Steve Sailer spells it out.

At this point, I don’t want to debate specific actions, but just call attention to the zeitgeist of the War on Noticing.

An analogy is to driving on a two lane winding road. You constantly have to make small decisions and adjustments to keep from either going into the ditch on the right or into oncoming traffic on the left. If you are trying to drive safely, sometimes you make perfect adjustments, sometimes you undercompensate to the right or left, sometimes you overcompensate to the right, other times you overcompensate to the left.

But if you adopt a rule that you will never ever allow yourself to overcompensate to the right, you will, on average undercompensate, and these errors will build up pushing you on average toward the left. Eventually, you will inevitably wind up over the line on the left with oncoming traffic headed your way.

Read it.

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

Speakers cited the work of Open Doors, a human rights organization that monitors the persecution of Christians, noting that 150 million Christians worldwide suffer torture, rape and arbitrary imprisonment. Christians in Iraq, Somalia, Syria, Pakistan, North Korea and Nigeria are among those hardest hit.

Nothing better underscores that Islam, like Communism, is an oppressive totalitarian ideology with which no co-existence is possible.

Read it.

Bill and Hillary have never hesitated to throw any member of their krew under the bus if it was to their advantage.

Read it.

See how successful the most restrictive gun laws in the nation were in preventing these two latest mass shootings.

Notice that this shit doesn’t happen in Texas, where more people go around armed.

Think how more successful banning Muslims would have been than banning guns in preventing this most recent mass shooting .

Watch everybody fail to connect the dots here.

Read it.

My son was a great boy — no parent should ever have to go through what I did. An illegal alien from Mexico, a member of a violent street gang who had just been released from Los Angeles County jail after his third gun charge, shot my son Jamiel Jr. to death in 2008. My son was on his way home from the mall after we spent the morning at a football camp.

Jamiel was murdered three houses from our home and left in the street. He was shot in the stomach, and while he lay on his back with his hands up, he was shot a second time through his hand and in his head. His mother, an Army sergeant, was on her way home from the Middle East when Jamiel was killed. She made it home in time to bury her son.

And there you have it.

Read it.

China will talk a good game at the UN Climate Conference in Paris, but won’t make any binding commitments, concludes The Truth About China, an important new report published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation. “China’s Communist Party has as its highest priority its own self-preservation, and that self-preservation depends overwhelmingly on its ability to continue raising the standard of living of its citizens,” states economist Patricia Adams, the study’s author and the executive director of Toronto-based Probe International, an organization that has worked closely with Chinese NGOs for decades. —Global Warming Policy Foundation, 2 December 2015

Looks as if China gives these international talkfests all the respect that they deserve.

Read it.

The overwhelming majority of fatal shootings in America happen in our inner cities. They aren’t committed by mentally ill loners, but by gang members involved in petty disputes. About half of the dead are black men (who represent just six percent of the total U.S. population). The most common type of firearm used is a handgun.

Black lives matter … except when it’s a black trigger finger.

Democrats increasingly see gun control as a wedge issue, and are therefore may be more willing to identify gun violence as a problem associated with their political enemies—white men in red states. Talking about gun violence in communities that vote overwhelmingly Democratic would not rally the base as effectively.

Read it.

The facts: DST does not actually reduce electric demand, as it was created to do. Additionally, it shatters delicate sleep schedules, leading to upwards of $400 million in economic losses each year. DST has also been linked to traffic accidents, heart attacks, Seasonal Affective Disorder, commuting snafus, and in my house, general unpleasantness and fist shaking.

But what would the country really look like without Daylight Saving Time? As Axis Maps cartographer Andy Woodruff points out in a recent blog post, its effects are not consistent across the United States. But even so, the time-turning phenomenon looks pretty horrifying for those who arise at the reasonable hour of 7 a.m.

Read it.

Brainiac hacker Samy Kamkar has developed a US$10 gadget that can predict and store hundreds of American Express credit cards and use them for wireless transactions, even at non-wireless payment terminals.

The mind-blowing feat is the result of Kamkar cracking how the card issuer picks replacement numbers, and in dissecting the functionality of magnetic stripe data.

It means criminals could use the tiny gadget to keep pillaging cash after cards have been cancelled at businesses that do not require the three or four -digit CVV numbers on the back of cards.

American Express has been notified and says it is working on a fix.

I should hope so. I am very glad I do not use an Amex card.

Read it.

A subtle hint not to visit a country where there is open warfare between police and drug dealers.

Read it.

A 25-year-old woman whose car flipped over on Long Island on Sunday emerged from the wreckage relatively unscathed — only to be struck and killed as she later went back to retrieve her property, police said.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

Early one weekend morning in January 2014, Janet was sleeping fitfully in her parents’ home in Toronto. A junior studying elementary education at a nearby college, she had gone home for the weekend in a state of nervous collapse. For months, someone going by the name ‘‘Obnoxious’’ had been harassing her online. He had called her cellphone repeatedly and sent her threatening texts. Worst of all, he had threatened to ‘‘swat’’ her at school — to make a false emergency call to the police and lure a SWAT team to her door.

Janet was afraid to go to sleep; she kept thinking that he was going to swat her in the middle of the night. He said he was going to swat her family, too. Her father owned a bar, and her mother worked at a hotel. They were from China, and their English wasn’t great. They didn’t know much about her life online, and they would never understand why someone would stalk their daughter on the Internet.

Around 6:30 a.m., her father jostled her awake and said she needed to come downstairs. When she got to the top of the steps, she saw her family’s living room ‘‘covered in cops.’’ There were at least five officers in riot gear, guns drawn. They had bulletproof vests and pads and helmets with visors. She remembers the eerie silence of the officers — they said nothing at all. She had no idea what to do with her hands. ‘‘I was scared to move,’’ she says. ‘‘I wanted to go downstairs with my hands up. I was afraid they would shoot me. I was so scared. I feel like they just didn’t really let their guard down until I told them what happened.’’

It could happen to you.

Read it.

Whenever there is a high-profile shooting incident, liberals scan the news eagerly, hoping that political hay can be made out of it. With the Planned Parenthood murders perpetrated by Robert Dear, they apparently think they have hit the jackpot. Perhaps, in political terms, they are right, but I doubt it.

Unnamed law enforcement sources are being quoted to the effect that after his arrest, Dear said something like “no more baby parts.” QED! say Planned Parenthood spokeswomen. The Center for Medical Progress’s videos are to blame. But do liberals really want to argue that wrongdoing shouldn’t be exposed, for fear that a lunatic may take vigilante action against the wrongdoers? I don’t think so.

To take just one of countless examples, imagine that a nut tries to assassinate one of the Koch brothers–by no means a far-fetched hypothesis, given the insane hatred that has been stirred up against them by the Democratic Party. In that event, would the Democratic Party take responsibility for the acts of the crazed assassin and apologize for its attacks on Charles and David Koch? I doubt it.

Read it.

What’s the big deal? Just think of it as a really-late-term abortion. Turn it over to Planned Parenthood to be sold for parts. Problem solved.

Read it.

This review is somewhat dated but captures perfectly, I think, what I disliked about the series.

To my mind, the picture is too crude and the artist too pleased with himself. In Mad Men, everyone chain-smokes, every executive starts drinking before lunch, every man is a chauvinist pig, every male employee viciously competitive and jealous of his colleagues, every white person a reflexive racist (when not irritatingly patronizing). It’s not that you don’t know that, say, sexism was rampant in the workplace before the feminist movement; it’s just that, on the screen, the endless succession of leering junior execs and crude jokes and abusive behavior all meant to signal “sexism” doesn’t work—it’s wearying rather than illuminating.

I grew up reading fantasy and science fiction, so it doesn’t bother me to see a tendentious fantasy on screen — I can roll with it. I remember that time, and it brought back a lot of memories — my first job, right out of college, was with a Wall Street law firm, and almost all of the secretaries had ash trays on their desks — but I found it disappointing because of its heavy-handed assumption that everyone watching it would share its sniggering “Wow, life pre-Woodstock really sucked, didn’t it?” attitude, to the extent that it was almost a self-parody.

Nevertheless, it captures a lot of the truth of that time, primarily because the writers and producers included things that they might not have have if they been more perceptive.

This impulse might be worth indulging (briefly), but the problem with Mad Men is that it suffers from a hypocrisy of its own. As the camera glides over Joan’s gigantic bust and hourglass hips, as it languorously follows the swirls of cigarette smoke toward the ceiling, as the clinking of ice in the glass of someone’s midday Canadian Club is lovingly enhanced, you can’t help thinking that the creators of this show are indulging in a kind of dramatic having your cake and eating it, too: even as it invites us to be shocked by what it’s showing us (a scene people love to talk about is one in which a hugely pregnant Betty lights up a cigarette in a car), it keeps eroticizing what it’s showing us, too. For a drama (or book, or whatever) to invite an audience to feel superior to a less enlightened era even as it teases the regressive urges behind the behaviors associated with that era strikes me as the worst possible offense that can be committed in a creative work set in the past: it’s simultaneously contemptuous and pandering. Here, it cripples the show’s ability to tell us anything of real substance about the world it depicts.

Read it.

Don’t make fun of the crybullies or you’ll be targeted for retribution.

Read it.

This is how you know someone is not ready for college.

A problem with a simple solution: Bag her up and ship her to Nigeria. Notify Boko Haram of the delivery details.

Read it.

I hope your Thanksgiving was as enjoyable as mine. We had our immediate family for dinner (minus one daughter who is living in Australia), so there was no potential for political disagreement, as we are all conservatives. Of course, I can’t imagine any family spending Thanksgiving arguing about politics in any event.

But the Democrats can. In fact, they encourage it. The Democratic Party has developed its own Thanksgiving tradition: advising its faithful on how to debate with their Republican relatives. That strikes me as completely bizarre, but then, if you think of Thanksgiving as Genocide Day, as so many liberals do, maybe it doesn’t seem like you’re ruining much.

This is rather amusing, but it does tell us quite a lot about Democrites:

1. Everything is political with them. Everything. That’s almost the definition of a totalitarian mindset.
2. Their supporters are so mentally absent that they need a crib sheet to remember what to say in favor of their own political positions. I’d hold off on further legalization of marijuana, which will only exacerbate the problem.
3. Note that there is no Republican counterpart.
4. They realize that their supporters are going to get pounded over the dinner table for their stupid positions and need to prepare beforehand. You’d think they’d connect the dots on that, but they never seem able to take the hint.
5. Apparently all Democrite kids are in Republican families. Who knew?

Read it.

Note that this is not a person of pallor. Note also the tattoo.

Read it.

Being a British newspaper, the Independent Doesn’t Quite Approve, but it’s hard to argue with the facts.

Tim “Nailer” Foley was more than 5,000 miles away from Paris when Isis terrorists launched a series of coordinated attacks throughout the French capital, killing 130 people and injuring hundreds more. But Foley — a former construction foreman who now spends his days with a band of heavily armed civilians, voluntarily patrolling the some of the most remote and dangerous stretches of the U.S.-Mexico border — wasn’t surprised.

…

“We have pictures from trail cameras that show Somalis and Middle Eastern guys with beards and everything else, but nobody is listening,” Foley told The Washington Post this week. “We’re going to have something like Paris had. It’s not a matter of if, but when.”

…

The link between immigration and terrorism is still up for debate. Although the Paris terror attacks appear to have been coordinated by Isis operatives in the Middle East, all of the identified assailants are so far citizens of European Union countries.

And yet, officials say, the threat of an Isis operative slipping into the United States from Mexico is a real one: Last week, the FBI confirmed that five men from Pakistan and one from Afghanistan were captured near Arizona’s border with Mexico, according to ABC affiliate KNXV.

Do tell.

To join Arizona Border Recon, volunteers must fill out an application, pass a background check and abide by strict rules of engagement, Foley told The Washinton Post. “We want to make sure you’re not a sexual predator or prohibited possessor, and by doing this it shows the Border Patrol agents that we have a sense of professionalism and they don’t have to sit there and wonder, ‘Who are these guys?’” he said.

…

“There’s that scene in ‘The Matrix,’ where Morpheus offers the blue and red pill,” he said. “I’ve taken the red pill, and I’ve woken up, and I can’t go back to sleep. I’ve seen the truth. How can I turn my back on it and go get another 9-to-5 job, pay my taxes and pretend it isn’t happening?”

Becoming a Democrite seems to work.

Read it.

More than 30 “White Student Union” pages have recently sprung up over the last several days on Facebook, pages that affiliate themselves with various universities around the nation.

If black people get into a serious pissing contest with white people, as a group, the black people will lose. Be careful what you wish for.

More here:

Linking to a student-run blog addressing diversity issues at New York University, the union’s Facebook admin mused, “What does ‘diversity’ mean other than ‘not white’? I’m not sure there is an answer to this. Is the word ‘diversity’ itself a discriminatory term against whites?”

Scott Johnson at PowerLine blog is delightfully dyspeptic today.

As President Obama enters the stretch closing out his second term, he is dedicating himself to sealing his reputation as the worst president in American history. He long ago blew by President Carter. He’s blowing by President Buchanan. He’s taken the lead and he’s putting distance between himself and the rest of the field.

Yesterday he deepened his hold on the laughingstock element of his performance in office. How to combine suffocating arrogance with gut-busting stupidity? See the man doing his thing side by side with President Hollande who was looking for something better than this Bartlett’s-worthy laugh line (video below): “[N]ext week, I will be joining President Hollande and world leaders in Paris for the Global Climate Conference. What a powerful rebuke to the terrorists it will be, when the world stands as one and shows that we will not be deterred from building a better future for our children.”

Read it. And watch the video.

Another video of witnesses to the event has now emerged, and it tells a quite different story. These witnesses say that the three men were trying to film the demonstrators and their camp. A group of protesters that considerably outnumbered the three approached them and demanded that they take off their masks. (Some of the protesters were also wearing masks.) The three men refused, and the protesters continued to confront them. The witnesses describe punches being thrown by the protesters on, if I understand them correctly, four occasions. The three men retreated, but the protesters chased them. One of these witnesses saw one or more of the three men reach for a weapon, and warned the others that the men were armed and they shouldn’t pursue them. But the mob continued to chase the three, and at some point one or more of the three men opened fire on the protesters.

This, of course, is what you won’t see in the Drive-By Media, who have a Narrative to push.

Was it self-defense? It certainly could be. As far as I know, no information has emerged about the state of affairs immediately before the shootings. But it is plausible that the three men could reasonably have feared that the mob would inflict great bodily harm, in which case they were entitled to use deadly force in self-defense. Of course, we know nothing about whether any or all of the three men had permits to carry firearms. And the men did not help their case by fleeing the scene.

Not that I blame them a bit.

Another obvious question is, where were the police? One of the oddities of this case is that the original assault and the altercation with Jamar Clark occurred within a block or two of the 4th Precinct station. Likewise, the events of last night occurred in close proximity to the station. Apparently having a lot of policemen around doesn’t confer as much security as one might have thought.

Sure, they intervene and get fired for racism. Yeah, that’s going to happen. This ain’t Baltimore.

Read it.

Boy, it sure didn’t take him long to ‘assimilate’ to modern-day America, did it?

They could have the kid whacked for $50,000 + expenses. (Tell ISIS that he’s Shi’a and they’d do it for free.) A financially responsible city government would at least consider it.

Read it.

This weekend, a 41-year-old rhino named Nola died. She had been living in the San Diego Zoo Safari Park for close to 27 years. Her death means that there are only three northern white rhinos left on the planet.

Perhaps when they’re all gone, these gurgle-mutts will stop whining about it.

Yes, that was insensitive — intentionally so. If there are people in the world who weep for the Northern White Rhino, I have no problem with that. What I do have a problem with, is their blithe assumption that (a) I must, simply must care as much as they do, and (b) they are justified in pursuing me to the ends of the earth in pursuit of getting me to do so.

They don’t care about the stuff I care about, so how come am I obliged to care about the stuff they care about? The world is overly full of people who, simply because they care very deeply about something, feel entitled to inconvenience the rest of the human race in that regard.

I am not a bad person for not caring; YOU are a bad person for being a self-righteous pain in the ass. Piss off.

Mark Steyn sounds the alert.

The official line from Obama and Kerry is that the world is safer than it’s ever been – except for a few pockets here and there. You’ll recall that, when I spoke at the Danish Parliament seven weeks ago, the US State Department issued a travel advisory warning US citizens to steer clear of me and that particular neighborhood of Copenhagen. All very specific, and leaving plenty of other places for Americans to visit. However, the State Department has now expanded its area of concern and issued a “Worldwide Travel Alert”, advising Americans basically to steer clear of the entire planet until February 26th. Claudia Rosett says reassuringly that travel abroad is still safe for Americans if you can “teleport into rural New Zealand”. Absent that, shelter in place for the next three months.

As Obama, Biden et al crowed only three years ago, the terrorists are on the run, and they’ve apparently run everywhere. Is this all the President’s fault? Well, he is “the leader of the free world”. Which sounds like a demanding job. But happily, in terms of places it’s safe to visit, the free world seems to be getting a lot smaller.

Freeberg fisks Hillary Clinton … and a whole lot more.

After seven or eight years of man-crush on Emperor Obama, an entire generation has figured out a new way of “thinking” and it isn’t healthy. You can’t create anything that will actually help anyone, thinking this way. You can’t grow turnips, or rice, or tomatoes, or slaughter some beef, pork or chicken, thinking this way. “This soil is good for growing grapes! Not only is it good for growing grapes, but it is the best soil for growing grapes on the WHOLE planet! And if you do not agree, unhesitatingly, my friends and I will all get together on Facebook, and mock you!” Just like “survivors of sexual assault deserve to be believed.” As is the case with sophistry, the conclusion has nothing to do with whether the soil is really good for growing grapes, or whether the survivor of a sexual assault really did survive a sexual assault.

 

…

The sophists of millennia ago who aroused the enmity of Socrates and Plato, would have stopped short of this. There is no “moral virtue” involved, cosmetic or genuine, in claiming to have been named after Sir Edmund Hillary. What there is, is a weird sort of group cred. Just like sophistry, it ignores truth, or rather makes a fair-weather friend out of truth, showing support for truth only when truth happens to take the side of the superior goals. But its goals are unique.

Read it.

Such explicit racism is, of course, de rigueur for the race hustlers in academia.

The Other McCain reviews Bernie Sanders.

His economic ideas are as obsolete as Eugene V. Debs, his foreign policy proposals can be summarized in two words — unilateral disarmament — and yet the socialist senator from Vermont inspires orgasmic enthusiasm from Generation Selfie….

Including my younger brother, sad to say, but I guess God used up all the brains in the family on me and he got caught short.

Read it.

An advert featuring the Lord’s Prayer has been banned from cinemas in case it offends people.

The Church of England said it had been left “bewildered” over the decision not to show the advert promoting Christian prayer in cinemas across the UK the week before Christmas.

The ad shows a number of people from different walks of life reciting or singing lines from the Lord’s Prayer, starting with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, walking through a park. His words are followed by those of a police officer, a weightlifter, a farmer, a congregation at a wedding and class of school children, among others in the minute-long piece of work.

…

The company stated it has a policy of not showing political or religious advertising in its cinemas as ads reflecting these personal beliefs risked upsetting, or offending, audiences, despite the ad having been approved by the Cinema Advertising Association and being given a “U” certificate by the British Board of Film Classification.

DCM said that “some advertisements – unintentional or otherwise – could cause offence to those of differing political persuasions, as well as those of differing faiths and indeed of no faith,” adding that in this regard DCM treats all political or religious beliefs equally.

Mark Steyn does a review.

The British Home Secretary, Theresa May, was a little behind the curve when she reacted to the bloodbath in Paris by insisting that “the attacks have nothing to do with Islam”. This is the old spin that, although some terrorists might claim to be Muslim, there’s nothing inherently Muslim about their terrorism.

But why be so modest? In the United States, the most senior members of the Democrat establishment are taking it to the next level.

The Other McCain surveys a disturbing trend.

America is in the grip of a crisis, namely a shortage of normal people. Evidence indicates that the population of kooks and freaks is rapidly increasing, and there are simply not enough sane people to keep the weirdos under control. Especially among the under-30 demographic, the United States is struggling to cope with the proliferation of dangerous perverts, drug addicts, psychotics and Ivy League liberal arts majors….

Read it.

Student activists at Smith College are barring journalists from covering their activities unless said journalists first pledge their loyalty to said activists’ cause. These irascible protesters believe the Mizzou protesters did not go far enough, apparently.

Well, I mean, Smith….

Read it.

‘Separate but equal’ is back — with a vengeance.

Wonder whether anybody on campus will call this what it is: Racism. But I doubt it.

Read it.

Unfortunately they’re objecting to him because he was a recist (which he was, nice of them to wake up to that) but not because he was a statist (which he also was, and in pursuit of which he did far more damage).

Read it.

Who are we letting out? The Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office has a website where you can scroll through the names of inmates proposed for release, and the “opposition letters” the DA has filed opposing release, as well as a list of a few dozen inmates released over the DA’s opposition. Doesn’t look like the releases are limited to “non-violent” offenders or just the poor kids who got caught with a joint. A few samples:

Read it.

China is destroying swaths of coral reefs in one of the most important fisheries in Asia and causing enormous environmental damage as it builds the fake islands it is putting up in the South China Sea,

To get some idea as to just how extensive China’s ruination of the reefs is, I went through some of the statistics gathered by the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative. Fiery Cross Reef has had 2.74 million square meters built up with sand and cement. The before and after shots are shown here. The photo below shows the reef before the Chinese had made much progress building on it. The photo above shows the latest satellite photo of the reef. You can see how completely the reef has been smothered in sand and concrete. Little of the original living reef can still be seen.

And, of course, the ‘environmentalists’ are nowhere to be seen.

Read it.

Trump keeps saying what a lot of people are thinking.

Sure, people are going to be throwing up their hands in horror over this; certainly more horror than they would show if they saw what is happening to Christian churches in Muslim countries. But I guess some churches are more equal than others.

Read it.

You read the headline correctly. The administration of Dartmouth has issued an apology, not to the students who were trying to study in the library, but to the protesters who made a scene.

Read it.

Students at the University of South Carolina (USC) are the latest to launch a large-scale campus protest inspired by the one at the University of Missouri. Students walked out of class Monday morning and called on administrators to submit to a list of 12 demands, which include allowing them to minor in “social justice.

‘Walk out’? Are they under the impression that the University will stop working if they aren’t on the academic assembly line? Somebody needs to remind these children that they are customers, not a labor force. Next step, I supposed, is to organize a Local of the Aggrieved Students International (AFL/CIO).

College Insurrection has the best quip: ‘USC students are demanding their school offer a minor in Social Justice which makes sense since there are so many high paying jobs in that field.’

Read it.

I’m sure it was just a coincidence that the first issue of my firearms association’s magazine to arrive after Justin Trudeau’s election came wrapped in an opaque gray plastic wrapper instead of the usual transparent variety.

I’m not being sarcastic. I do try to leave the augury of such quotidian “signs” to the world’s cranks, yet in this instance I can’t help but wonder:

Was the National Firearms Association concerned that some posties, buoyed by the election of their chosen one, would be emboldened to fold, spindle, and/or mutilate any snail-mailed materials they disapproved of?

Read it.

In response to the idea that the U.S. should limit the flow of Syrian refugees into this country to Christians, President Obama had this to say:

That’s not American. That’s not who we are. We don’t have a religious test for our compassion.

This sounds good in the abstract. For at least two reasons, however, it is not a persuasive objection to limiting entry to Christians.

First, Syrian Christians face persecution from ISIS based on their religion. Syrian Sunnis do not. If ISIS conquers their town, they will not be slaughtered because of who they are. Christians are likely to be. (Alawites might be, but they can relocate to areas controlled by the Assad regime; there is no need for them to leave Syria).

…

Second, in its radical form, Islam is a militant, murderous political movement. It may well be that only a small percentage of the Muslims fleeing Syria subscribe to, or are even sympathetic with, this movement. However, we can’t tell which ones are and which ones aren’t. Our intelligence services have no comprehensive list of ISIS adherents and sympathizers in Syria.

Obama keeps going out of his way to demonstrate that he is an ignorant amateur floundering in the deep end of a pool with which he is entirely unacquainted.

Read it.

How should we explain the fact that black student militancy is now manifesting itself in the disruption of campus libraries and demands for postponement of exams? Here’s one plausible explanation: mismatch is to blame.

“Mismatch” refers to the fact that, due to aggressive race-based admissions preferences, many African-American college students fall short of the white students with whom they attend school in terms of the credentials most closely associated with academic success — high school performance and SAT scores. As such, they are less likely to succeed academically than their white counterparts. Through no fault of their own, they are running uphill (to the extent they choose to run).

Exams are the main mechanism that, in many classes, separates high performing students from average and poor performing ones. Studying is an important mechanism through which highly capable students convert their potential into high performance.

Most colleges do what they can to reduce and mask the disparity between the performance of affirmative action admittees and their better-credentialed peers. Grade inflation means that below average performers can still get decent-sounding grades. Courses in which little more than mastery of politically correct jargon can yield an A or A-minus are offered. On a more salutary note, tutoring and writing assistance are available.

In the end, however, students admitted due to racial preferences surely understand that they are at a competitive disadvantage. This realization is likely to have adverse psychological consequences for some.

Such as rampant cases of Impostor Syndrome.

Read it.

A group of Black Lives Matter protestors at Dartmouth College led a violent protest Thursday, hurling racial insults at students and pushing them up against a wall as they tried to study in the library, The Dartmouth Review reports.

“Fuck you, you filthy white fucks!” “Fuck you and your comfort!” “Fuck you, you racist shit!” they reportedly yelled.

About a 150 Dartmouth protesters shouted as they marched through Baker-Berry Library at Dartmouth College. Students who didn’t join in on their protests were harassed, one woman was pinned to a wall by protesters who shouted, “filthy white bitch!” in her face. Students who were seated were told to, “Stand the fuck up!”  “You filthy racist white piece of shit!”

The protesters actively disrupted students reviewing for exams, entering study spaces and shouting at students who tried to close their door. One student was forced to abandon her study room and ran out of the library.

When even the New York Times notices that things have gotten silly, then they’ve really gotten silly.

Name an inequity, and it is highly likely that social media has helped call meaningful attention to it, if not started and hashtagged a movement.

But a glance through your acquaintances’ aggrieved online posts may well show equal attention paid to the slings and arrows of everyday vexations. The same technology that allows people to voice their displeasure with dictatorships, police brutality and prejudice also enables them to carp about mediocre meals, rude customer service and that obnoxious guy at the next table who won’t shut up.

It was once considered unbecoming, or annoying itself, to moan publicly about trifling personal ordeals. Now, in a seismic shift for the moral culture, abetted by technology, we tolerate and even encourage the “microcomplaint”: the petty, petulant kvetch about the quotidian.

Read it.

There was a much-beloved quote circulated among leftists, often attributed to Sinclair Lewis, that “when fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” In light of recent episodes of mob action on American campuses, the quote needs updating: When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in “diversity” and demanding “safe spaces.”

Read it.

For more than a week now, the country has been mesmerized, and appalled, by the news emanating from academia. At Yale the insanity began over Halloween costumes. Erika Christakis, associate master of a residential college at Yale, courted outrage by announcing that “free speech and the ability to tolerate offense are the hallmarks of a free and open society” and it was not her business to police Halloween costumes.

To people unindoctrinated by the sensitivity training that is de rigueur on most campuses today, these sentiments might seem unobjectionable. But to the delicate creatures at Yale’s Silliman College they were an intolerable provocation. What if students dressed as American Indians or Mexican mariachi musicians? Angry, hysterical students confronted Nicholas Christakis, Erika’s husband and the master of Silliman, screaming obscenities and demanding that he step down because he had failed to create “a place of comfort, a home” for students. The episode was captured on video and went viral.

And a lot of alumni became ashamed to have gone to Yale. But nobody cares about alumni any more, least of all Yale.

What is happening? Is it a reprise of the late 1960s and 1970s, when campuses across the country were sites of violent protests? In my book “Tenured Radicals: How Politics Have Corrupted Our Higher Education,” I showed how the radical ideology of the 1960s had been institutionalized, absorbed into the moral tissues of the American educational establishment.

As one left-wing professor wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “After the Vietnam War, a lot of us didn’t just crawl back into our literary cubicles; we stepped into academic positions. With the war over, our visibility was lost, and it seemed for a while—to the unobservant—that we had disappeared. Now we have tenure, and the work of reshaping the universities has begun in earnest.”

Indeed it is. The cancer is metastasizing, and has migrated to one of our most important institutions, the network of colleges and universities which we look to in order to find those who will be running the country. And it looks as if they intend to run it into the ground.

Mark Steyn is delightfully dyspeptic today.

Just in case our enemies needed another reason to despise us, today the inactivist group Somnolent Tilty-Headed Wankers for Peace launched an exciting new graphic: the same old clapped-out hippie peace symbol but incorporating the Eiffel Tower (right)! Isn’t that a cool, stylish way of showing how saddy-saddy-sadcakes you are about all those corpses in the streets of Paris? It’s already gone viral! And that’s all that matters, isn’t it?

Our enemies use social media to distribute snuff videos as a means of recruitment. We use it to confirm to them how passive and enervated we are: What was it the last time blood ran in the streets of Paris? Oh, yeah, a pencil – for all those dead cartoonists. But, given that blood in the streets of Paris looks like becoming a regular event, it helps to have something of general application. What about, ooh, a tricolor with a blue tear at the end? No, better yet: a peace symbol with a croissant in the middle. No, wait…

Read it.

Well, maybe hair style.

It seems fairly clear that the Democratic presidential primary debate schedule was deliberately designed to ensure that as few people as possible tuned in: After the first debate, the next two events were set on Saturdays—including one the Saturday before Christmas—and the one after that set for the Sunday before the Martin Luther King holiday.

And in a way, it makes sense: Why would Democrats want more viewers? Even though Sen. Bernie Sanders is performing notably better than many expected, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton remains the prohibitive favorite to win the Democratic party nomination. Because she is already so well known and well established with the general public, debates have little upside and large potential downside: She’s unlikely to say anything to help her chances all that much, and, given the base-pleasing incentives of the primaries, more likely to say something that would come back to hurt her in a general election. The Democratic party scheduled presidential debates so that they could say they had debates—not to actually have a contest.