Peggy Noonan nails it.

Readers know of the phenomenon at college campuses regarding charges of “microaggressions” and “triggers.” It’s been going on for a while and is part of a growing censorship movement in which professors, administrators and others are accused of racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, gender bias and ethnocentric thinking, among other things. Connected is the rejection or harassment of commencement and other campus speakers who are not politically correct. I hate that phrase, but it just won’t stop being current.

Kirsten Powers goes into much of this in her book, “The Silencing.” Anyway, quite a bunch of little Marats and Robespierres we’re bringing up.

But I was taken aback by a piece a few weeks ago in the Spectator, the student newspaper of Columbia University. I can’t shake it, though believe me I’ve tried. I won’t name the four undergraduate authors, because 30 years from now their children will be on Google, and because everyone in their 20s has the right to be an idiot.

Yet theirs is a significant and growing form of idiocy that deserves greater response.

We need a good long Depression to bring these people back to reality — or subtract them from the gene pool. I’m good with it either way.

Read it.

In 2016, insurance premiums could go through the roof as big insurers across the country apply for large rate increases for their ACA plans. For example, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee, the state’s biggest insurer, wants to raise rates 36.3 percent on average. New Mexico (at a truly eye-popping 51.6 percent), Maryland, and Oregon are seeing similar big numbers. Even in states where insurers are requesting more moderate increases, the percentages are still high enough to give one pause (Michigan’s Blue Care Network, for example, wants a 10 percent bump). Only in Maine has a state’s main insurer signaled its intent to keep rates flat for 2016.

That’s why they called it the Affordable Care Act, because laws are always titled the opposite of the effect that they have.

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Yes it’s true: Rubio isn’t rich, like Hillary Clinton and so many others in politics. He has made his money honestly, practicing law, earning a salary from public service and publishing a couple of books. No $300,000 speaking fees for Marco. And unlike Harry Reid, he hasn’t gotten wealthy on corrupt real estate deals. Somehow, the Post spins this into a negative.

He’s a politician — how dare he spend his own money!

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Campign group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is demanding the St Albans based establishment in Hertfordshire rename itself ‘Ye Olde Clever Cocks’ to “celebrate chickens as the intelligent, sensitive and social animals they are”.

I guess these guys were scared by a Disney movie while in the womb and are working out their issues in real life.

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It took a while—the first class graduated in 2009—but today the American College of the Building Arts (ACBA) is the only school in the United States to offer a bachelor’s degree in traditional building trades.

Which, of course, completely inverts the basic function of a university degree, as it grew from medieval roots. But nobody cares about history these days, except to plunder it for clever-sounding words that they can ‘repurpose’ to serve their own agenda.

David Warren has some interesting things to say.

My own development as a political thinker was tragically stunted by employment as a political pundit. No class of writers knows less about politics than they. In order to write at all in this genre, one must pretend to take seriously an entire political order that is preposterous, peopled by the mentally and emotionally disturbed, and ruled by power-hungry maniacs, until one’s own last mooring is shot. The madness is compounded by complete ignorance of what is going on, since no one not himself up to his ears in the actual exercise of political power can possibly understand what is in play. And, those up to their ears are drowning.

…

Where to the old Christian view, rights followed from duties in the same man, to our post-Christian view the arbitrary rights of one man translate to duties for unaccounted others. (My right to a free lunch translates to your duty to pay for it, &c.) In this sense, all modern political thinking is in its nature totalitarian.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, does what he does best.

Bill Nye the Science Guy gave a commencement speech at Rutgers on Sunday. Reading the speech left me thinking that if this is America’s designated Science Guy, I can be the nation’s designated swimsuit model.

…

What did the Science Guy have to say to the Rutgers graduates? Well, he warned them of the horrors of climate change, which he linked to global inequality.

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Just about every day there are stories in the MSM about “Swedes”, “Norwegians”, “Danes”, “Germans”, “Britons”, “Australians”, etc. traveling to Syria to join the Islamic State and fight in the jihad. Except that the media articles don’t put the quote marks in — they’re willing let their audience think these are just ordinary Svens and Heinrichs who inexplicably decide to grow beards, sell all their worldly goods, and smuggle themselves into Syria.

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You can’t make this stuff up: some on the left are complaining that the Waco biker gangs have gotten more favorable press coverage than the rioters in Ferguson and Baltimore.

And you can feel their pain.

The way the left drags race into every damn thing that happens is corrosive. The Waco/Baltimore comparison is ridiculous, but it is far too typical of the nonsense we see from newspeople and commentators every day.

Read it.

Of course, when I want to know about a Texas shootout, the first place I look is the New Yorker, by a female ‘staff writer’ who has probably never been within yards of a ‘biker’ in her life. That makes perfect sense.

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One-quarter of people with healthcare coverage are paying so much for deductibles and out-of-pocket expenses that they are considered underinsured, according to a new study.

So, in Crustian, ‘underinsured’ means ‘less insurance than we think they ought to have’. Good to know.

I thought that Obamacare was going to fix that?

Like the ‘poor’, the ‘underinsured’ we have always with us.

Read it.

Henk Jonkers, a microbiologist at Delft University of Technology, is working on a concrete with built-in bacteria that can fill in cracks as they form.

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Something is rotten in the NHS: Julie Mellor, the UK’s Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman, has released a report finding that “hundreds of thousands” die in miserable circumstances because the NHS’s end-of-life care can be “appalling.” The report, which draws on the complaints of family members, describes a system in which palliative care is neglected, medication administered incorrectly, and the dying go unserved because of state mandated limits on working hours.

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And the Voices of the Crust continue the hunt for every last victim minority they can find … or manufacture….

“There’s an assumption that white Americans make about Asian-American social class status based on racial identity. It’s the idea of the model minority; that Asian Americans are successful, high income, studious, hard working, quiet,” said C.N. Le, PhD., a University of Massachusetts sociologist. “That’s the prevailing image that white Americans have and it’s of course a set of stereotypes.”

They say that as if it’s a bad thing. Never forget that stereotypes have an underlying factual basis, otherwise they wouldn’t exist.

“I didn’t realized how little we really earned until recently, when I had to pay for college, and apply for financial aid; I realized that we are not that well off at all,” Chen said. “I would say that we’re financially struggling.”

Can you imagine a black American saying that? I can’t either.

“My parents don’t have much in the way of retirement savings,” Chen said. She and her sisters, she says, “want our parents to live with us and live a good life as they get older. We see it as our job to pay our parents back.”

Can you imagine a black American saying that? I can’t either.

It’s not race, it’s culture, morons.

Read it.

The American left has spent the past few weeks trying to tell us that they believe in free speech, but…—and the “but” is that anything that offends the sensibilities of Islamic fanatics is unnecessarily provocative, hateful, and possibly racist. Therefore, such “hate speech” shouldn’t be allowed.

Now they’ve gotten a taste of their own medicine.

An anti-censorship benefit scheduled for next month in New York City has been cancelled after the managers of the venue, the Sheen Center, “suggested that we alter the title of Neil LaBute’s play”—charmingly titled Mohammed Gets a Boner—”and alter the content of some of our panelists’ speeches.”

That’s right, folks. They tried to censor an anti-censorship event.

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“We believe our diversity, our differences, when joined together by a common set of ideals, makes us stronger, makes us more creative, makes us different,” Barack Obama pronounced at a citizenship ceremony last Fourth of July. Until half a century ago most serious historians would have called such an opinion ignorant or naïve. Ethnic diversity implies cultural diversity—if it did not, ethnic diversity would soon disappear. Cultural diversity means division, division means weakness, and weakness means, eventually, unfreedom. Such, at least, is the traditional view, and history appears to vindicate it.

…

The motto E pluribus unum is a sign that the founders saw diversity as a challenge to be mastered, not a resource to be tapped. – See more at: http://www.claremont.org/article/the-browning-of-america/#.VVxk8uc0pap

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Robots are nothing new. Industrial robots have been employed in manufacturing for about as long as polyester has been belabored in fashion. But unlike synthetic fibers, synthetic laborers have gotten much better over time. Digital employees consistently become cheaper, smarter, and more prevalent with each doubling of the number of transistors crammed into microprocessors. At their most salient, robots look a lot more like Kiva’s dumb and deferent deliverybots shuttling packages along Amazon warehouse floors than Neill Blomkamp’s charming CHAPPiE. But let’s not be crass humanoid supremacists, here. Digital workers are much more than mere metal reflections of ourselves.

My job, no; I have yet to see a robot that can create a star-schema data model from the nebulous blatherings of business users.

Your job — who knows?

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The typical method of shutting down a Mohammed cartoon event is analogous to the “heckler’s veto”. However, it goes beyond a guy at the back of the room shouting at the top of his lungs, forcing the speaker to give up and leave the mike. And it’s far more effective than a bunch of leftist boneheads standing around blowing whistles, drowning out the speaker.

All you have to do is spread the word that people are going to show up with AK-47s and perforate everyone who attends the event. That guarantees that the authorities will shut it down.

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Aside, of course, from the plain fact that God intended you to do so.

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Chelsea Clinton is so unpleasant to colleagues, she’s causing high turnover at the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, sources say.

Several top staffers have left the foundation since Chelsea came on board as vice chairman in 2011.

“A lot of people left because she was there. A lot of people left because she didn’t want them there,” an insider told me. “She is very difficult.”

Onetime CEO Bruce Lindsey was pushed upstairs to the position of chairman of the board two years ago, so that Chelsea could bring in her McKinsey colleague Eric Braverman.

“He [Braverman] was her boy, but he tried to hire his own communications professional and actually tried to run the place. He didn’t understand that that wasn’t what he was supposed to be doing,” said my source. “He was pushed out.”

Bill’s efficiency, Hillary’s charm.

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A TURKISH teenage talent sensation who has been starring on the country’s equivalent to the X Factor has been shot in the head while rehearsing at home.

Mutlu Kaya, 19, is in a critical condition after the brutal attack as she practised for the national TV talent show, according to reports.

Ms Kaya had allegedly received death threats for appearing on the singing contest, which is frowned upon by some in her conservative home region of Diyarbakir in southeast Turkey.

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The troubling fact is that none of this, neither the financial cost nor the emotional toll, was necessary. After all, the defense team, long before admitting their client’s responsibility for the bombings on the very first day of trial, was willing to enter a guilty plea if the government agreed to take the death penalty off the table in favor of life without parole. Would that have been so bad?

Yes.

Sure, critics would have complained about the high cost of housing and feeding Tsarnaev as a guest of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. They failed to recognize that this expense is a drop in the justice system bucket compared with the millions upon millions of dollars spent on prosecuting him.

One round of .45 ACP is 64 cents if you buy it in bulk. I’d be happy to pull the trigger for free. Hell, I’d pay my own expenses there and back pro bono publico.

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In more bad news for Obamacare exchanges, QSSI, the information technology firm that manages the federally run Healthcare.gov unexpectedly quit last Thursday. The IT firm, which is the third to manage Healthcare.gov in its brief two year history, has been marred by controversy over its relationship with administration officials.

While QSSI has been credited with saving the federal exchange following its disastrous 2013 rollout, its relationship with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has come under scrutiny for possible conflicts of interest. Andy Slavitt, formerly an executive at QSSI’s parent groups United Healthcare Group and Optum, was later made a senior advisor at CMS.

Slavitt was strangely allowed to pocket at least $4.8 million in tax-free income by indefinitely deferring capital gains taxes on the sales of millions in stock upon joining CMS. Slavitt was also granted a rare federal ethics waiver which allowed him ignore the one-year mandatory cooling off period and simultaneously be involved in contracting issues for Optum and United Healthcare while working at CMS.

The Affordable Care Act ought to have been named the Incompetents Full Employment Act.

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Consumer Reports never spent more on a car than on the all wheel drive version of the Tesla Model that it bought to review.
But its reviewers soon ran into a unique problem – they couldn’t get in the car.

The $127,000 Tesla Model S has door handles that retract flush into the door when not in use, and which are supposed to pop out when a owner approaches the car with the key fob.

That mad giggling sound you hear is Elon Musk scampering all the way to the bank.

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Good luck with that.

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Great. Let the Muslims fight each other for a change.

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What do restaurant menus, refrigerators, community banks and escalators have in common? All were subjected to yet more federal regulation last year.

No fewer than 184 “major” new rules have been imposed since the start of the Obama administration, costing Americans about $80 billion per year in additional regulatory costs. And many more regulations are on the way. Another 126 such rules are on the administration’s agenda, such as directives to farmers for growing and harvesting fruits and vegetables; strict limits on credit access for service members; and another redesign of light bulbs.

A new Heritage Foundation study found that in 2014, red tape entangled virtually every aspect of American life. The largest single area was financial services, which has been inundated with hundreds of new regulations as a result of the 2010 Dodd-Frank law. The full effects of the act have yet to be felt, but its restrictions are already crippling community banks and increasing consumers’ banking costs, while doing little to reduce the threat of bailouts.

Steve Sailer does a little fisking.

That’s kind of my point, which is that Diversity was already a real thing in this part of L.A. when I was growing up (and Weiner, from the richer side of the Hollywood Hills, is six years younger than me). Society was getting complicated in ways that the rest of the country only began to understand decades later. For example, Dr. K. told me at lunch in 1981 that Harvard School had a policy of discriminating against Oriental applicants because they didn’t contribute as much to classroom discussions as their test scores would indicate. Presumably, opinionated students like Weiner were preferred, even if they weren’t as smart. Today, we hear that Harvard University is being sued by Asian-Americans for discrimination in admissions, but I heard about discrimination against Asians at Harvard School 34 years ago.

It’s a little bit like how I can relate to Barack Obama (b. 1961) because Honolulu was like L.A., only much more so. But nobody is interested in how racially integrated little Barry’s kindergarten class was in 1965. Instead, when New Yorker editor David Remnick wrote a quasi-biography of Obama, he called it The Bridge and made it, somehow, all about the 1965 civil rights struggle on the bridge in Selma, Alabama, even though Obama spent 1965 feeding the hamster in Miss Yomiguchi’s kindergarten class along with little Jimmy and Soon-mi. It was a bestseller.

In contrast, I wrote a book putting Obama into the context of his growing up at a prep school in Hawaii and going to college in Los Angeles in 1981. It was not a bestseller.

Similarly, Weiner loves to tell interviewers about how Jews were a down-trodden one-eighth or one-tenth of the student body at Harvard School, even though a Los Angeles Herald-Examiner article from 1981 mentions that two-fifths of the student body was then Jewish. It’s a bizarre thing to dissemble about since Harvard and Westlake (the boys school and the girls school merged in 1989) figure in the lives of so many prominent people. According to Harvard-Westlake’s Wikipedia page, it’s alumni include Shirley Temple, Jon Lovitz, H.R. Haldeman, gay basketball player Jason Collins, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Tori Spelling, swimmer Dara Torres, Mark Harmon, astronaut Sally Ride, Governor Gray Davis, reluctant NFL player Jonathan Martin, Salon founder David Talbott, etc etc

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Thank God somebody is sticking up for the ‘abled’ in this country.

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Oh, yeah, that’s SURE to work. Why didn’t Obama think of that?

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If a person of color feels offended by something a well-meaning white person said and no one knows they’re offended, is it still a hate crime?

This is the implicit question posed by the very idea of “racial microaggressions.” The concept seems to have been formulated by the racial-grievance industry to fill the savage dearth of truly aggressive acts committed by whites toward nonwhites over the past few generations.

In other words, if what used to be known as “racism” no longer exists, you have to greatly expand the term’s breadth so that it includes words, thoughts, and acts that have zero conscious hostility behind them. You have to make everything racist just to stay in business.

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Last Saturday Gavin Boby of the Law and Freedom Foundation spoke at a demo sponsored by MARIAS (Mothers Against Radical Islam and Sharia) at Downing Street in London. He discussed the Islamization of Britain and the rest of Europe, paying particular attention to rape gangs, Jew-hatred, and seditious mosques.

As he says, “The problems with Islam are not a by-product of the policy: they are the policy.”

The Other McCain waxes philosophical.

It takes a lot of money to learn how to disregard — or condemn as “oppression” — ordinary common sense about human nature.

…

What nearly all of these books have in common is that they are either written or edited by Women’s Studies professors or else, as in the case of Adrienne Rich, are by authors whose works are included in the Women’s Studies curricula. As readers of Sex Trouble know, the book focuses on academia — the Feminist-Industrial Complex — because it is by institutionalizing their power in colleges and universities, with Women’s Studies departments as the engine of their influence, that radical feminists have gained hegemonic authority within elite culture.

Richard Fernandez points out what our Ruling Class cannot see.

But like the monster in the movie, it’s taken “three billion electro-volts of energy and it’s still coming on”!  Why have none of the previous heavy blows slowed ISIS or any of the affiliated rebel groups down?  Why is the jihadi organism inexplicably resistant to leadership disruptions, whether caused by drone strikes or the murderous work of rivals from other factions? How can it stand against the Olympian thunderbolt? This is an important question to answer.

It’s resistant because it is not a state.

No it’s not made of “solid nuclear material”.  But unlike a state, headed by an Emperor of Japan or Fuhrer, Islamic militancy has the apparent ability to reconfigure itself on the fly; to find energy from catastrophes that would delegitimize ordinary state institutions.   The Syrian rebel scene is a case in point.  It’s a constellation of merging and splitting groups with fanciful names like “Defenders of Jerusalem”, “Knights of Justice”, “Shields of Revolution”, “Sham Legion”, “Knights of Constantinople” and “Euphrates Volcano”.  It’s a regular Legion of Doom.

In this environment a damaged Al-Qaeda evolves into ISIS or spawns an al-Nusrah, like a Hydra sprouting heads or water groping a path down a slope.  Groups are constantly dividing, consolidating and taking each other over.  Instead of dying under the blows of the administration, the collective organism mutates; it has now acquired the unnerving capacity to engage in “united front” tactics with governments and rival armed groups in Iraq and Syria.

Islam is not an enemy; it’s a disease, and must be faced as such.

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“I think microwaves have been a largely overlooked idea,” says Tim Langley of CarbonScape. “It’s a technology that we almost all have in our homes, but as a commercial heat source for anything other than perhaps drying food we haven’t really looked at it.”

Blenheim-based company CarbonScape is using microwaves to turn wood waste from forestry into high-value carbon products in what it says is a world first.

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Growing up in some places — especially liberal ones — makes people less likely to marry, new data shows.

Well, that’s encouraging.

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We age, in part, because the adult stem cells in our tissues are surrounded by chemicals that prevent them from replacing damaged cells. One of these chemicals is TGF-beta1, known to depress stem cell activity. A new study shows that a drug that blocks TGF-beta1, which is now being tested for its anticancer properties, makes brain and muscle tissue more youthful. This is a step toward a drug cocktail that could rejuvenate aging tissue.

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A phenomenon called superlubricity occurs when two perfectly flat surfaces with incompatible crystal structures slide past each other. It’s only been observed in extremely small samples, however, as larger surfaces have imperfections that tend to get stuck as they slide around.

Now, researchers have managed to create superlubricity in a large sample. They do so by getting graphene to wrap around nanoscopic diamonds, creating something akin to tiny ball bearings.

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The CRISPR-cas9 system makes gene editing in many organisms and cells — like our own egg, sperm or embryo — more efficient, accessible and simple than ever before. These groundbreaking capabilities have spawned discussions surrounding the ethics and applications of the new system, and have garnered significant attention around the world to ensure ethically correct usage.

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Citizen scientists are playing an increasingly important role in experiments, but there may be a place where certain experiments are less than welcome: Wyoming.

The term ‘citizen scientists’ is, of course, a euphemism for ‘busybody enviro-Nazis who suspect you are doing something with your own property that they don’t like’.

A new law passed earlier this year criminalizes the collection of data on “open land” if the collector doesn’t receive permission in advance and eventually shares that data with the government.

If the enviro-Nazis don’t choose to pester you, the taxpayer-funded enviro-Nazis want to make sure they get their turn at the piñata.

As Slate points out, the move sounds like a modest proposal until almost any of those terms — “collection,” “data,” or “open land” — are defined. And although other states have passed similar laws, Wyoming’s seems especially broad: photographs are specifically covered by the law, while the land could mean any place outside of a town or city.

Privacy? What’s that?

One example: under the law, collection of data could mean taking soil samples to demonstrate an environmental problem in a state park — an act that could be seen as a violation of the law if shared with the government, and ultimately inadmissible in a lawsuit.

Oh, I’m sure somebody’s worried about ‘an environmental problem in a state park’ rather than some rancher or natural resources extraction company.

Why would the Wyoming government want that? At Slate, Justin Pidot, citing a recent case where citizen scientists found high levels of E. coli in streams, argues that it’s a way for the government to crack down on environmental dissent. You can either keep that information to yourself, or risk a year in jail.

Oh, I’m sure the worry is about ‘a way for the government to crack down on environmental dissent’, which it’s never shown any inclination to do.

If you believe that one, they’ll tell you another one.

Read it.

Here’s hoping. There is very little wrong with California that a rise in sea level of about 20 feet wouldn’t cure, although I’m hoping for 40.

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The Watch has major in-practice downsides though, the mother of which I’ll call The Douchebag Factor. By virtue of the product’s newness, and its cost, it’s hard to wear the Apple Watch in public without feeling like that girl, the designer-handbag girl, the “I spent $400 to read my texts three seconds sooner” girl. The Watch is still rare enough to earn glances and even questions on the subway, and I found it hard to not be constantly aware of it shouting “I am a shameless consumer!” from my wrist.

The Douchebag Factor is equally prominent in social settings, even if you have the kind of friends who are sympathetic to one’s need to test drive new gadgetry over beers. Because the Apple Watch inherently combines two of the rudest things you can do among friends—check your watch and look at your phone—and suggests that you do them incessantly.

Anything that gets the SWPLs bickering with each other has my support. (The fact that I own Apple stock has absolutely nothing to do with it, of course.)

Mark Steyn looks at the madness afflicting the New York Times.

What confidence can we have that traumatized war refugees can be transformed into budding American entrepreneurs? We cannot know for sure. But recent evidence of recaptured children from the clutches of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda and victims of violent crime across five continents reveals that they become more active citizens than similar compatriots who have not suffered from these traumatic events.

What a fascinating study. If that’s how you make “active” citizens, let’s drop the entire student body of Oberlin in the middle of Somalia and see what they’re like when they get back.

I’ll be you didn’t know that it was Armed Forces Day, did you?

You wouldn’t know it from reading the ‘news’.

You wouldn’t know it from watching TV.

You wouldn’t know it from listening to the radio.

You wouldn’t know it from the special ‘doodle’ that Google uses for special days, since there isn’t one today, although they can celebrate every SWPL happening that pops up in the the fevered brains of the Chattering Class.

But we veterans remember — and celebrate.

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A California hacker who has become an expert in cracking locks has invented a 3D-printed machine that can crack a rotary combination lock in around 30 seconds – and he’s released the plans, 3D models, and code as open source.

Isn’t that special.

Single-Serve Food Pod machine.

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The Church of Santa Maria della Misericordia in Venice is being used by Muslims for prayers, without the authorization of either the Patriarchate or the property owners.

Now, just imagine the reaction of the Lamestream Media to the discovery that Christians had been using a mosque as a church.

Oh, wait, you don’t have to imagine it — it already exists. (Note that this church was originally a Christian church before the Muslims stole it and converted it into a mosque — but, apparently, once a mosque, always a mosque.)

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Barack Obama says he is a Christian. The rest of us can only take him at his word, but for a believer, he seems remarkably ignorant of both Christians and Christianity. At the Weekly Standard, Mark Hemingway writes on “Obama’s Casual Slander of American Christians.”

…

Obama’s comments are odd. They certainly aren’t based on his own experience; the only church Obama has belonged to is the one run by Jeremiah Wright. Did Wright devote a lot of attention to abortion? I doubt it. To be fair, though, Wright’s congregation may not have done much about poverty, either, other than complain (“God damn America!”).

So Obama sounds like all he knows about Christianity is what he reads in the newspaper.

Read it.

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