whole lot worse.

So what are Trumpistas and Bern-feelers rebelling against?

One answer might be that they’re fed up with exactly this — the politics of “it could be worse,” of stagnation and muddling through. They aren’t revolting against abject failure, or deep and swift decline. They’re rebelling against decadence.

Well said.

But don’t just think about the word in moral or aesthetic terms. Think of it as a useful way of describing a society that’s wealthy, powerful, technologically proficient — and yet seemingly unable to advance in the way that its citizens once took for granted. A society where people have fewer children and hold diminished expectations for the future, where institutions don’t work particularly well but can’t seem to be effectively reformed, where growth is slow and technological progress disappoints. A society that fights to a stalemate in its foreign wars, even as domestic debates repeat themselves without any resolution. A society disillusioned with existing religions and ideologies, but lacking new sources of meaning to take their place.

This is how many Americans, many Westerners, experience their civilization in the early years of the 21st century. And both Trump and Bernie Sanders, in their very different ways, are telling us that we don’t have to settle for it anymore.

Bingo.

There are pathways up from decadence. But there are more roads leading down.

Yup.

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It’s hard to read about how Saudi Arabia’s rulers are handling the collapse of oil prices without recalling the end of the Soviet Union. Every petro-state has to ponder this precedent, but for the Saudis the parallels must be unnerving. Consider: Their economy is inefficient and undiversified, based on irrational pricing and vast subsidies. There’s no modern taxation system; money just sloshes around, Soviet-style, on the basis of insider connections. There are no mechanisms of meaningful political representation, and after years of senescent leadership a new generation is clamoring to take over. Growing ethnic divisions and the military’s huge share of the economy round out the picture. To all this, add a sharp drop in export earnings, and it’s no surprise that people worry about systemic failure.

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The Campbell Club at the University of Oregon is $17,000 in debt because, well, people take its anti-capitalist bona fides seriously. Or they’re just lazy bums.

The Daily Emerald reports that the Student Cooperative Association, which oversees campus co-ops, will shut down the Campbell Club in two months if it doesn’t pay its tab.

Just as ‘capitalism’ was invented by Karl Marx to serve as a shame-name for an economic system that was UnGood (i.e. not communism), so ‘anti-capitalist’ is embraced by people who dislike economic procedures that personally inconvenience them, such as paying rent, buying stuff rather than just getting it for free, and the like.

One of these days I’m going to do an article on The Myth of Capitalism and explain the damage to Western intellectual history by Marxism that is largely off the radar.

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The most formidable foe Indian commandos face are Indian politicians. Since 2013 Indian special operations forces and the various branches of the military have sought to form a united Special Forces Command based on the success of the American SOCOM (Special Operations Command). Created in the 1980s SOCOM went on to be the model for similar organizations in many other nations. One of the most recent was Israel in 2007. That is important because Israel has become a major defense supplier and military ally of India since the 1990s and the two countries exchange a lot military-related information and experiences. Indian officers and special operations troops are quite familiar with the success of the Israeli SOCOM. But by late 2015 these Indian efforts were blocked by a lack of government willingness to back the proposal and the fact that half the Indian armed forces (and nearly as many of the special operations troops) are not in the military but an equally large collection of paramilitary forces controlled by other bureaucracies. This was done on purpose in the late 1940s to prevent the possibility that the military would become powerful enough to take over the government. That has worked. Neighboring Pakistan went in another direction, building a relatively more powerful military and has suffered periodic military takeovers. But India has several other cultural differences from Pakistan that have helped prevent coups. Meanwhile many non-defense branches of the Indian government have grown fond of having their own armed forces and mainly because of that have been unwilling to give up or share control of their special operations forces. In reaction to that the military has been reluctant to provide assistance to these paramilitary forces, even when there was a strong case for it (as in efforts to deal with Islamic terrorism, leftist rebels and armed separatist groups).

A pity. In the world that is to come, India will one of our few potential allies against an expansionist Red China, and we need her to be as strong as possible.

Steve Sailer is guilty of the crime of Noticing.

I coined the term “the White Death” to refer to the rise in death rates among non-elderly whites during this century. It appears to be related to overdoses from prescription painkillers and heroin. Nobody paid much, if any, attention to it until economist Angus Deaton put out a paper on it last fall right after he won the econ (quasi-)Nobel.

“The Black Death” can refer to the >16 percent rise in homicide rates in big cities in 2015 over 2014. Nobody has crunched the numbers by race yet, but most of this appears to be a spike in black-on-black murders. This is likely related in some manner to Black Lives Matter agitation against law and order.

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Whilst President Obama and his administration are waging non-violent war against Israel, and Swedish dignitaries are playing the old, old game of anti-Semitic blood libel at the behest of foreign (Muslim) relations, they are allowing forced religious prostitution of young girls and women all across Europe, Canada and, one must assume, the US. No cases have yet come out in the US, but one can be sure that the motivation is there, but maybe, just maybe, the thought of an angry father, armed to the teeth, is more than the average ‘brave’ Muslim sex jihadist can contemplate.

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We have now reached the point where we have professional beggars. Lucky us.

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Welcome to the club.

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That would certainly explain Congress.

Steve Sailer pierces the Veil of Ignorance.

Another one of those ideas looming just outside the realm of the thinkable is that for the Democrats to import ringers from abroad to win elections, which Democrats have boasted about throughout this century, is a shameless example of political corruption. This is especially true when the Democrats are more or less explicitly making a deal with the Republican donor class: You Republican plutocrats immediately reap the economic advantages of immigration to your net worths, we Democratic politicians later reap the political advantages of their children’s votes.

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As the United States faces the not-impossible prospect of an openly socialist president, Sen. Bernie Sanders, it is worth a quick revisit, from The Washington Post today, to how Venezuela’s socialist government is doing.

Hint: Poorly.

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His then-fiancee, who wasn’t even a UT student, posted criticism of two UT professors and tagged Barnett.

I think Communist regimes classify this as ‘associating with disruptive elements’.

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Hint: Not only is she a crook, she’s an incompetent crook.

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A college bound high school student criticized Black Lives Matter in his school paper and received death threats.

Free speech? We don’t need no stinkin’ free speech.

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It has gotten to the point where we need elected representatives to fight for due process on college campuses.

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By now, it has been nearly forty years since the Cultural Revolution officially ended, yet in China, considering the magnitude and significance of the event, it has remained a poorly examined, under-documented subject. Official archives are off-limits. Serious books on the period, whether comprehensive histories, in-depth analyses, or detailed personal memoirs, are remarkably few. Ji Xianlin’s The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which has just been released in English for the first time, is something of an anomaly.

At the center of the book is the cowshed, the popular term for makeshift detention centers that had sprung up in many Chinese cities at the time. This one was set up at the heart of the Peking University campus, where the author was locked up for nine months with throngs of other fallen professors and school officials, doing manual labor and reciting tracts of Mao’s writing. The inferno atmosphere of the place, the chilling variety of physical and psychological violence the guards daily inflicted on the convicts with sadistic pleasure, the starvation and human degeneration—all are vividly described. Indeed, of all the memoirs of the Cultural Revolution, I cannot think of another one that offers such a devastatingly direct and detailed testimony on the physical and mental abuse an entire imprisoned intellectual community suffered. After reading the book, a Chinese intellectual friend summed it up to me: “This is our Auschwitz.”

This is what electing people like Bernie Sanders inevitably leads to. We’re already seeing the signs among college students, academics, and the media, not coincidentally Sanders’ most enthusiastic supporters.

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I take it you all know by now this is quite an ugly story, namely that both early progressives and late 19th century American economists were often quite appalling racists and eugenicists, and that such racism was built into the professional structure of economics in a fairly fundamental way, including but not restricted to the American Economics Association.

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A 17-year-old girl who was physically and sexually attacked in Sønderborg will herself face charges for using pepper spray to fend off her assailant.

This sort of breakdown in civil order is what fostered the rise of paramilitary militias in Germany between the world wars and eventually birthed the totalitarian Nazi regime. The first duty of a government, the very first duty of a government, is to protect its people from criminals and foreigners, and when any government falls down on that particular job, people make ‘alternative arrangements’.

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A new study suggests that a disproportionate number of professors are gay.

Doesn’t surprise me.

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No doubt you’ve had January 25, 2016 marked on your calendar this last decade, waiting for al-Gore’s shining prediction at the Sundance Film Festival in 2006, which actually began with one of his books in 1996. [I forget which one now, but I remember him saying we’d have to learn to get along without the internal combustion engine. And from then on he walked everywhere (small lie in aid of his larger truthiness)].

…

But the world he swore would be much worse, with flooding in Manhattan, droughts and super-hurricanes? No, they didn’t happen; and that nor’easter this past weekend was within normal limits for weather. So yet again #ClimateHell has been deferred. Funny, he bought a mansion on the beach, did Al, while he swore erosion was inescapable. But then he did a lot of that – check out his dealings with Occidental Petroleum, work that bore lots of fruit and none of it ecologically sound, or so the stories report. A do-as-I-say kind of guy, methinks. And a very sad one.

Perhaps the worst of it was another Nobel Peace Prize wasted on another hollow man. In 2007, Gore shared The Peace Prize with the beloved IPCC. They beat out Irena Sendler. (She lost in 2006 and 2008, too. She died at the age of 98 in 2009 so they could finally cross her off the list.)

This woman was an authentic achiever and a real hero. She was a Polish Catholic nurse/social worker who quietly saved at least 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw Ghetto before she was captured and tortured. Though she lived, those war years obviously took their toll: she married three times but never had any children. Without a doubt the PTSD from which she surely suffered – given her heart-stopping work in the Warsaw Ghetto – had a life-changing impact.

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But even better are the less read The Economy of Cities (1970) and Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984), twin volumes which do nothing less than demolish and rebuild macroeconomics. Economics went wrong, she explains, with the work her titles allude to, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Nations aren’t the proper unit of macroeconomic analysis; cities are.

Jacobs arrives at this conclusion by considering the stagflation of the 1970s– simultaneous high unemployment and high inflation, something that was not supposed to be possible under either left-wing (Keynesian) or right-wing (monetarist) economics. They were supposed to trade off. She points out that this condition– high prices and not enough work– is normal for backward regions; Western economists mistook the fitful but constant economic boom from Smith’s time on as a permanent condition.

Thinking in terms of national economies smears over the economic facts. Once we take off these lenses, we can see that the world consists not of developed and poor nations, but of dynamic and poor regions. One of the great advantages of this point of view, in fact, is that we become aware of the backward regions in the First World, and realize that they follow the same dynamics as the Third World. These days they may be comfortable enough due to transfer payments from richer regions, but they are economically passive nonetheless.

And the dynamic regions are centered around cities. (The one apparent exception: supply regions, rich in natural resources. We’ll get back to them below; for now we’ll just note that they’re rich because cities want the resources and come and get them. Arabs didn’t have to travel across the oceans to find people to hawk their oil to.)

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Two base jumpers are feared dead after jumping off a bridge over the Pacific ocean as one man tried to rescue his female companion, officials say.

Mary Katherine “Katie” Connell, from Ventura, California, first jumped off the 260-foot high Bixby Creek Bridge with one parachute and landed in the water below.

Footage not released by police shows that high waves overcame her shortly after landing, as reported by Monterey Herald.

The footage also shows her companion from Finland, who has not yet been named, jumping off the same bridge on about 7.30am Wednesday morning to rescue her. Both are now feared dead.

Think of it as evolution in action.

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Ironically, several students and faculty have reacted to the notion they want to stifle free speech by savagely attacking the event, with some of them arguing it should be shut down.

Liberals are fascists. They prove it by their actions every day.

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This could be how our experiment with grassroots democracy finally ends. World leaders—the super-rich, their pet nonprofits, their media boosters, and their allies in the global apparat—gather in Paris to hammer out a deal to transform the planet, and our lives. No one asks much about what the states and the communities, the electorate, or even Congress, thinks of the arrangement. The executive now presumes to rule on these issues.

For many of the world’s leading countries—China, Russia, Saudi Arabia—such top-down edicts are fine and dandy, particularly since their supreme leaders won’t have to adhere to them if inconvenienced. But the desire for centralized control is also spreading among the shrinking remnant of actual democracies, where political give and take is baked into the system.

The will to power is unmistakable. California Gov. Jerry Brown, now posturing as the aged philosopher-prince fresh from Paris, hails the “coercive power of the state” to make people live properly by his lights. California’s high electricity prices, regulation-driven spikes in home values, and the highest energy prices in the continental United States, may be a bane for middle- and working-class families, but are sold as a wonderful achievement among our presumptive masters.

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Pair both wearing helmets when accident happened.

People who indulge in stupid ‘sports’ deserve what they get.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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British anarchists are among agitators who are stirring up trouble in Calais, where migrants and protesters stormed the port and boarded a ferry on Saturday, according to reports.

A number of Britons are said to be in Calais with No Borders, an anti-capitalist protest group accused of acting as agitators in the camp dubbed “The Jungle” that is home to an estimated 4,000 asylum seekers.

The port was forced to close for several hours and security forces were drafted in on Saturday evening when a crowd of around 350 people, said to be refugees and supporters, infiltrated secure areas at the quayside.

Well, it seems to me that, if the French were to move these ‘refugees’ elsewhere, such as BACK WHERE THEY CAME FROM, this wouldn’t be a problem.

According to The Sun one of the activists detained was a British man who was later released without charge.

And there’s the problem, right there. Every time one of these idiots is ‘released without charge’, they are encouraged to do it again. And again.

Local official Jean-Marc Puissesseau has estimated passenger numbers in the port have fallen by 40,000 compared to a year ago and the town’s shops and restaurants are suffering, with blame pointed at the squalid refugee camp and repeated interruption to ferry and rail services.

Boy, that French government is really effective, isn’t it?

The Other McCain is on the case.

This is an important ruling because there is no First Amendment in Canada. Americans are prone to take free speech and freedom of the press for granted, and thus have been slow to recognize the menace to liberty posed by feminism (a Totalitarian Movement to Destroy Civilization as We Know It). Feminists are notoriously intolerant of criticism, and have effectively prohibited opposition in academia, where Lawrence Summers was purged from the presidency of Harvard University in 2006 after he dared to suggest there are “innate differences” between men and women.

Having obtained hegemonic authority in academia, feminists are endeavoring to silence opposition to their radical agenda in every other venue. The persecution of Greg Elliott as a scapegoat was clearly intended to make an example of him, a form of terroristic intimidation using the power of government to crush him, so as to send a message: “Disagree with a feminist, and this will happen to you, too.”

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The choice of a single textbook for one section of a course at one university might seem like a decidedly local issue. But a dispute over whether an academic department may impose such a selection on all faculty members in a multisection course has set off a large debate over how textbook choices should be evaluated, who should select textbooks, whether price should be a factor, and academic freedom.

These issues came to a head Friday when Alain Bourget, an associate professor of mathematics at California State University at Fullerton, appeared before a faculty grievance committee to challenge a reprimand he received for refusing to use a $180 textbook his department had determined was the only appropriate text for an introductory linear algebra and differential equations course. Instead, he used two textbooks, one of which cost about $75 and other of which consists of free online materials.

Bourget maintains that his choices are just as effective educationally and much less expensive — so he should have the right to use them. But the university says that it makes sense for courses that have multiple sections to all use the same textbooks. Both Bourget and the university say their positions are based on principles of academic freedom.

Why is this such a big deal?

The Fullerton text in question is Differential Equations and Linear Algebra, published by Pearson with a suggested price of $196, but available at the Fullerton bookstore for $180 (used editions for much less). The authors are Stephen W. Goode and Scott A. Annin, the chair and vice chair, respectively, of the mathematics department at Fullerton.

Aha.

Read it.

I can certainly believe it. She certainly weirds me out.

It seems, however, that there is a group of “other voters” — i.e., ones not predisposed against Hillary — for whom the Clinton sex scandals have resonance. That group is young radical feminists.

For them, according to this report in the New York Times, what resonates is Hillary’s role in attacking women who spoke out against her husband’s behavior towards them. They tend, it seems, to agree with Donald Trump who says that Hillary “was not a victim; she was an enabler — some of these women have been destroyed, and Hillary worked with” her husband to accomplish their destruction.

For young feminists, this isn’t “old news.” Many of them are learning the details for the first time. And although one can say that to raise the matter now is to “relitigate” it (to use one of President Obama’s favorite dodges), the “litigation” occurs under a new set of rules.

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At the end of a luncheon for The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council in Davos, Switzerland, an informal, highly unscientific poll was taken on a question that has stirred brisk debate: the U.S. presidential contest. The approximately 40 top executives were asked: Show of hands, how many of you expect Donald Trump to be the next president?

No hands.

How many expect him to be the Republican nominee?

A few hands in the air.

How many of you expect Hillary Clinton to be the next president?

Nearly every hand in the room shot up.

There. Now we know how the Crust would vote … possibly the best endorsement for Trump obtainable.

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But you knew that.

And even if it weren’t, we’d just wind up with the crappy system that Britain has.

Shitty free care doesn’t help the people that single-payer is supposed to help.

Mark Steyn persists in pointing out inconvenient truth.

The argument was straightforward. The western world is going out of business because it’s given up having babies. The 20th century welfare state, with its hitherto unknown concepts such as spending a third of your adult lifetime in “retirement”, is premised on the basis that there will be enough new citizens to support the old. But there won’t be. Lazy critics of my thesis thought that I was making a “prediction”, and that my predictions were no more reliable than Al Gore’s or Michael Mann’s on the looming eco-apocalypse. I tried to explain that it’s not really a prediction at all.

…

Enter Islam, which sportingly volunteered to be the children we couldn’t be bothered having ourselves, and which kind offer was somewhat carelessly taken up by the post-Christian west.

…

Last year, Angela Merkel decided to attempt it. The German Chancellor cut to the chase and imported in twelve months 1.1 million Muslim “refugees”. That doesn’t sound an awful lot out of 80 million Germans, but, in fact, the 1.1 million Muslim are overwhelmingly (80 per cent plus) fit, virile, young men. Germany has fewer than ten million people in the same population cohort, among whom Muslims are already over-represented: the median age of Germans as a whole is 46, the median age of German Muslims is 34. But let’s keep the numbers simple, and assume that of those ten million young Germans half of them are ethnic German males. Frau Merkel is still planning to bring in another million “refugees” this year. So by the end of 2016 she will have imported a population equivalent to 40 per cent of Germany’s existing young male cohort. The future is here now: It’s not about “predictions”.

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A Stanford professor is deflecting criticism after allegedly deleting data from research associated with a year-old study in order to avoid inadvertently showing how green energy will kill millions of long-term jobs.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Prof. Mark Jacobson rebuked criticisms brought by Steve Everley of Energy In Depth, an oil industry-backed education project, that supplementary data actually showed using 100 percent green energy would result in 1.2 million jobs being eliminated from the economy.

Jacobson said Everley’s claim was a “flat out lie” and relied on “faked data.”

Everley’s claim was based on data taken from Jacobson’s own research, but when Everley went back to show the Stanford professor that the proof was in his own online files, he found the data was gone — Jacobson had deleted it just hours after Everley exposed the job loss numbers.

Ethics? We don’t need no stinkin’ ethics.

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Israel is demonized and singled out by the media and international bodies. Israel is accused of excessive use of force, despite its great efforts to minimize collateral damage, while the massacres by the Assad regime or the heavy collateral damage resulting from Saudi attacks in Yemen are hardly mentioned. The EU decided to mark the products of the Israeli settlements beyond the “Green Line,” taking no similar action for the products in northern Cyprus (occupied by Turkey), or in Tibet (occupied by China), or in Western Sahara (occupied by Morocco). Israel, a democratic state, is accused of human rights violations, while the UN ignores the human rights violations of many of its members.

The reasons for the dislike of the Jewish state are numerous and often reinforce each other.

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“To regard it as one of life’s premiere moral injustices to have to eat dinner underneath a portrait of Woodrow Wilson is to lose perspective on what is happening in the world.” That was former Harvard University President Larry Summers’ take on the increasingly petty concerns of college students, which he shared during a revealing conversation with The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol.

‘Creeping’? Say rather ‘galloping’.

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For the last several months, social scientists have been debating the striking findings of a study by the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton.* Between 1998 and 2013, Case and Deaton argue, white Americans across multiple age groups experienced large spikes in suicide and fatalities related to alcohol and drug abuse—spikes that were so large that, for whites aged 45 to 54, they overwhelmed the dependable modern trend of steadily improving life expectancy. While critics have challenged the magnitude and timing of the rise in middle-age deaths (particularly for men), they and the study’s authors alike seem to agree on some basic points: Problems of mental health and addiction have taken a terrible toll on whites in America—though seemingly not in other wealthy nations—and the least educated among them have fared the worst.

And everywhere they look the cry of ‘White Privelege!’ sounds from their newspapers and their TV sets, their college campuses and their shopping malls. I’m surprised they’re not doing worse than they are.

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Members of the Ohio University activist group Black Lives Action Coalition (BLAC) want to see compulsory “cultural competency” courses established for the spring of 2017.

We could hold them out in the woods and call them Re-Education Camps.

And people could be expelled for racist/sexist/homophobe/whatever ThoughtCrime! Yeah, that’s the ticket.

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As a Democrat, she wants to buy your vote; and she realizes that you’re easy, but not cheap.

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The elites who live extravagantly along the coast have their own peasants – nannies, gardeners, maintenance workers and security guards. They account for one-sixth of the welfare recipients in America. The shrinking middle class, meanwhile, “drives on substandard roads to a job that does not quite pay for his once overpriced but now underwater house, or the most expensive and highly taxed gas in the nation.”

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Fifteen years ago this month, on Jan. 20, 2001, his last day in office, Bill Clinton issued a pardon for international fugitive Marc Rich. It would become perhaps the most condemned official act of Clinton’s political career. A New York Times editorial called it “a shocking abuse of presidential power.” The usually Clinton-friendly New Republic noted it “is often mentioned as Exhibit A of Clintonian sliminess.”

…

What bothered so many was that Clinton’s clemency to Rich reeked of payoff. In the run-up to the presidential pardon, the financier’s ex-wife Denise had donated $450,000 to the fledgling Clinton Library and “over $1 million to Democratic campaigns in the Clinton era.”

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Rich died in 2013. But his business partners, lawyers, advisers and friends have showered millions of dollars on the Clintons in the decade and a half following the scandal.

Clinton corruption .. the gift that keeps on giving.

“And I say unto you, make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness, that when ye fail, they may receive you into everlasting habitations.” — Luke 16:9.

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Ever notice how feel-good government programs by The Great Nanny wind up encouraging people to lie, cheat, and steal?

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The Kennedy Political Union, the student organization that hosted the event, imposed a no-filming rule after explicitly inviting “student media” to cover Cullors’ speech and even reserving seats for reporters.

What are they trying to hide?

Organizers may have had reason to fear that a moment from Cullors’ talk would go viral. In her opening remarks, Cullors addressed a rumor that activists who disagree with her may be present among the crowd.

Oh, ya think? What are they trying to hide? Actionable slander, perhaps?

Is it time to coin the hashtag #BlackPrivilege?