Read it.

The University of Louisville is being ripped for a job posting for a professor that it said could only be filled by an “African-American, Hispanic-American or Native American Indian.”

The website Inside Higher Ed, in a story with the headline “Whites, Asians Need Not Apply,” reported Wednesday that the posting raised legal questions about limiting job searches only to specific racial and ethnic groups, The Courier-Journal says.

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

The ad for an assistant professor in U of L’s physics and astronomy department was abruptly removed from higheredjobs.com Tuesday after the department got a complaint that the preferences didn’t include people who have disabilities, the story said.

So it wasn’t Politically Correct enough. That’s good to know.

Cindy Hess, a university spokeswoman, said the ad was in error “because we did not intend to exclude any group or persons from applying for the position.” She added that the job will be re-posted, the story said.

Well, really, they did, they just didn’t want to be so public about it. I’ll bet you a paycheck that the person ultimately hired won’t be white or Asian.

Read it.

A psychopath, according to the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R), which is often used as a diagnostic tool to determine levels of psychopathy and antisocial behaviour will often display some or all of several key signs.  Psychopaths are often pathological liars, have very high self-estimation, are impulsive and fail to regulate and take responsibility for their behaviours.

Hillary Clinton. Ask me a hard one.

The first thing that Wells shares about his behaviour is that how he acts is strongly dependent on the circumstances. He deliberately changes how he acts according to the situation he finds himself in.

Any politician. Another easy one.

The process of becoming friends with someone that Wells describes seems extremely superficial – every move he makes is calculated. Any favours or nice things he does to someone he is ‘close’ to seem to be purely part of a carefully conceived process which aims at eventually being in control of their relationship and making them useful to him.

…

“Psychopaths are often charming, and can emulate emotional intelligence, drawing in the unsuspecting and vulnerable but without becoming truly emotionally engaged.”

Bill Clinton. I’m on a roll.

Read it.

A new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found yet more evidence for the notion that skyrocketing college tuition costs are the result of all-too-generous student loan policies.

The study, authored by Grey Gordon and Aaron Hedlund, used a computer model to measure the effects of various economic forces on college costs. According to the model, no factor had more to do with rising tuition prices than loan subsidies.

“Looking at individual factors, we find that expansions in borrowing limits drive 40% of the tuition jump and represent the single most important factor,” wrote the study’s authors.

Read it.

The Democrats held their presidential candidates’ be-in on ABC this past Saturday night. Time has posted a transcript. I have posted the video below. The be-in made for difficult viewing, but reading the transcript isn’t much easier. It’s painful.

Hillary will of course be the Democratic nominee. She seems to me an increasingly absurd figure. I find it hard to take her seriously, but she’s as serious as cancer. When it comes to anything approaching truth, she’s certainly as deadly. I’m getting ready for Hillary.

…

Those who know their ancient history will recall that Hillary expressly rejected the sedentary role of women as homemakers in the first Clinton presidential campaign of 1992. The ISIS manifesto makes it clear that women are to be subordinate to men. There will be no female leader of ISIS. The very idea of such a role for a woman would strike them as an absurd abomination.

If Hillary Clinton is elected president of the United States, she is therefore highly likely to become ISIS’s best recruiting tool. Regardless, ISIS can go to hell, and it should be among the next president’s first orders to make sure they do.

Read it.

Theodore Dalrymple turns over a rock.

There is no racist like an antiracist: That is because he is obsessed by race, whose actual existence as often as not he denies. He looks at the world through race-tinted spectacles, interprets every event or social phenomenon as a manifestation of racism either implicit or explicit, and in general has the soul of a born inquisitor.

…

Outrage supposedly felt on behalf of others is extremely gratifying for more than one reason. It has the appearance of selflessness, and everyone likes to feel that he is selfless. It confers moral respectability on the desire to hate or despise something or somebody, a desire never far from the human heart. It provides him who feels it the possibility of transcendent purpose, if he decides to work toward the elimination of the supposed cause of his outrage. And it may even give him a reasonably lucrative career, if he becomes a professional campaigner or politician: For there is nothing like stirring up resentment for the creation of a political clientele.

Antiracism is a perfect cause for those with free-floating outrage because it puts them automatically on the side of the angels without any need personally to sacrifice anything. You have only to accuse others of it to feel virtuous yourself. There is no defense against the accusation: The very attempt at a defense demonstrates the truth of it. As a consequence of this, it is a rhetorical weapon of enormous power that can be wielded against anybody who opposes your views. It reduces them to silence.

Read it.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer toy.

Read it.

For that special someone, no need for a fruit cake or fugly sweater. Now you can send lumps of real coal, gift-wrapped with a bow and anonymous note.

Yes, coal—the bad boy of fossil fuels, the bane of environmentalists—gets new life this holiday season as the anti-present for the despised (or those with a sense of humor.)

I’m sure the address for Hillary’s campaign headquarters is on the Internet somewhere.

Read it.

Sounds to me like a self-correcting problem.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

Well, obviously Britain needs an active Black Lives Matter movement. C’mon, let’s get with the program!

Read it.

The colorful, laminated sheets (which can be viewed in this Campus Reform article) are divided into four topic areas officials thought family might ask about, including student activism, Islamophobia, the Harvard’s controversial house master title change and black murders in the street.

The placemats offered helpful responses like: “When I hear students expressing their experiences of racism on campus, I don’t hear complaining. Instead I hear young people uplifting a situation that I might not experience.”

Apparently the world is not yet ready for meal-time lessons on the Party Line.

If they were to think first, then act, they wouldn’t have this problem.

Read it.

Stupidity is a profit opportunity the world ’round. Ask P.T. Barnum.

Steve Sailer sounds the alarm.

Birth tourism isn’t just for Chinese grifters. Here’s the exhaustive website for a birth tourism company — Miami-Mama — for an especially unpopular form of white people: Russians.

A general lesson is that the advantages of living in America and being an American citizen are no longer well defended at present. In the past, Americans could rely to some extent upon distance and complexity to keep out large numbers of the world’s seven billion non-Americans. But the ubiquity of smartphones makes coming to America and scamming past our unsophisticated defenses far more feasible for the con artists of the world. Anything you need to know to worm your way in, you can look up on your phone.

I don’t really have a problem with that. Our immigration system, as with anything run by government employees, is broken — people get in who ought to be kept out, and it takes forever (even when it works) to let in the people who ought to be let in.

It’s hard to blame those with money and a taste for America for trying to game the system, and our legal system, with birthright citizenship, has given those with an appropriately long time horizon a great bypass to drive through. I would favor a Constitutional Amendment to fix the hole that a century of jurisprudence (if one can call it that) has created, but as it is we have to work with what we’ve got. If we’re going to be overrun with foreigners, as the Obama administration seems hell-bent (slur intended) on achieving, I’d rather they were rich and educated than poor and stupid.

Read it.

As we all know, there’s nothing more unthinkable than restricting the right of foreign Muslims to immigrate here because they or their descendants might go on the Internet someday and learn that Allah wants them to commit Jihad at the office Christmas party. You’d have to be a Republican frontrunner to doubt the absolute sanctity of the Zeroth Amendment: that everybody in the rest of the world has the presumption of a right to move here. Granted, exceptions could be made for migrants visibly wearing suicide bomb vests, but to, say, disproportionately pat down Muslim migrants based on the stereotype of Muslim terrorists would be a hideous violation of the Zeroth Amendment.

Read it.

And what will happen? Nothing.

See how effective the UN is?

See how carefully Iran keeps their agreements?

See what an ASS Obama has made of U and ME?

The Other McCain is on a roll.

Diversity is one of those “glittering generalities” — like Equality and Progress and Science — that function in public discourse as a sort of intellectual anesthesia, inducing a trance-like state in which we can be argued into accepting bad policy because any opposition could be characterized as a sin against these vague concepts. Rhetorical invocations of abstract ideals are a sort of counterfeit currency, a substitute for sound logic and sturdy facts, when we are talking about matters of policy that affect the real lives of flesh-and-blood people in a world where the potential consequences of foolish naïveté include War, Famine, Disease and Death.

…

You might think the lessons of history would teach people to be skeptical toward slogans as a substitute for sound policy, but the teaching of history has been hijacked and corrupted by ideologues in much the way journalism has been similarly hijacked and corrupted. The moral of history, as taught in American schools and universities, is the same as the moral of every story in the major news media: Vote Democrat.

Read it.

In the past few years, even as the United States has pulled itself partway out of the jobs hole created by the Great Recession, some economists and technologists have warned that the economy is near a tipping point. When they peer deeply into labor-market data, they see troubling signs, masked for now by a cyclical recovery. And when they look up from their spreadsheets, they see automation high and low—robots in the operating room and behind the fast-food counter. They imagine self-driving cars snaking through the streets and Amazon drones dotting the sky, replacing millions of drivers, warehouse stockers, and retail workers. They observe that the capabilities of machines—already formidable—continue to expand exponentially, while our own remain the same. And they wonder: Is any job truly safe?

The Atlantic is a leftist Voice of the Crust but it has some damned fine writers, who tend to ask the right questions even when their answers are, more often than not, the same ‘progressive’ pap.

Futurists and science-fiction writers have at times looked forward to machines’ workplace takeover with a kind of giddy excitement, imagining the banishment of drudgery and its replacement by expansive leisure and almost limitless personal freedom. And make no mistake: if the capabilities of computers continue to multiply while the price of computing continues to decline, that will mean a great many of life’s necessities and luxuries will become ever cheaper, and it will mean great wealth—at least when aggregated up to the level of the national economy.

The major question mark regarding automation is, not how robots are going to be producing all of these goods for cheap, but how the people who need these cheap goods are going to earn the money to pay for them.

But even leaving aside questions of how to distribute that wealth, the widespread disappearance of work would usher in a social transformation unlike any we’ve seen. If John Russo is right, then saving work is more important than saving any particular job. Industriousness has served as America’s unofficial religion since its founding. The sanctity and preeminence of work lie at the heart of the country’s politics, economics, and social interactions. What might happen if work goes away?

Bear in mind that an automated world doesn’t need a lot of manual labor, and that ‘knowledge work’ doesn’t leave a lot of demand for the half of the population who are, by definition, of less than average intelligence. In a world where people, in large part, define themselves by the work that they do, what happens when there isn’t any work than anyone wants them to do? Even if they have sufficient worldly goods, through government benefits or whatever, a brief glance as the sort of path many heirs of great fortunes take suggests that a disturbing number of them will wind up drones and slackers.

Read it.

Somehow it doesn’t surprise me that Hillary feels comfortable with scofflaws.

And this is a person wanting the job of ‘ensuring that the laws of the United States be enforced’. They don’t even pretend any more.

Read it.

East Asia has been gripped by an unprecedented rise in myopia, also known as short-sightedness. Sixty years ago, 10–20% of the Chinese population was short-sighted. Today, up to 90% of teenagers and young adults are. In Seoul, a whopping 96.5% of 19-year-old men are short-sighted.

Other parts of the world have also seen a dramatic increase in the condition, which now affects around half of young adults in the United States and Europe — double the prevalence of half a century ago. By some estimates, one-third of the world’s population — 2.5 billion people — could be affected by short-sightedness by the end of this decade. “We are going down the path of having a myopia epidemic,” says Padmaja Sankaridurg, head of the myopia programme at the Brien Holden Vision Institute in Sydney, Australia.

And here we thought it was just the politicians who were short-sighted.

It was a good thing they did. After five years, one in five of the children had developed myopia, and the only environmental factor that was strongly associated with risk was time spent outdoors6. “We thought it was an odd finding,” recalls Mutti, “but it just kept coming up as we did the analyses.” A year later, Rose and her colleagues arrived at much the same conclusion in Australia7. After studying more than 4,000 children at Sydney primary and secondary schools for three years, they found that children who spent less time outside were at greater risk of developing myopia.

…

But what scientists really needed was a mechanism: something to explain how bright light could prevent myopia. The leading hypothesis is that light stimulates the release of dopamine in the retina, and this neurotransmitter in turn blocks the elongation of the eye during development. The best evidence for the ‘light–dopamine’ hypothesis comes — again — from chicks. In 2010, Ashby and Schaeffel showed that injecting a dopamine-inhibiting drug called spiperone into chicks’ eyes could abolish the protective effect of bright light.

Read it.

The problem for Mrs Grenier, and Quebec’s other so-called “maple syrup rebels”, is that they cannot freely sell their syrup.

Instead, since 1990 they have been legally required to hand over the bulk of what they produce to the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers (which in French-speaking Quebec is abbreviated to FPAQ).

Backed by the Canadian civil courts, the federation has the monopoly for selling Quebecois maple syrup on the wholesale market, and for exporting it outside the province. It sets the price for how much it pays producers, and it charges them a 12% fee per pound of syrup.

Producers are only allowed to sell independently a very small amount of syrup, to visitors to their farm, or to their local supermarket. And then they still have to pay the 12% commission to the FPAQ.

The United States government operated a similar legally-enforced cartel with respect to raisins, which (thank God) has been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 2015.

Canadians don’t have that protection.

Read it.

This merely underscores the stupidity of the whole concept of ‘intellectual property’, which is ‘property’ only because the government has created an artificial monopoly in certain discoveries.

(Reminder for the dimwitted: Property is something where, if person A has it, then person B doesn’t. Knowledge isn’t property, because if you’ve got it, nothing prevents me from having it, too.)

The problem comes when governments, under political pressure, arbitrarily invade this so-called ‘property right’ and so create a climate in which they can as readily invade true property rights.

Read it.

Scientists are studying past changes in sea level in order to make accurate future predictions of this consequence of climate change, and they’re looking down to Earth’s core to do so. “In order to fully understand the sea-level change that has occurred in the past century, we need to understand the dynamics of the flow in Earth’s core” says Mathieu Dumberry, a professor in physics at the University of Alberta.

Further evidence that the Transnational Dronage is panicing (Sky is falling! Women and minorities hardest hit!) based on incomplete information because climate models.

Coming soon to a hand-wringing bureaucrat near you: A plan to slow down the rotation of the earth by reverting to pre-1900 technology.

Remember: You heard it here first.

Based on their work reconciling these discrepancies, the scientists involved in the study are confident in predicting sea level to the end of the 21st century. “This can help to better prepare coastal towns, for example, to cope with climate change,” says Dumberry. “We’re talking billions of dollars of infrastructure here.” Dumberry notes that this study serves as a stimulus for more work to continue investigating the deep interior of our planet.

Translation; WE NEED MORE FUNDING! (Tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.)

Read it.

A rara avis, a book review in the New York Times that doesn’t parrot the latest SWPL fad.

If you’re a parent with young children, you’ve likely encountered a sanctimommy. Sanctimommies, of course, are that modern species of sanctimonious mothers who liberally dispense parenting advice laced with the subtext, “I’m not saying you’re a bad parent, but. .?.?.” Smug in their maternal superiority, they crusade perhaps most vehemently against moms who choose not to breast-feed.

If this moralism were limited to sanctimommies, it might be written off as nothing more than parenting blog fodder. But according to “Lactivism,” Courtney Jung’s riveting exposé of the forces that have turned the simple act of feeding one’s baby into a veritable battlefield, “to breast-feed or not to breast-feed” has become a question with far-reaching implications spanning medicine, politics, religion, feminism, commerce, race and social class.

Judging by recent history, ‘and soon to be a major motion picture’.

Read it.

And who knows better about ROI than Goldman Sachs?

Read it.

China is a foreign country. They do things differently there.

What we would regard as corruption has been endemic to Chinese culture for about 3000 years.

Read it.

In early December, after years of trying to justify allowing women into the infantry, artillery and armor and special operations forces, the U.S. government simply ordered the military to make it happen and do so without degrading the capabilities of these units. While the army was inclined the just say yes, find out what quotas the politicians wanted and go through the motions, some others refused to play along. SOCOM (Special Operations Command) and the marines pointed out that the research does not support the political demands and that actually implementing the quotas could get people killed while degrading the effectiveness of the units with women. This is yet another reason why many politicians do not like the marines and are uneasy about SOCOM. The commander of SOCOM promptly said the order would be implemented (otherwise he can kiss his upcoming promotion goodbye) but the Marine Corps has, as in the past, not voiced any enthusiasm at all. This decision involves about 220,000 jobs. About ten percent of these are special operations personnel, commonly known as commandos.

People will die — including many women — just because of a Politically Correct fantasy. Your tax dollars at work.

No wonder Trump is rocking the polls.

Read it.

Members of the Black Student Union at Eastern Michigan University stormed the halls and classrooms of Pray Harrold Tuesday afternoon, promising the protests would not stop until their list of demands is met.

“All black students report to the hallway! If you want freedom, report to the hallway! If you want freedom report to Welch Hall at 1:30!” The leader of the group was screaming while banging on a drum to get the attention of students and faculty in the academic building.

Since the 1960s there has been this subtle acceptance that being a ‘protester’ somehow absolves a person from polite behavior. Things that would have gotten a non-student locked up somehow get winked at when students are doing the coercion.

“The black students have been asking for these things for years and we are frustrated with the school’s administration,” one of the student protesters told Campus Reform. “These are not new demands; we tried to be peaceful, but our frustration has built up. We want to feel safe, and right now we don’t.”

So the way to ‘feel safe’, apparently, is to threaten others. I see.

When the meeting was over, EMU students and BSU followed two members of the board out to their cars to block them from leaving.

“Hey now! Hey now! We want freedom! Freedom! All these racist ass regents! We don’t need ‘em, need ‘em!” The BSU and other EMU students chanted while arranged in a half-circle, arms linked, blocking the vehicles of two members of the Board of Regents from leaving the parking lot.

After about 10 minutes of chanting, three police officers on the scene were joined by 12 other Ypsilanti Police Officers.

Here’s where a concealed carry permit comes in very handy.

The leader of the group, who would not release his name to Campus Reform, said he felt they won the feud even though they didn’t win the vote because they made the board members fearful.

Yeah, that’s a sure way to persuade them to give up the ‘safe space’ demanded. The standards for admission to EMU must be lower than low.

Steve Sailer turns over a rock.

I’ve been vaguely aware of Carlos Slim Helú for most of the century and have been following his career closely since he began to challenge Bill Gates and Warren Buffett for the title of World’s Richest Man about 8 years ago. But it’s only with the publication in Spanish of a biography of Slim this fall that I became aware of Slim’s literally Fascist roots in Lebanon.

The media has been more interested in imputing fascism to Slim’s business / political frenemy Donald Trump than in covering the background of the New York Times’ savior and largest individual shareholder.

Steve Sailer boils it down.

For example, the ongoing Black Autumn protests on college campuses are in part an outgrowth of the near-universal demand for diversity that spreads blacks in a thin layer across practically every college with enough of an endowment to afford affirmative action. Much of the hysteria on display by black students this fall stems from homeboys and, especially, homegirls feeling uncomfortable by having been made so welcome on diversity-worshipping campuses across the country. Because the institutional competition for black students is so fierce—every prestigious college’s admissions department has its quotas to fill—black students aren’t allowed to clump up naturally in large groups at a few colleges, where they’d feel more at home.

…

For example, we are lectured that only xenophobic nativists worry about allowing Muslims to move en masse to Western countries because concepts like nationalism are obsolete, divisive, and uncool. But the sons of Muslim migrants pay no attention to these sermons denouncing territorial instincts. They tend to grow up on the streets of Europe to be extremely controlling of their turf, often forming street gangs to harass non-Muslim men and groom underage infidel girls.

Read it.

A while ago WUWT wrote about the inexplicable green fascination with technological monstrosities, such as artificial trees, to replace real trees. And of course we already know about the green love of wind turbines and solar farms, which cover vast acreages of the natural landscape with concrete, plastic and steel.

Now greens appear to have gone one better – toxic artificial trees which emit cyanide.

Hooray.

Read it.

Adults these days are as educated as they have ever been, but poverty is no lower than it was in 1991. This is not because the few lingering people with “less than high school” have soaked up all the poverty. Quite the contrary: poverty has simply moved up the educational scale. The poor in 2014 were the most educated poor in history.

Read it.

The U.S. population contains just about twice as many Jews as Muslims. Yet Jews were the target of four times as many hate crimes as Muslims in this country.

A fact you won’t see in the Drive-By Media, who are too busy wringing their hands over non-existent ‘Islamophobia’.

Read it.

The Democrat program to produce a country that consists of a wealthy Overclass and a dependent-on-government-benefits Underclass is well underway.

Read it.

Rutgers University recently dedicated an entire week to celebrate Paul Robeson, an avowed communist who spoke out vehemently against the U.S. government during the post-WWII era.

Robeson was one of the greatest bass voices in the country’s history, an astonishingly talented man who perverted that talent in the service of one of the world’s foulest dictatorships. He represents one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century.

Read it.

The organization I founded has become a monster. When I was a member of its central committee in the early days, we campaigned – usually with success – on genuine environmental issues such as atmospheric nuclear tests, whaling and seal-clubbing.

When Greenpeace turned anti-science by campaigning against chlorine (imagine the sheer stupidity of campaigning against one of the elements in the periodic table), I decided that it had lost its purpose and that, having achieved its original objectives, had turned to extremism to try to justify its continued existence.

Now Greenpeace has knowingly made itself the sworn enemy of all life on Earth. By opposing capitalism, it stands against the one system of economics that has been most successful in regulating and restoring the environment.

Scott Johnson at PowerLine is not impressed by Obama the Preacher Man.

President Obama fancies himself a progressive in the Progressive tradition. He wants not only to ride the wave of the future but to sense where it is going and give it a nudge. As with all good progressives, it is history by which Obama takes his bearings, not the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence. Thus in his Oval Office speech this past Sunday, he declared that “we are on the right side of history.” Steve Hayward deals with the thought underlying this claim here.

The argument from history is a weak argument to begin with, but Obama does no honor to it. Recall that Obama came out in favor of preserving the democratic “process” in Egypt in order to support Mohammed Morsi. Obama sought to preserve Mohammed Morsi as president of Egypt. The damage Morsi’s authoritarian governance had done to rule of law and the other fundamentals of a free society were left unspoken.

But this is inevitable. The core dogma of ‘progressivism’ is that Progress Is Inevitable (‘right side of history’) and so Change Invariably Leads To Progress; so, if at first your changes don’t succeed, just keep changing until the desired progress comes around on the guitar.

Obama would love to find a way to get the United States aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood’s Hamas branch in Gaza and Iran’s Hezbollah subsidiary in Syria and Lebanon. They are the logical destination of his Middle Eastern fantasies. Coincidentally, Obama has just named a fan of Hamas as his Senior Advisor to the President for the Counter-ISIL Campaign in Iraq and Syria. In the Middle East, anyway, Obama is riding the wave of the eighth century.

And so, to the extent that Obama is on any side of history, his is the Wrong Side — that ship sailed over a thousand years ago.

WE ARE ENGAGED IN A GREAT EXISTENTIAL WAR with an oppressive totalitarian ideology that has been Stealing People’s Stuff for over 1400 years. It isn’t going to change any time soon. And our leaders have to bit the bullet and accept reality, or we are going to keep losing.

Mark Steyn sums it up.

As the President and Attorney General see it, the biggest national security threat is apparently bigoted, racist, Islamophobic Americans. Useful to know.

Hard to understand why he still consents to be President of such a place. Perhaps he ought to resign and move back to Kenya.

Read it.

The World War II generation had more faith in the federal government than any other Americans ever. Who could blame them? The federal government won the war and appeared to be guiding the nation’s economy to smooth and never-ending growth. Later, it put a man on the moon and returned him safely to earth.

But the success did not last. The wars in Korea and Vietnam did not end well. The economy spiraled out of control in the late ’60s and struggled for more than a decade. The bank bailouts of this century and other events eroded public confidence in the federal government. For those who grew up during World War II, this lack of trust was hard to understand. They still remembered the government that saved the world after Pearl Harbor.

In retrospect, that generation’s extraordinary faith in the federal government was a temporary aberration brought about by unique circumstances. Their world no longer exists, and the political system it created is collapsing around us. Our challenge now is to rebuild a political system that recognizes the inability of the federal government to lead our nation.

Read it.

50 species of French cheese to have vanished in the past four decades

With all the whining going on these days, we certainly need more cheese.

Taki sums it up.

Who said that African-Americans lack initiative? It was obviously a fool, and a racist to boot. White folks never came up with terrific initiatives such as speech codes, political correctness, and boycotting speakers you don’t like. Well, maybe some white folks did, mostly Jewish intellectuals on the far left. But our black brethren sure caught up fast. They now control more than three dozen American campuses, disrupting student life with a very long list of demands. Fascism lives on at American campuses, although these modern fascists lack the sartorial brilliance of Benito’s mobs.

…

Missouri’s student president, Payton Head, is a black gay man from Chicago. If bigotry is prevalent, how come he got elected from a student body 77 percent white and overwhelmingly heterosexual? Don’t bother trying to figure it out, most protests have Barack Obama’s blessings. He’s encouraging and bankrolling a nonstop riot against invented slights and insults. (Organizing for Action is a well-funded group that mobilizes college protesters.) The media are having a field day, pointing fingers at racist killer cops, as permanent protesters call them, but when a pregnant white woman—wife of a minister—was murdered in Indiana by two black thugs, none of the major networks, and certainly not The New York Times, reported it.

Read it.

As Ross Douthat observes, these fits of radicalism, beginning in the 1960s and continuing apace to the present dramas, are in fact attempts to erect a new moral scaffolding, to restore the higher purpose higher education has lost in recent decades. The drama of the moment may reflect an unyielding reverence for identity thought (and not a little egoism), but it is primarily the effect of the decline of the liberal arts.

…

The contemporary character of the university has been molded by strange bedfellows that include gargantuan administrative apparatuses, ideologically homogenous faculties, and the commodifying forces of capitalism. Two features particularly seem responsible for the deterioration of the liberal arts: the displacement of ethical and aesthetic thought by theory (or, put more capably by a dear friend, the “1970s poststructuralist gnashing of teeth”) which hurled the university gates open to all manner of passing fads, and a democratizing effect that forged the campus in the crucible of egalitarianism and made the application of reason virtually impossible.

Ross Douthat in the New York Times uncovers a rock. (The Times is allowed one token ‘conservative’ columnist; David Brooks formally filled that slat until it got to where no one would believe his Clever Plastic Disguise any more, and so Ross was brought in.)

I DO NOT own guns, and the last time I discharged a firearm was on “Second Amendment Day” at a conservative journalism program many years ago. (Yes, dear reader, that’s how conservative journalism programs roll.) My political commitments are more communitarian than libertarian, I don’t think the constitution guarantees a right to bear every kind of gun or magazine, and I think of myself as modestly persuadable in the gun control debate.

So, as you can see, what is ‘conservative’ to the New York Times is not necessarily conservative to an actual conservative.

Does that make “getting to Australia” a compelling long-term goal for liberalism? Maybe, but liberals need to count the cost. Absent a total cultural revolution in America, a massive gun collection effort would face significant resistance even once legislative and judicial battles had been won. The best analogue is Prohibition, which did have major public health benefits … but which came at a steep cost in terms of police powers, black markets and trampled liberties.

Or, even closer to home, the ‘war on drugs’, which doesn’t seem to have reduced drug use very much (when did you ever hear of rock stars finding it impossible to get cocaine when they wanted it?), but which has enriched drug-running cartels to the point of undermining public order in Columbia and Mexico.

I suspect liberals imagine, at some level, that a Prohibition-style campaign against guns would mostly involve busting up gun shows and disarming Robert Dear-like trailer-park loners. But in practice it would probably look more like Michael Bloomberg’s controversial stop-and-frisk policy, with a counterterrorism component that ended up heavily targeting Muslim Americans. In areas where gun ownership is high but crime rates low, like Bernie Sanders’ Vermont, authorities would mostly turn a blind eye to illegal guns, while poor and minority communities bore the brunt of raids and fines and jail terms.

What Ross dare not say is that such a result would actually work as intended, since most ‘gun violence’ occurs in poor and minority communities rather than in Bernie Sanders’ Vermont and such.

Read it.

China and South Korea are both quite uneasy about the prospect of the North Korean government collapsing. This is by both as a question of when not if as the economy and public support for the hereditary dictatorship in North Korea continues to decline. Unless the North Korean leadership makes some fundamental, and long opposed, changes the government control of the country will collapse. Both China and South Korea say they should take over but neither is enthusiastic about actually doing so. According to opinion surveys more South Koreans are agreeing with letting China take over up there. That’s because since the 1990s South Korean reunification planners have been studying what happened in Germany after the communist East Germany was absorbed by the democratic West Germany in the 1990s. That cost the West German taxpayers over two trillion dollars. Estimates of what it will cost South Koreans to absorb North Korea are now over five trillion dollars. Then there was the fact that Germany had a GDP four times that of South Korea, meaning that the average South Korean will have to pay ten times what the average West German paid to rebuild their lesser half. This could cost South Koreans up to ten percent of their GDP for a decade or more. Many South Koreans fear that rebuilding the north could wreck the South Korean economy. No one knows, and everyone is scared. But someone will have to pay, and the most likely candidate is the South Korean taxpayer. Unless, of course, China is allowed to take over. This is something China is not only willing to do but is kind of insisting on.

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Be prepared to hold your nose.

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Well, socialism will do that to you.

Thousands of Venezuelans have been pouring out of their home country in recent months as it’s spiraled into ever-deeper crisis levels under the socialist administration of President Nicolás Maduro. Venezuela, home to the largest oil reserves in the world, became one of the world’s worst performing economies this year, with triple-digit inflation, severe shortages of basic household goods and soaring rates of violent crime propelling those who can afford it to leave the country. The festering crisis is set to hit a pivotal point Sunday, when Venezuelans vote in long-awaited parliamentary elections that could put the political opposition back into a seat of power for the first time since late President Hugo Chávez took office in 1999.

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Democratic lawmakers are planning to attend prayer services at a Washington-area mosque that has been accused of acting as a front for Hamas and that served as the home of terrorist spiritual leader Anwar al-Awlaki, who reportedly mentored two of the 9/11 hijackers.

Haters of America flock together.

On the heels of a deadly mass shooting by two Muslim individuals in San Bernardino, California, a group of Democratic lawmakers said they would attend Friday prayer services at the Dar al-Hijrah Mosque in Virginia, which has been linked to the financing of terrorists and where al-Awlaki served as the spiritual leader.

Just in case they win, you understand.

Beyer told the Times that the visit could help diffuse tensions with the Muslim community in the wake of the San Bernardino attack and the recent terrorist massacre in Paris.

‘It’s okay, you’re safe, we’ll still ignore you, jihad can continue in peace.’

Dar al-Hijrah has come “under numerous investigations for financing and providing aid and comfort” to extremist groups, according to these records compiled by the Investigative Project.

No wonder Democrites feel right at home.

Patrick Poole, a terrorism analyst and national security reporter who has covered the mosque, told the Washington Free Beacon that Dar al-Hijrah has been a “premier” spot for “terrorist recruitment” and questioned why Democrats would choose this as a site to promote tolerance.

Trade tips? Get some pointers?

Read it.

Putin has employed the tactic of turning a civil war into a counter-terrorist operation before—in Chechnya, where Russia launched a war in 1999 that lasted for almost a decade. The Kremlin regards its campaign in the small Muslim republic as a model of conflict resolution to be replicated elsewhere. Last year, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev called it “one of the business cards of Russia” and a “good, unique example in history of combat of terrorism.” In thinking about how Russia’s folly in Syria might develop, Chechnya provides a number of important lessons.

Russia’s war in Chechnya was brutal. The Kremlin initially defined all those who opposed its military action as terrorist sympathizers, entirely indistinguishable from Islamic extremists. It bombed the Chechen capital of Grozny indiscriminately, killing hundreds if not thousands of civilians (official figures were not compiled) and forcing thousands more from their homes. Later, it began to target moderate Chechens; in 2005, the FSB murdered Aslan Maskhadov, the democratically elected leader of Chechnya’s independence movement. His predecessor, Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, was assassinated by car bomb in Qatar in 2004. Though the Russian government denied any involvement in the attack, a Qatari court convicted two Russian security agents for their roles in the bombing.

Steven Hayward at PowerLine blog passes on some observations by a commenter on the parallels between Now and Then:

One of the main characteristics they share is an obsession with “identity.” Reading on the collapse of Nazi Germany, about the last thing that went for them was “identity.” Even at the bitter end they were obsessed with it. Everyone had an identity – some mix of “race” or “ethnicity,” occasionally spiced with “gender” or conduct (usually misconduct). But by and large the identity you were born with defined you forever. It could never be transcended. Jews who had been heroes in World War I found themselves pilloried, at best barely tolerated. Successful (even lapsed) “Jewish” businessmen or doctors or academics found themselves scooped up almost as easily as the most mundane but orthodox Jewish clerk. Jews were simply irredeemable and no matter what they did to serve the Reich, they were always doomed. The same, only in a slightly lower degree of vehemence, went for Freemasons (whom the Nazis had an inexplicable obsession with), Gypsies, Slavs, et al.

Pace Godwin’s Law, there is a lot of resemblance between what is going on now on campus and what was going on then on campus. If the Black Lives Matter people start singing Tomorrow Belongs To Me, it’s time to leave.

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The rifles used in the San Bernardino mass shooting were illegal under California law because they were modified and violated the state’s ban on assault weapons, ATF officials said.

… which puts paid to the Leftist Lie, promoted by Barack Obama among others, that stricter gun control laws would have had any impact on this tragedy. If just one of the people at that center had had a gun, perhaps the body count wouldn’t have been as high. But that’s not an option that the Usual Suspects are prepared to entertain, despite the fact that there is more evidence for it than for their precious Global Warming.

‘When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns’ is an Eternal Truth that needs to be tattooed on the forehead of every government employee.