Victor Davis Hanson has a solution to suggest.

College football players are gladiators of sorts. On the one hand, they are vastly underpaid for the risks they take as well as the profits they generate for the university and the scores of jobs they subsidize. On the other, in terms of college protocols, they are pampered and exempt from rules that other students follow. Being exploited and privileged is a bad combination.

Baseball and hockey don’t depend on colleges to serve as their farm teams.

For half a century, liberals have pointed out that football players should drop the amateur pretense, join a semi-pro club, and make the money they deserve — given that their admissions, grades, and class attendance are exempt from university rules, and warp the college experience. Why do we treat as a privileged class those who so often do not meet university requirements that are non-negotiable for mostly indebted students without recourse to such lavish scholarships and subsidies? Entire majors, curricula, counseling, and protocols were invented simply to free football players from having to be students.

Indeed. The football program corrupts the entire college experience.

Nearly half of the University of Missouri’s players are African-American, four times greater than the black percentage of the general population.

How ‘under-represented’ can you get?

The truth is that the university is a dysfunctional institution. Free speech no longer exists. Trigger warnings, micro-aggressions, and safe zones have created a climate of fear and bullying on campus. Affirmative action criteria emulate the abhorrent “one-drop” rule of the Old Confederacy. Campus identity is defined by race and gender, but never class.  Annual hikes in tuition exceed the rate of inflation. Faculty are paid widely asymmetrical compensation for instruction of the identical class, depending on archaic institutions like tenure and seniority. Non-teaching personnel have soared. Graduate PhD programs have proliferated, even as jobs for their graduates have shrunk. Undergraduate university graduation rates have declined. College graduates are assumed to earn high-paying jobs; but the dismal rate of bachelor’s degrees translating into employment commensurate with staggering college costs and student-loan debt would prompt federal investigations of fraud and false advertising in any other institution.

Steve Sailer politely refrains from saying ‘Told you so’.

Consider the Tsarnaev Bomb Brothers, who were admitted as refugees when children. Dad Tsarnaev, an auto mechanic, is not great addition to America, but at least he’s not a homicidal maniac. In contrast, growing up in Cambridge, MA, surrounded by patriotic Republican rednecks, it was only natural for the oppressed younger Tsarnaevs to blow up the Boston Marathon.

Yeah, that assimilation thing really works with Muslims. (Not….)

Marie Hermanova, the spokeswoman for a team of Czech volunteers who have been working with the migrants, said her group was bracing for a rising anti-migrant mood.

“What happened in Paris on Friday night is happening in Syria every day, and it is exactly why those people are running away,” she said. “Our volunteers are extremely unhappy about the wave of hate this will likely release.”

The wave of hate has been going on for 1400 years, in the opposite direction. Too bad the ‘volunteers’ are ignoring it.

“We should not blame the migrants,” said Mr. Zitmanis, a construction engineer. “If we help them more, the risk of a terror attack happening again would be less.”

Yeah, there’s really a lot of evidence supporting that position. Oh, wait….

Read it.

It will also put a lot of people out of a job. Maybe even yours.

Read it.

Today, the Clinton Foundation is unlike anything else in the history of the nation and, perhaps, the world: It is a global philanthropic empire run by a former U.S. president and closely affiliated with a potential future president, with the audacious goal of solving some of the world’s most vexing problems by bringing together the wealthiest, glitziest and most powerful people from every part of the planet.

The evolution of the foundation, which began as a modest nonprofit focused largely on the ex-president’s library in Arkansas, is a nearly perfect reflection of the Clintons themselves. It was not designed as a master plan but rather has grown, one brainstorm at a time, in accordance with the ambitious, loyal, restless and often scattered nature of its primary namesake. Many programs were sparked by chance encounters in Bill Clinton’s life. A meeting with a Harlem shopkeeper. A friend’s plan to fight AIDS. The flight to Davos. Emergency heart surgery.

Where the Crust can come out and play.

Ben Chu at the Independent understands the dialectic.

When Confucius was asked by his students what was the first thing he would do if he were made king, the sage replied: “Rectify the names.”

The answer baffled the students, who had expected their master to say he would promote the virtuous into positions of authority and expel corrupt officials. But Confucius explained his reasoning: “If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.”

That is why the Forces of Evil spend their initial effort at having a good ‘name’ for name-calling, upon which every other tactic depends. From ‘black market’ to ‘price gouging’ to ‘windfall profits’, the Left knows that controlling the terms of the argument is the first step on the road to winning. And Marx was the original Alinskyite – ‘capitalism’ isn’t really a thing, it’s just a name he created as a stick to beat the people he didn’t like. And everybody has used it as a punching bag ever since, since even people who favor property rights and free markets have taken to using it, since they don’t have any alternative.

But what is this capitalism? What does the word stand for? It’s not a question that is asked enough. The journalist Paul Mason has published a book with the title “Post-capitalism” which, rather irritatingly, lacks any substantive discussion of what capitalism actually is.

The definition is implicit: Capitalism is ‘those ignorant losers who don’t agree with us’. See how it is used and tell me I’m wrong.

But the old concepts are hard to shake. When pressed, people often still describe capitalism as a system under which the owners of financial capital (shareholders) offer up their resources to fund business ventures in exchange for a financial return (dividends paid by a company). Yet few large businesses need to raise money from investors in stock markets any longer. They can fund their expansions from internally generated profits. They are more likely to buy back shares with their free cash flow than issue new ones.

The classic Marxist understanding of capital is economic power as ownership, but ‘ownership’ has become so diffused in the modern world that it has about as much power as owning a lottery ticket. You hope to get lucky, but none of the outcome depends on any action on your part.

Ownership has changed too. Today many company employees are shareholders through their pension schemes. Does that give these workers economic power in the manner of the 19th-century capitalist class? Not really. Economic power usually lies not with shareholders but with the managers of companies, the executives. Sometimes it lies with the financiers who look after people’s investments, the professional asset managers employed by pension funds. But it is virtually never the ordinary shareholder who is in the driving seat.

This is old news among those who have been paying attention. James Burnham wrote it all up in his seminal work, The Managerial Revolution, back before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.

Labels are often a substitute for thought, especially in politics where a naïve view holds sway that economic policies and institutions are either inherently “capitalist” or “socialist”. See “privatisation” and “the NHS” for two examples in the British context. Extremists of both the left and the right are attracted to this Manichean world where good and evil collide.

…

“Capitalism” doesn’t really exist. There are various modes of market-based economic, social and legal organisation in rich countries, some of which work well in some respects, and some of which don’t. There is a debate to be had about how to reform those modes to meet the often divergent needs and aspirations of different populations. But there is no magic “capitalist” or indeed “socialist” formula that all should follow. Such 19th-century labels are often an excuse to dodge the difficult job of figuring out what will work.

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.

People may call for peace all they want, but when one side wants war, war is what you get.

The answer to those who break the peace is to break them, so that peace may be restored.

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.

Read it.

It’s difficult to think of a piece of legislation that failed more abysmally than the ADA.

No Child Left Behind. But I’ll grant you that the ADA is certainly in the running.

So now what to we do? Will the supporters of the ADA concede that it failed and call for repeal? Not likely. A cynic might claim that the Americans with Disabilities Act is not about getting disabled people into the workforce, it’s about creating jobs for lawyers.

And the lawyers certainly appreciate it. Check any legislator’s campaign contribution list and you’ll find lawyers figured prominently.

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.

Read it.

Sign it.

Drivel from a British Voice of the Crust.

Fine — we’ll kill them, too.

A thought – if we kill them all, there won’t be anybody to recruit from, would there? Problem solved.

Read it.

A man posted live updates on Facebook from inside the Bataclan music venue as hostages were shot “one by one”.

One of the best-known music venues in Paris, the Bataclan was hosting California-based rock-band Eagles of Death Metal. Around

The attackers first targeted cafes outside the venue with machine gun fire, then went inside and opened fire on the panicked audience, according to the Paris police chief.

Now we see the violence inherent in the system — the system being Islam.

There is no such thing as ‘Islamophobia’ – a ‘phobia’ is an irrational fear, and the fear of Islam is extremely rational.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

Read it.

Student actors and the stage crew at Clarion University arrived Tuesday evening for one of the final rehearsals before next week’s campus opening of “Jesus in India” only to learn the off-Broadway production they had spent months on had been canceled.

The reason they were given was race: theirs.

Three of the five characters in the production are Indian, but on the mostly white state university campus, two of those characters were to be played by white student actors and a third was being portrayed by a mixed-race student.

Lloyd Suh, the playwright, told the university through his literary agent Monday that he was uncomfortable with any notion that he supported Caucasians portraying Indian characters in his play, said Bob Levy, chairman of the visual and performing arts department at Clarion.

I was under the impression that an actor’s job was to pretend convincingly to be someone he is not. Apparently I was misinformed.

The Korean-American playwright wanted the parts recast, Mr. Levy said, and ultimately pulled the university’s right to stage the production after being told that finding Asian replacements was not practical given the play was to open next Wednesday on a campus in rural northwestern Pennsylvania where Asian or Pacific Islander students account for 0.7 of 1 percent of the university’s 5,368 students.

Sorry, reality, you’ll have to take a back seat to the political agenda.

I think the playwright needs to be pressured to change his name from ‘Lloyd’ to something more ethnic. Suk Deep, perhaps.

Read it.

A pair of journalists critical of modern feminism have been banned from a university event that, ironically, focuses on whether feminism is stifling modern free speech.

The University of Manchester Free Speech & Secular Society is scheduled to hold a public debate Oct. 15 titled “From Liberation to Censorship: Does Modern Feminism Have a Problem with Free Speech?” Initially, two journalists, Milo Yiannopoulos of Breitbart and Julie Bindel of the Guardian, were invited to speak at the debate. Both have since been barred from attending because their opinions are considered too offensive.

The people at The Onion must be tearing out their hair. How do you parody something that looks like a parody?

Read it.

Being able to say ‘I told you so’ is cold comfort at this point.

And the saddest thing is that THESE STUPID PEOPLE REFUSE TO FACE REALITY.

Lion of the Blogosphere mind-melds with the usual suspects.

And the winners are:

• If we stop letting in refugees because of this, the terrorist will have won.
• If France had only better integrated Muslims into society and provided them with better jobs…
• George W. Bush
• More people die because of poverty than terrorism.
• The terrorists don’t understand the true meaning of their religion
• By banning Muslim women from wearing the hijab and other racist laws, France fomented the hatred which led to them becoming terrorists.
• The Crusades.
• Remember that 99.99% of Muslims are good people who condemn these acts of violence.
• Climate change is a far greater threat than terrorism
• Dylan Roof, Timonthy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were all Christians.
• If we respond to these attacks by further dehumanizing entire religious and ethnic groups, we will only set the stage for more extremism.
• Lack of adequate healthcare kills more people than terrorism.

And that shows what we’re up against.

Read it.

Fox News reports that jihadi web sites are rejoicing over today’s terrorist attacks in Paris. The line we have heard more than once from ISIS-related sites is, “The American blood is best, and we will taste it soon.” The French are tougher than many realize, but they are not the primary targets of Muslim extremists.

This morning, in a burst of bad timing, Barack Obama said on ABC that ISIS is “contained.” Far from being contained, ISIS is on a roll, from the Sinai, where they apparently brought down an airplane full of Russian tourists, to Paris, France.

No one can seriously doubt that ISIS, and other Muslim terrorist groups, are doing all they can to attack the United States. We, meanwhile, are welcoming enormous numbers of immigrants from Islamic countries, and have gone “open borders” so that anyone can enter the United States from the south. What reason is there to think that Islamic terrorists will not enter across our unguarded borders and organize attacks similar to, or worse than, what France experienced tonight? None.

Read it.

And if you believe that one, she’ll tell you another one.

Read it.

What a bunch of Islamophobes! Don’t they know that they’ve got Islam all wrong?

Medicine-Dispensing Sippy Cups.

Star Wars Death Star Waffle Maker. You know you want one.

Keyboard Waffle Iron. You can find anything on the Internet. Awesomesauce not included.

The Other McCain is on the case.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the bistro….

Perhaps we could sic the Mizzou students on them. “Can we get some muscle over here?”

Read it.

The 18-year-old was found dead in an SUV with “several bites” from a deadly monocle cobra on each arm, KVUE reports. The autopsy found that Thompson first had bites on his left shoulder, consistent with a right-handed person intentionally receiving a snakebite. The venom would have led to paralysis and death in as few as 30 minutes.

Seems like a self-correcting problem — if, indeed, it is a problem.

The teen loved reptiles and had a “history of suicidal ideation,” according to the medical report. He was found in the SUV with its door open and an empty cobra container, though the snake was gone. Animal control conducted a large-scale search until the snake was found dead by a road.

Perhaps we could ship a carton of cobras to Yale. Surely those special snowflakes do not wish to spend any more time in such a sexist/racist/homophobic/what-have-you world as this. I mean, we’d be doing them a favor.

Steve Sailer is not afraid to connect the dots.

But, strange as it may seem from reading The Economist, the word “demographics” means more than just “age.” One of the more interesting aspect of demographics is the “consanguinity” rate, or percentage of all marriages that are between first or second cousins, a statistic which correlates strikingly with a lack of what Europeans consider civic virtues.

…

Interestingly, the Merkel Youth seem to come overwhelmingly from inbred cultures, which is probably not coincidental.

So, if you’re European, go out there and be odd.

Well, more odd than you are already….

Read it.

I am not making this up.

Nathan Amundson serves as President of UMN’s Young Americans for Liberty chapter and student group representative for Write Things, a creative writing group. Amundson said debate on the resolution centered around whether enacting the moment of recognition might instill a more islamophobic sentiment on campus.

I wonder whether they think that being beheaded would also ‘violate their safe space’?

One student representative said holding a moment of recognition over a tragedy committed by non-white perpetrators could increase racist attitudes on campus.

Sounds like the racist attitudes on campus are at their max already, although not in the direction that these one-way muthas think.

Read it.

A Massachusetts woman this week won the right to wear a colander on her head in her driver’s license photo after citing religious reasons. Lindsay Miller identifies as a “Pastafarian” and member of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which some critics call a parody religion.

Imagine that.

She tried to wear the kitchen utensil in her driver’s license photo this year but the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles denied her request. However, after intervention by the American Humanist Association’s Appignani Humanist Legal Center the RMV recently reversed its stance.

This is why it’s not a good idea to put government employees in charge of anything important, such as your health insurance or your tax money.

Ms. Miller said she was delighted that the agency allowed her to don a colander for her driver’s license, which was issued Thursday.

I have absolutely no doubt that she is. The rest of us, on the other hand, not so much.

“While I don’t think the government can involve itself in matters of religion, I do hope this decision encourages my fellow Pastafarian Atheists to come out and express themselves as I have,” Ms. Miller said.

Of course, if she had just called it an especially sturdy niqab, nobody would have dared to say boo about it.

Read it.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is facing a growing backlash from Mormons upset about a new policy that bars children of same-sex parents from baby-naming ceremonies and baptisms, and declares members in gay marriages to be apostates subject to excommunication.

The policies have hit hard in a church that considers family bonds central in this life and eternal in the afterlife. While church members are pouring out their pain and confusion at family dinners and on Mormon blogs, critics are planning a “mass resignation” in a park adjacent to the church’s headquarters in Salt Lake City on Saturday.

Pain there may be, but confusion only afflicts the clueless. The LDS church has a structure of authority based on revelation, just like Real Christianity, and its principles are not subject to the whims of fashion. The children aren’t being permanently excluded from the church, they just have to demonstrate that they conform to the church’s teachings rather than to their ‘parents’. There comes a time when an organization has to step up to the plate or go home, and it would appear that this is the point to which the LDS church has come.

Fortunately they don’t depend for their revelations on the editorial board of the New York Times, or there’s no telling what they’d be expected to believe.

Read it.

In Tuesday’s Republican presidential primary debate, Senator Marco Rubio wondered aloud why Americans insist that the only legitimate option after compulsory education is college. “For the life of me, I don’t know why we have stigmatized vocational education,” Rubio said. “Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less [sic] philosophers.”

Events this week prove Rubio right, and not just in terms of the American economy. University campuses these days produce far fewer philosophers and more outright fascists in shutting down speech and scrutiny. Two incidents in the past fortnight have shone a bright light on the failure of academics to protect the kind of free speech that succeeds in producing philosophers – or educated adults in general.

Read it.

What I’ve been expecting to see every day is a bunch of KKK members dancing in the streets and saying ‘Told you so! Told you so!’ The backlash against all of this crap is not going to be pretty.

Read it.

And ‘progressives’ are doing their best to drive a stake through its heart — and its head, and it’s hands and feet, and anywhere else they can reach.

Read it.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Ammo Grrrll remembers.

“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” {Exactly like Obama, except that he will support any foe and oppose any friend while trying to lose every conflict slowly enough so that it’s the next guy’s problem.}

“To those nations who would make themselves our adversary…we dare not tempt them with weakness.” {What? No such thing as an adversary. Just friends we haven’t caved to yet. Weakness is Putin being on “the wrong side of history.” Tremble, Putin, tremble.}

And, of course, the big finish with “Ask not what your country can do for you.” Seriously?

Can you imagine any Democrat who hoped to be elected saying any of that today? Why, today it’s ALL about what your country (read: “taxpayers”) can do for you! Been a thoroughly-unrepentant criminal? Not a problem. We’re issuing an edict that no potential employer can even ASK! Hightailed it away from your platoon to join up with the enemy? Not a problem. Welcome home! Invite your parents to the White House! Enter the country illegally? Not a problem! Have a baby and some foodstamps! Got a penis but feeling kind of girlish today? Aw, go ahead, shower with the girls! Only bigots could possibly oppose that.

Read it.

But you knew that.

The Huffington Post called the shortage “devastating,” and the Obama administration’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology predicted a shortfall of 1 million technical professionals by 2020. What’s more, 90 percent of executives report that they struggle to recruit and retain tech talent.

But as an engineer, founder and tech executive, I see a certain absurdity in this conversation — I’ve never thought talented people are particularly tough to find. Perhaps I don’t understand because I’m lucky and haven’t faced the same challenges as other tech CEOs, but I don’t think so. I think I, too, have lived those experiences.

In fact, I’ve come to believe the so-called “talent shortage” is a lie — the real shortage is of companies that are willing to invest in talented people.

Read it.

I have long been toying with a business idea, but never had the time, patience, know-how and, above all, the resolve to do anything with it: the Virtue-Signalling Investment Fund. This fund would invest exclusively in virtue-signalling products – that is, products which people use to signal a right-on, trendy-leftie view of the world.

It would hold shares in companies making products related to fashionable causes, such as feminism (think of the “This is what a feminist looks like” T-shirt), environmentalism, identity politics and above all, anti-capitalism.

Anti-capitalism provides the basis for a permanent bull market, which is massive in size and scope. It’s not just the obligatory Che Guevara shirt. There is more anti-capitalist literature on the market than anyone could read in a lifetime, and there are literally thousands of movies and songs with subtle or not-so-subtle anti-market messages. And, of course, there’s anti-capitalist merchandise.

Take the ‘Anonymous’ masks used on Guy Fawkes Night: You probably knew that Time Warner collects a royalty per mask sold – but they are not the only ones profiting handsomely from the anti-capitalist gravy train. At least one businessman buys those masks directly from China at a price of £0.22 a piece, and sells them here for £4.20. He says that he makes a profit of £2.60 per mask, which would amount to a staggering margin of 62 per cent.

Read it.

The working theory is that the students are of a generation raised by helicopter in a therapeutic culture – in shorthand, they lack the very basic coping skills that most everyone in generations previous developed as of course. Rather than “walking off” a skinned knee or saying “sticks and stones” in response to a bully’s insult, they’re acculturated to appeal to authority for attention, protection, and justice (revenge).

At the same time, overt racial and other discrimination and expressions thereof having receded, a need arose to find racial or sexist offense in innocuous statements and neutral acts for the Left to maintain fuel for its resentment politics – see, for example, the theories of “privilege” and “micro-agressions.” (Putting those words in quotes is likely an expression of my “privilege” while also serving as a “micro-agression.”)

Read it.

Educator and writer Michael Copperman has discovered that Portland’s hip scene has come at a price: young people moving to Portland from other parts of the country have gentrified North Portland, traditionally a heavily black neighborhood, and displaced blacks to the suburbs. “The number of people living in poverty in Portland’s suburbs shot up almost 100 percent between 2000 and 2011,” observes Copperman.

Portland is, of course, justly famous as the whitest city in America.

While such income and racial integration might be welcome, it has its costs as well. While the whites gentrifying North Portland neighborhoods enjoy food carts, boutique restaurants, and ethnic grocery stores, displaced blacks are not better off in the suburbs and in many cases are worse off, replacing the single-family homes they rented with cramped apartments.

“Suburban Portland, home to the most notorious white West Coast gangs, has in some hotspots become a turf war apartment complex by apartment complex, the traditional Crips and Bloods of urban Portland overlapping areas dominated by the European Kindred and affiliates, all battling to control lucrative sex trafficking operations off the I-5 Corridor,” says Copperman, a transition that is pretty much invisible to recently arrived Millennials.

Read it.

The following news report from RT discusses the recent clashes between police and a rioting mob in the makeshift “Jungle” migrant camp near Calais. Prior to this report there had been three successive nights of violence in the Jungle (and tonight may have seen a fourth; I haven’t heard any reports yet).

Watch carefully all the way to the end of this video. Just before the end it looks like the situation for the reporter, Laura Smith, may be turning ominous.

Read it.

Carvana, a Phoenix-based online-car-buying startup that describes itself as the “Amazon of cars,” opened the vending machine Thursday in Nashville. The five-story glass building, which is equipped with three customer delivery bays, can store up to 20 cars. The vending machine is open Monday through Saturday and vehicle pickup is free for all Carvana customers. The company says it will subsidize $200 in airfare and arrange transportation from the Nashville airport for customers who live outside Tennessee, but who want to pick up their car at the vending machine.

‘Work computers are like an android simulation of a good friend with the memory and personality modules removed.’

Read it.

Read it.

Look at that picture. This guy is about as ‘black’ as Dwight Eisenhower.

Read it.

Not too long ago, shortly before our son turned 18 months old, an important document arrived in the mail. It was a revised birth certificate, reflecting our son’s new first name—Lev.

When Lev was born, we named him Liev—a name that autocorrect doesn’t think exists. But over the first five weeks of his life, my husband Dan and I realized we’d gotten his name wrong, and now we were issuing a very public correction over a single letter.

Denizens of the Crust cope with a First World Problem.

We hadn’t taken the naming process lightly. The artisanal baby name trend has prompted a sort of arms race for obscurity. Like many people, we wanted a name that was at once classic and unusual, so I went all Nate Silver on the stats, consulting the demographic trends state by state, just as I had with my daughter four years before. (Back then, trying to see around corners, I nixed one contender because it was trending in Maine, which seemed like a bellwether state.) But we couldn’t come up with a name that fit our son the way the name Olive fit our daughter—enveloping her right away when she was born, like a soft sweater.

Reported in Slate, naturally.

If they were black, of course, they could have named him D’Volve or Peeair  and just be done with it. But they’re Persons of Pallor, so the dilemma was crippling.

Read it.

The historian A. Roger Ekirch has uncovered a pattern of references to “first sleep” and “second sleep,” or “morning sleep,” in sources from Homer and Plutarch to John Locke. Until the spread of artificial light in the 18th and 19th centuries, it turns out, our ancestors slept in two shifts of roughly four hours each, with a period of wakefulness in between. That interval was a peaceful time, a time for contemplation and reflection and maybe copulation. “Usually, people would retire between 9 and 10 o’clock only to stir past midnight to smoke a pipe, brew a tub of ale or even converse with a neighbor,” Ekirch wrote. “Others remained in bed to pray or make love.”

Or – dare I say it? – surf the web.

(Note the obligatory dig at ‘capitalism’ in the last paragraph — this article is in Slate, after all.)

Read it.

Nose, feel the knife. Face, feel spited.

Dr. Dale Brigham, considered one of the most beloved professors at the University of Missouri, has resigned after refusing to cancel an exam for students who claimed to feel “unsafe.”

“If you don’t feel safe coming to class, then don’t come to class,” Dr. Brigham told his students. “I will be there, and there will be an exam administered in our class,” he continued, imploring his students to stand up to the bullies on campus. “If you give into bullies, they win. The only way bullies are defeated is by standing up to them.”

…

Under intense pressure, Dr. Brigham has both cancelled the exam and resigned from the university, according to screenshots posted online of an email from Dr. Brigham to his students.

“The exam is cancelled. Our students will be able to take the exam at an alternate date with no loss of points,” Dr. Brigham told students. “No one will have to come to class today. And, I am resigning my position.”

Sounds as if somebody is bailing before the crash.

Read it.

They probably lost the receipt and so can’t return it. Pity.

The original “flat-pack” church is known to date from the era of the Emperor Justinian, who ruled from around 482 – 565 AD and was a prolific builder in his efforts to regulate Christianity across his empire.

Under his rule, based at Constantinople, large stone-carrying ships laden with prefabricated marble church interiors were sent out from quarries around the Sea of Marmara to sites in Italy and North Africa.

Read it.

Aravindan Balakrishnan, 75, used “brutal and calculated” manipulation to subjugate women under his control, repeatedly assaulting some of them them and using violence and sexual degradation to bend them to his will, Southwark Crown Court was told.

Well, that’s socialism for you.

Brendan O’Neil at Spiked blows the whistle.

It is indeed interesting, and worrying, that students are so sensitive and censorious today. But I have a question for the hand-wringers, the media people, academics and liberal thinkers who are so disturbed by what they’re calling the ‘Yale snowflakes’: what did you think would happen? When you watched, or even presided over, the creation over the past 40 years of a vast system of laws and speech codes to punish insulting or damaging words, and the construction of a vast machine of therapeutic intervention into everyday life, what did you think the end result would be? A generation that was liberal and tough? Come off it. It’s those trends, those longstanding trends of censorship and therapy, that created today’s creepy campus intolerance; it’s you who made these monsters.