COST OF SEQUENCING A HUMAN GENOME is plummeting. “What the present much lower cost of sequencing tells us: the number of genetic variants with known impact is going to soar in the next 5 years and soar even more in the next 10 years. By the year 2025 the number of pieces of useful information you can get from getting yourself sequenced is going to be large. It is going to be especially large for people who are thinking about having kids.”

WELL, THAT’S A RELIEF: Yes, There Is a Technology Bubble, and That’s Okay.

AMMUNITION HAS COME A LONG WAY IN THE PAST COUPLE OF DECADES: FBI Switching Back To 9mm.

PAUL RYAN ON IMMIGRATION: “Get serious about enforcing our laws.”

12 CLASSIC MOVIES TO WATCH WITH YOUR CHILDREN BEFORE THEY BECOME TEENAGERS: Curiously, the oldest movie namechecked in this PJM Parenting article is Star Wars from 1977. But I can remember watching The Wizard of Oz (in network reruns every year), the Hope and Crosby road movies (because my dad worshipped Crosby) and plenty of other pre-1960s movies with my parents.

Can kids no longer handle black and white movies or any films that pre-date the founding of Industrial Light & Magic?

IT’S POTEMKIN VEHICLES ALL THE WAY DOWN: VW’s emissions scandal spreads to gas-powered cars.

IN THE MAIL: The Business of Family: How to Stay Rich for Generations.

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TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 909.

POLITICIZING TAYLOR SWIFT: Erick Erickson describes Red State readers outraged over Erickson taking his ten year old daughter to see Taylor Swift. “According to the emails and tweets, it was inappropriate for me to take my child to see her favorite singer because her favorite singer is supporting a Democrat:”

I just don’t get that attitude. Why must everything be politicized? In fact, Taylor Swift did not politicize her concert. There was no Hillary for President banner anywhere. It never came up. The only people I see politicizing anything are the people who declared I should not have gone.

That must be a miserable existence. I don’t know that any television show or movie or music, except for long dead Classical composers, would be acceptable if I limited myself based on the political affiliations of performers.

Then there are the people who get upset over where you shop. I’ve been criticized before for eating at Arby’s because of positions they’ve taken. Others are enraged by Chick-Fil-A.

Personally, I think life is too short to get upset by the fact that a singer might support a politician you don’t like especially when it’s not like the singer is in your face about it. And I don’t have enough time or energy to figure out the political leanings of the various grocery stores, restaurants, and other facilities I use.

Exactly — leave the politicized life to the left, who both invented the concept and all-too-frequently wallow deeply in it; as Matt Labash of the Weekly Standard once warned, “It’s hard work, politicizing your whole life.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: What We’re Buying With $1 Trillion+ in Student Loans:

You know what they say about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. This is certifiable. College is too expensive, so have the government make it easier to finance — then keep shifting more and more of the cost burden to the government, without doing anything about the underlying cost inflation that is making it necessary for government to get into the finance business.

Obviously, this can’t go on indefinitely. The income-based-repayment programs are relatively new, so the government hasn’t yet been handed the bill for the loan forgiveness that will be necessary as we give people payment rates that are often less than the interest on the loan. But when the government gets that bill, people are going to notice that this is a costly business.

Over decades, the government has restructured the educational system to make it look more like the health-care system, with the costs paid by third parties while the service is consumed by individuals who have no incentive to think about price. The effects are predictable for both. . . .

Does college actually make people much more economically productive? Yes, yes, I know: People who go to college earn substantially more than people who don’t, and that earnings premium has been increasing in recent decades. But what, exactly, do they learn in college that makes them so much more productive? In certain technical professions, the answer is obvious; engineers and nurses do need to master the rudiments of their trade before they are unleashed on an unsuspecting public.

But that doesn’t describe the whole higher educational system. It doesn’t even seem to describe the majority of college degrees. Administrators defending the value of degrees in “business” or liberal arts rely on nebulous claims that they are teaching students “how to think.” However, they provide little objective evidence that these programs impart thinking skills worth tens of thousands of dollars.

There’s at least some evidence that a lot of the benefit of a college degree comes not from what you learn in college, but from signaling to employers that you are the kind of conscientious, hardworking student who can get into college and stick with it long enough to get a degree. In other words, much of what we do in school is not learn anything in particular, but obtain a credential that certifies us as good potential employees.

Do tell. If you understand the federal student aid system as a means for transferring money from taxpayers to an industry that’s basically a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party, it makes more sense.

WHY WE NEED SPACE COLONIZATION: The Chilling Regularity Of Mass Extinctions.

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SO FILMS TITLED BODY HEAT, CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, AND SOME LIKE IT HOT ALL GOT IT WRONG? Bloomberg News: Climate Change Kills the Mood: Economists Warn of Less Sex on a Warmer Planet:

Hot weather leads to diminished “coital frequency,” according to a new working paper put out by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Three economists studied 80 years of U.S. fertility and temperature data and found that when it’s hotter than 80 degrees F, a large decline in births follows within 10 months. Would-be parents tend not to make up for lost time in subsequent, cooler months.

An extra “hot day” (the economists use quotation marks with the phrase) leads to a 0.4 percent drop in birth rates nine months later, or  1,165 fewer deliveries across the U.S. A rebound in subsequent months makes up just 32 percent of the gap.

As John Hinderaker quips at Power Line, “People in places like Brazil and India don’t have much of a sex life; it’s too hot. It explains, too, why beautiful women are referred to as ‘cold,’ and why animals in the mood for sex are described as being ‘in cold.’ And why couples looking for a romantic rendezvous schedule trips to Lapland and Siberia rather than the Caribbean.”

Heh. And just as a reminder — in the 1970s, the twin concerns of the far left were overpopulation and global cooling:

In any case, while the arguments change, as Roger Kimball writes at the New Criterion, in an essay titled “Misanthropic nostalgia,” the goal remains the same: “No matter what the crisis, massive government intervention is always the answer.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, ANTISEMITISM EDITION: Israeli academic shouted down in lecture at University of Minnesota. “The protests were apparently organized by a group calling itself the ‘Anti-War Committee,’ which bragged on its Twitter feed about having disrupted the lecture and complained that the protesters’ ‘free speech’ rights were violated when a few were arrested.”

They’re not “anti-war,” they’re just on the other side. And they don’t care about free speech, or they wouldn’t be shouting down speakers. More evidence of the toxic environment on many campuses today.

THIS STORY IS BAD FOR THE NARRATIVE, SO THE NATIONAL MEDIA WILL LARGELY IGNORE IT: Kentucky’s New GOP Lt. Gov. Is Black Tea Party Activist. “Hampton’s path certainly represents triumph over adversity. Born in Detroit, the 57-year-old Hampton and her three sisters were raised by a single mom who lacked a high school education and couldn’t afford a television or a car. But Hampton was determined to better herself. She graduated with a degree in industrial engineering and worked for five years in the automobile industry to pay off her college loans. She then joined the Air Force, retiring as a Captain. She earned an MBA from the University of Rochester, moved to Kentucky and became a plant manager in a corrugated packaging plant. Then she lost her job in 2012. She used her free time to start a career in politics and becoming active in the Tea Party. She ran a losing race for state representative in 2014 but won an early endorsement from Senator Rand Paul. She was tapped by Bevin to be his running-mate earlier this year.”

Related: ObamaCare Loses Big In Kentucky. “Even some residents who are enrolled in the expanded Medicaid program or an exchange plan supported Bevin. Stanley and Deborah Harp, who own a business in Georgetown, Ky., were among Americans who saw their policies canceled after the Affordable Care Act went into effect. They now qualify for Medicaid, but they aren’t happy about it and they voted for Bevin.”

PENN STATE MORE INTERESTED IN POLITICS THAN IN SAVING A MALE STUDENT’S LIFE:

Pennsylvania State University appeared to be more concerned with federal pressure to “do something” about campus sexual assault than the life of one its students.

The student was found responsible using a process even the federal government has deemed unfair (more on that later) and suspended for two semesters. The problem is, the fourth-year architectural engineering student says that if the suspension is upheld he will be forced to return to war-torn Syria, where two members of his family have already been killed due to the civil war. . . .

The student in question was accused of sexual assault earlier this spring, months after a sexual encounter last December. The encounter, which occurred at a campus fraternity house, involved a young woman who went to the basement during a party, where Doe and two of his friends were, and performed oral sex on all three.

Doe says in his lawsuit that the woman initiated the encounter. She told the university that she had been too drunk to consent to such behavior. It was her sister that reported the encounter to police, but after an investigation, the police declined to file charges. The accuser then went to the school, which initiated its own investigation into the matter, using a single-investigator model of adjudication.

The single-investigator model used by Penn State replaced a hearing procedure where students could call witnesses and cross-examine their accuser. The new model employed by Penn State had one person interview the accuser, accused and any witnesses they provided, then present their findings to a hearing panel, without the students being able to participate.

The Education Department has deemed the single-investigator model to be unfair, as it creates conflicts of interest.

If it’s too unfair for the Department of Education, it’s too unfair. And shame on universities who care more about sucking up to federal educrats than they do about their own students. Which, sadly, seems to be nearly all of them.

JOHN PODHORETZ ON THE MEANING OF BEN CARSON’S STUNNING RISE:

The fact that together Trump and Carson are scoring 50 percent in the polls is remarkable only if it persists into the voting season. Trump’s lack of momentum may mean his supporters will be taking a second look around the GOP field. And Carson’s newly won supporters may only be weakly attached to him and ready to move elsewhere as they pay closer attention.

Republicans want a candidate they can believe in. But they also desperately want to win in November 2016. Political campaigns are courtships.

Most of those who are telling pollsters they support the outsiders are basically dating Trump and Carson. They’ll likely settle down with someone else.

Especially when as Steve Green writes, “Carson Feels the Burn Rate,” spending a large chunk of money to build his direct mail list, and as Steve warns, Carson’s “email fundraising efforts are strictly amateur hour… It’s no bold prediction that if Carson gets the nomination, Clinton’s high-tech, Google-powered machine will clean the floor with him.”

WASHINGTON POST: From coast to coast, conservatives score huge victories in off-year elections. “Even in San Francisco, the sheriff who steadfastly defended the city’s ‘sanctuary city’ policy went down.”

WELL, GOOD: Paul Ryan refuses to rule out riders on spending bill.

New Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) on Tuesday refused to rule out attaching legislative policy riders to an omnibus spending bill, foreshadowing a possible confrontation with President Obama next month.

“This is the legislative branch and the power of the purse rests within the legislative branch, and we fully expect that we’re going to exercise that power,” Ryan told reporters at his first news conference since he was elected Speaker last week.

Obama and congressional leaders struck a major deal last week that lifts sequester spending caps, sets spending levels and raises the debt ceiling for two years.

But House and Senate appropriators will need to pass an omnibus spending bill to prevent a government shutdown by Dec. 11. That’s when a stopgap measure, known as a continuing resolution, is set to expire.

Obama and Democrats are insisting on a clean spending bill, free of controversial policy riders or “poison pills.” But conservatives will be pressing their GOP leaders to attach a slew of amendments, including one to defund Planned Parenthood.

“Poison pills” means “provisions we don’t like.” I’d send Obama a lot of separate spending bills, and put the riders on legislation that his constituents need to pass. Go ahead, veto welfare spending or Department of Education funding. Make my day!

AND IT’S STILL ONLY 2015: 6 Of The Most Racist Things The Media Has Said About Marco Rubio.

WOW! TV REPORTER EXPLAINS SECOND AMENDMENT AND MAKES CASE AGAINST GUN CONTROL (VIDEO).

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: GOP students ‘intimidated’ on campus, say views less tolerated.

FRANK RICH: ‘FASCISTIC’ GOP DEBATE LETTER APPEARS ‘TO HAVE BEEN DRAFTED BY STALIN.’

This is recurring speech tic of Rich whenever he’s confronted by someone who might shrink government by even a minuscule amount — in November of 2009, with a mammoth case of Tea Party Derangement Syndrome fueling his paranoia, Rich wrote an article with the hilarious title, “The G.O.P. Stalinists Invade Upstate New York.”

As Matt Welch of Reason counseled Rich, “Only Stalinists Use Words Like ‘Stalinist’.” Both instances are made all the more curious considering the glowing terms in which the New York Times, Rich’s longtime former employer praised Stalin’s “accomplishments” upon his well-deserved death in 1953. (See also: Pulitzer Prize-winning Timesman, Duranty, Walter.)

A WORLD OF THEIR OWN: Richard Fernandez writes that “The New York Times has a series of articles examining the causes of why an entire generation ‘has become less tolerant of free speech’ noting the growing list of subjects or persons that are now banned on campuses to prevent people from freaking out:”

The safe spaces they crave don’t exist in in the ambient environment. To maintain a “nuclear free” or “gun free” zone someone has to do the distasteful work of maintaining it.  Probably some guard, soldier or policeman with a gun. Cafeterias and dorms have to be supplied with meat, fossil fuels and dirty pharmaceuticals; the wrong people have to be shown the door by the academic equivalent of a bouncer.  All this takes labor and costs money.

* * * * * *

In the past, when schools still regarded it  their job to prepare the young for a world of danger and disappointment, mentors were expected to teach their students how to look unflinchingly at the facts.  In those days educated men were distinguished by their ability to gaze full upon the truth armed with a free speech, which as Eugene Volokh reminds, opened our eyes to the pleasant and unpleasant alike.

Today, we don’t want to know.  We don’t even want to know what we don’t know.  In all the wide world the only trigger warning that is forbidden is the one which alerts us to our own ignorance.

Related: “A liberal New York Times writer told a liberal MSNBC host that the problem with conservatives is they exist in their own ideological echo chamber. Without a sense of irony, All In host Chris Hayes on Monday night wondered, ‘What do you make of this sort of inward turning that we’re sort of seeing effectuated in the Republican field?’” 

I’M YASSER ARAFAT AND I APPROVE THIS BILINGUAL OBFUSCATION: Emails show Clinton had 2 Benghazi stories: 1 for Libyans, 1 for Americans.

ROGER SIMON ON BEN CARSON AND THE DEMOCRATS’ ‘WAR ON GOD:’

Now, with Carson a frontrunner in national and Iowa polls, not to mention the only Republican tied with Hillary Clinton in a hypothetical matchup, what I recently called, channeling Stalin, the media/Democrat “plot against the doctor” I fully expect to metastasize to a full-on “War on God.”  But — take it from this agnostic — that will be a very risky war because it will be based on the assumption that Carson is wacky in his belief.  He isn’t.  He is to be admired and, in my case, envied.

Read the whole thing.

Related: ABC, NBC Knock ‘Hardline’ Ben Carson on Political Experience; ‘Issue’ ‘He Will Have to Address.’

Funny, I don’t remember this being an issue in 2008 (expect when the MSM-DNC needed to destroy the only person with executive experience in the race, of course.) Perhaps Carson could answer his critics by mystically replying, “I serve as a blank screen, on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”

After all, it wouldn’t be the first time Americans would be “putting a lot of faith in a man they barely know,” to coin a CNN-approved phrase from the conclusion of that election cycle.

FALLEN ANGELS WAS JUST A SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL, RIGHT GUYS? RIGHT? GUYS? The Climate Iceman Cometh.

RON FOURNIER: When The Clinton Scandals Boil Away, A Residue of Distrust.

Clin­ton has taken re­spons­ib­il­ity for se­cur­ity lapses at the U.S. com­pound in Libya, but she hasn’t ex­plained her role in an ad­min­is­tra­tion-wide at­tempt to mis­lead Amer­ic­ans about the reas­on for the at­tacks. In the heat of Pres­id­ent Obama’s reelec­tion cam­paign, the White House ini­tially blamed the raid on an anti-Muslim video rather than a ter­ror­ist strike.

Con­gres­sion­al in­vest­ig­at­ors un­covered evid­ence that Clin­ton knew with­in hours that ter­ror­ists were be­hind the raid. Ac­cord­ing to the fath­er of a former Navy SEAL who died in the raid, Clin­ton stood be­fore his son’s coffin and privately told him the United States would ar­rest the film­maker re­spons­ible for the at­tack.

Clin­ton has apo­lo­gized for put­ting all her of­fi­cial email on a private serv­er but con­tin­ues to claim in­cor­rectly that the ac­tions had pre­ced­ent and were au­thor­ized. She vowed in March that no clas­si­fied ma­ter­i­al was ever on the serv­er, a claim proven false. She now tells voters none of the emails were marked clas­si­fied, which she must know is ir­rel­ev­ant; people are pro­sec­uted for mis­hand­ling un­marked U.S. secrets.

Fur­ther­more, Clin­ton in­sists that she vol­un­tar­ily turned over the email to the State De­part­ment, though in fact, she had kept the gov­ern­ment doc­u­ments secret un­til Con­gress dis­covered her stash. She in­sists she vol­un­tar­ily turned over the serv­er, fail­ing to men­tion the FBI’s strong de­sire to scour the stor­age unit as part of its on­go­ing in­vest­ig­a­tion of her ac­tions.

Be­cause of all this, and more, the Benghazi and email stor­ies could boil away, and there will re­main the bit­ter residue of a char­ac­ter is­sue likely to stick to Clin­ton throughout the cam­paign—and throughout her pres­id­ency, should she win. People don’t trust her.

Well,they shouldn’t, because she’s untrustworthy.

REALLY, JEB? REALLY? Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush apologized to the people of France on Tuesday for making fun of their work week during last week’s Republican debate.

Nothing excites Republican primary voters like an apology to the French!

UH OH: Huge Crack Discovered In Earth In Wyoming.

John Manchip White, call your office!

WHAT HATH OBAMA WROUGHT? GOP Wins Big In Kentucky, Holds Virginia Senate.

Note this: Matt Bevin’s running mate, Lt. Gov-elect Jenean Hampton, is first African-American to be elected to statewide office in the history of KY.

WELL, THAT’S SAD: Guinness Tweaks 256-Year-Old Recipe — to Appease Vegans.

THIS WILL PREPARE THEM FOR BEING PLUGGED INTO THE MATRIX IN THEIR 20S. Many Children Under 5 Are Left to Their Mobile Devices, Survey Finds. I’d say this is better, because less passive, than being plopped in front of the TV. Playing outside would be better, of course, but children aren’t allowed to do that now because there’s a pedophile behind every bush.

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NOTICE WHAT PAUL EHRLICH IS COMPARING TO GARBAGE, Bret Stephens writes in the Wall Street Journal:

From “The Population Bomb” there came Zero Population Growth, an NGO co-founded by Mr. Ehrlich. Next there was the United Nations Population Fund, founded in 1969, followed by the neo-Malthusian Club of Rome, whose 1972 report, “The Limits to Growth,” sold 30 million copies. In India in the mid-1970s, the Indira Gandhi regime forcibly sterilized 11 million people. Then-World Bank President Robert McNamara praised her for “intensifying the family planning drive with rare courage and conviction.” An estimated 1,750 people were killed in botched procedures.

Power is seductive, as are fame and wealth, and it’s easy to see how being a scientific prophet of doom afforded access to all three. So long as the alarmists fed the hysteria, the hysteria would feed the alarmists—with no end of lucrative book contracts and lavish conferences in exotic destinations to keep the cycle going. It’s also not surprising that someone like Mr. Ehrlich, trained as an entomologist, would be tempted to think of human beings as merely a larger type of insect.

“My language would be even more apocalyptic today,” an unrepentant Mr. Ehrlich told the New York Times earlier this year. “The idea that every woman should have as many babies as she wants is to me exactly the same kind of idea as, everybody ought to be permitted to throw as much of their garbage into their neighbor’s backyard as they want.” Notice what Mr. Ehrlich is comparing to garbage.

Meanwhile, Neo-Neocon spots Princeton’s Peter Singer, another utilitarian philosopher with otherwise similarly coldblooded Malthusian views blinking when confronted with a decision regarding someone close to him facing the end of life:

When Singer’s mother became too ill to live alone, Singer and his sister hired a team of home health-care aides to look after her. Singer’s mother has lost her ability to reason, to be a person, as he defines the term. So I asked him how a man who has written that we ought to do what is morally right without regard to proximity or family relationships could possibly spend tens of thousands of dollars a year for private care for his mother. He replied that it was “probably not the best use you could make of my money. That is true. But it does provide employment for a number of people who find something worthwhile in what they’re doing.”

…Singer has responded to his mother’s illness in the way most caring people would. The irony is that his humane actions clash so profoundly with the chords of his utilitarian ethic.

That doesn’t surprise Bernard Williams. “You can’t make these calculations and comparisons in real life. It’s bluff.” Williams told me, “One of the reasons his approach is so popular is that it reduces all moral puzzlement to a formula. You remove puzzlement and doubt and conflict of values, and it’s in the scientific spirit. People seem to think it will all add up, but it never does, because humans never do.”

Singer may be learning that. We were sitting in his living room one day, and the trolley traffic was noisy on the street outside his window. Singer has spent his career trying to lay down rules for human behavior which are divorced from emotion and intuition. His is a world that makes no provision for private aides to look after addled, dying old women. Yet he can’t help himself. “I think this has made me see how the issues of someone with these kinds of problems are really very difficult,” he said quietly. “Perhaps it is more difficult than I thought before, because it is different when it’s your mother.”

“‘It’s different when it’s your mother.’ Duh,” Neo deadpans in response. “Singer’s ethics is an ethics for robots. And you better be careful, even when you design an ethics for robots, that you don’t end up creating something that makes things worse.”

As Stephens writes, “Modern liberals are best understood as would-be believers in search of true faith.” He’s not the first to notice the connection.

OBAMA CALLS SENATE ENVIRONMENT CHAIRMAN ‘CRAY’ FOR DOUBTING CLIMATE CHANGE:

Obama rattled off his standard policy stump, with special aim at Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) for bringing a snowball onto the Senate floor in February to argue that terrorism is a greater risk than climate change.

“And the planet is warming; 99 percent of scientists have said it’s warming. And we’ve got the Republican chairman of the Senate Energy and Environment Committee carrying a snowball into the Senate chambers to show that there is still snow and that climate change isn’t happening. I am not making that up. That’s what happened. That’s what happened. That’s crazy,” Obama said. “I was going to quote Kanye, but I can’t because this is a family audience. But it’s cray.”

That’s a reference to a lyric in Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “N*ggas In Paris”: “that shit cray.”

President Camacho, call your office — and you too, Donald Trump; your presidency really would make the White House a classier place than it is now.

THE PERILS OF BAD GOVERNMENT: “The Peronists (named after former dictator Juan Peron) have had political control much of the last 70 years, and it has been a disaster for the country. In 1900, Argentina was one of the 10 highest-income countries in the world, having an estimated gross domestic product per capita of roughly 80 percent of that in the United States. Successive Argentine governments have squandered much of the wealth and potential of the economy, so now Argentina ranks approximately 57th in per capita income.”

As with all variants of socialism, impoverishing the nation to enrich cronies — all in the name of “fairness” and “equality.”

KATHY SHAIDLE: Nobody needs to tell me to boycott Quentin Tarantino:

Okay, it was faintly amusing, but Tarantino’s admirers insisted that this “meta” conceit—pop culture entities arguing about other pop culture entities—was somehow sui generis, and Tarantino, a genius.

I was the bore at every party pointing out that, in fact, the pilot for Cheers a full ten years earlier saw the soon-to-be-beloved bar regulars similarly quarreling about “the sweatiest film of all time.” (Cool Hand Luke won out, as I recall.)

And literally the same movie buffs who’d spent twenty years slagging Brian De Palma for ripping off Hitchcock were now hailing naked serial plagiarist Tarantino as the savior of cinema, knowing full well that he’d lifted entire scenes in Reservoir Dogs from Hong Kong director Ringo Lam’s City on Fire. “Isn’t that, er, ‘cultural appropriation,’ you guys?” I’d ask. “Even maybe a kind of ‘colonialism’?”

When cornered, I’d spit out a Tarantino-themed variation on David Lee Roth’s (unfair in retrospect) line about why rock critics loved Elvis Costello so much.

Oh, well. Good thing I never much liked parties anyhow…

Heh. I tuned out Tarantino after Jackie Brown in 1997 — but it was fun watching him make the rounds back then saying that he had grown up and decided to be a man before he began shooting that film.

Well, it must have sounded good at the time.

Update (11/4/14): At some point in the night, the article’s URL was apparently changed; link should be working now.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): P.E. teacher arrested on suspicion of sexual relationships with 2 students. “Lindsay Himmelspach, 33, was arrested Friday on suspicion of having unlawful sexual intercourse with two minors, communicating with them for the purpose of committing sexual acts and communicating with them to commit a lewd or lascivious act, according to the Butte County Sheriff’s Office.”

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON IN THE L.A. TIMES on How the widening urban-rural divide threatens America:

How did the new Californians deal with the drought? Not as in the past. Enthralled by a fantasy of a pristine 19th century California that has it all — from daily fresh organic tomatoes to schools of fish jumping amid white water, without understanding what it takes to grow those tomatoes — urbanites have argued that farmers can make do with less but wildlife needs ever more. Millions of acre-feet of precious stored water were released out of rivers as urban environmentalists hoped to increase the population of 3-inch delta smelt and to restore salmon to the upper San Joaquin River. Despite millions of acre-feet of released water, both fish projects have so far failed. Meanwhile, under pressure from environmental groups, the state canceled water projects such as the huge Temperance Flat reservoir on the San Joaquin River.

Common sense would have warned that droughts are existential challenges, the severity and duration of which are unpredictable. Droughts are times to bank water, not to release it for questionable green initiatives. Such common sense would assume, though, that millions of Californians had seen a broccoli farm or a Flame Seedless vineyard and had made the connection that what they purchased in supermarkets was grown from irrigated soil.

The founders and early observers of American democracy, from Thomas Jefferson to Alexis de Tocqueville, reflected a classical symbiosis, in which even urban thinkers praised the benefits of life in rural areas. Jefferson famously wrote: “I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries; as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be vacant lands in any part of America. When they get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe.”

Read the whole thing — and then ponder how the typical bobo Los Angeles Times reader would respond to VDH’s harsh truths.

TRUTH REVEALED ABOUT ‘RAZOR BLADE’ FOUND IN LITTLE GIRL’S HERSHEY BAR:

It appears as though the little girl was not the only one to make a false report about dangerous objects in their candy bars.

In the greater Pennsylvania and New Jersey area, numerous reports were made to police, stating that sewing needles were found lodged inside Halloween candy:

t turns out that Robert Ledrew of Blackwood, who made the initial report, had fabricated the story as well, reports CBS3.

Ledrew, who posted needle-filled candy bars to his Facebook, claimed he was trying to teach his children a lesson to be careful with their candy. He was later arrested and charged with making a false police report.

Unexpectedly.

HOME RECORDING FLASHBACK: Recreating The ’80s Home Studio Experience.

To celebrate its 30th anniversary, England’s Sound on Sound magazine recreates the typical 1985-home recording studio, with a reel to reel analog recorder that record eight tracks of audio, a Roland drum machine, hardware synthesizers and a pair of Yamaha digital reverb units. (The article also includes a clip of a demo recorded on that gear. It doesn’t sound too bad!) Even if home recording isn’t your bag, baby (as legendary Ming Tea frontman Austin Powers would say), reading the article gives a real sense of how far technology has advanced in 30 years. Today a PC with software such as Cakewalk’s Sonar, Propellerhead’s Reason or Avid Pro Tools can record as many tracks as the PC’s RAM can handle (and that’s a lot), software synthesizers can replicate virtually any hardware synthesizer, and post-production tools such as Melodyne’s pitch correction program or Izotope’s RX5 audio restoration software would have seemed like science fiction in 1985.

I know — I was there; I had the same Roland TR-707 drum machine the Sound on Sound authors used, a pair of Yamaha SPX-90 digital reverb and processing units, and my hardware synthesizer was Yamaha’s CX5M music computer — which was an absolute beast to program, but was capable of some decent sounds; it was basically a Yamaha DX-9 synthesizer with a (very) rudimentary computer attached, and which used an existing TV as a monitor, Altair 8800 style. (Which isn’t pictured in this circa-2000 photo I took of the unit for a magazine article while it was in storage in my parent’s home):

Now if only songwriting and melodies had kept pace with the remarkable advancements in technology…

RECIPE: A Sandwich Straight From Heaven.

INSIDE THE DEVIL’S PLEASURE PALACE: My interview with Michael Walsh on his new history of the socialist Frankfurt School and its incalculable damage to America and the arts is online at Ed Driscoll.com.

MUGGERIDGE’S LAW BUSTS ZOMBIE: “I Predicted Europe’s Future — and Now I’m Depressed,” veteran Bay Area blogger Zombie writes today at the PJ Tatler:

Back in 2004, eleven long years ago, I made a satirical map of what Europe might look like in 2015, and posted the map on my site zombietime, along with a short satirical “news” article about how the EU was planning to intentionally hand the continent over to Muslim immigrants…Looking at it now for the first time in 11 years, I am disturbed at how I somehow managed to predict (albeit even as a joke) what would happen to Europe in 2015.

Of course I got many details wrong: I didn’t foresee that each nation would no longer merely import their own pet Muslims (Turks to Germany, Pakistanis to Britain, Algerians to France, etc.), but that it would turn into a pan-Islamic colonization of the whole continent en masse. Also, having started assigning humorous new names to the nations in central Europe, I ran out of ideas after a few minutes and just abandoned the theme halfway through, leaving most of Eastern Europe and Scandinavia with their original names. But interestingly, I did predict that it would be the Hungarians and the Swiss who, among all central European nations, would most actively resist the immigration — exactly as is playing out today. How could I have known that?

What was a joke in 2004 is a brutal reality in 2015, and even the progressive elites who encouraged this continental suicide now concede that the immigration crisis is only going to get worse, with no end in sight, as seemingly half the population of the Middle East is now in the process of relocating to a new homeland in Europe.

As Tom Wolfe wrote in his 1989 article “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,”  the liner notes to his first novel, the Bonfire of the Vanities:

While Malcolm Muggeridge was the editor of Punch, it was announced that Khrushchev and Bulganin were coming to England. Muggeridge hit upon the idea of a mock itinerary, a lineup of the most ludicrous places the two paunchy pear-shaped little Soviet leaders could possibly be paraded through during the solemn process of a state visit. Shortly before press time, half the feature had to be scrapped. It coincided exactly with the official itinerary, just released, prompting Muggeridge to observe: We live in an age in which it is no longer possible to be funny. There is nothing you can imagine, no matter how ludicrous, that will not promptly be enacted before your very eyes, probably by someone well known.

And as Mark Steyn asked a decade ago regarding Europe’s future — and/or the distinct lack thereof in his London Telegraph article, “The strange death of the liberal West,” “The hyper-rationalism of post-Christian Europe turns out to be wholly irrational: what’s the point of creating a secular utopia if it’s only for one generation?”

A reminder that ultimately, the joke is on the EU — and as Zombie writes, it’s a very grim one at that.

Related: Steve Green proffers a timely juxtaposition, with both a new Star Wars and potential EU war on the short-term horizon:

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:

● “How much is liberalism like a religion?”

—The subhead of Tyler O’Neil’s new article today at PJ Media exploring “The Theology of Liberalism.”

● “And since every good religion needs a devil, [the World Health Organization] has chosen bacon.”

The last sentence of Robert Tracinski’s new article today at the Federalist on “The WHO’s Bacon Fatwa And The New Puritanism.”

As H.L. Mencken famously defined the term, “Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy,” which sums up the worst inner demons of the political correct, the socialist bureaucrat, and SJW rather well, doesn’t it?

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Meet The Most Popular Straight Woman On OKCupid.

She has a book out on online dating. But I think her secret is that she looks like Bettie Page.

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Plus, Generators and Portable Power for Storm Season. Winter is coming.

T-MINUS 30 DAYS UNTIL BULLETS AND BOURBON IN TEXAS: We’ve sold out the suites, and only have one cabin left.  We have a small number of rooms with king beds, and one room with two queen beds.   Our sponsors have started to send us some terrific drawing items and I’ve just gotten my Texas TABC Server-Seller Certificate which will allow me to help Steve with his How to Make the Perfect Old Fashioned demonstration (plus it’s always good to have a fallback trade if this whole Internet media thing doesn’t work out…):

So with a month to go, click here to learn how to join Glenn, Roger L. Simon, Steve Green, Ed Morrissey, Kevin D. Williamson, Dana Loesch, and Mark Rippetoe December 3rd through 6th in Texas:

READER PEN PLUG: Let me put in a good word for reader Greg Shea’s Pen Company Of America. They make good pens.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: AALS, Law School Deans, Bar Official Respond To New York Times Editorial On The Law School Crisis.

I HOPE IT SPREADS TO AMERICA: A New Sexual Revolt Is Underway at British Universities; Could this be the start of an uprising?

George Lawlor, a student at Warwick University, started a firestorm when he wrote a piece for a student newspaper called The Tab, headlined “Why I Don’t Need Consent Classes.” Not only did he tell the “self-appointed teachers of consent” to “get off your fucking high horse”—even worse, in the eyes of the raunch-allergic feminists who staff Britain’s students’ unions, he posted a photo of himself holding a sign saying: “This is not what a rapist looks like.”

Cue global media outrage. Pretty much every liberal broadsheet in Christendom asked, “Well, what DOES a rapist look like?,” hinting that Lawlor, by virtue of the fact that he has XY chromosomes, does look like a rapist. A Guardian writer suggested every man in the world, including the Dalai Lama, should post photos of themselves holding a sign that says “This is what a rapist looks like.” Because, yep, any man might be a rapist. Maybe every woman in the world should post a pic of themselves with a sign saying, “This is what someone who commits infanticide looks like”? No, best not — the women who do that are a tiny minority, as are the men who rape.

A few days later, another Warwick student, Jack Hadfield, announced that he, too, would not be attending campus consent classes. We are witnessing “the demonisation of men,” he said, the promotion of the idea that “men are dangerous sex pests.”

Then came The Tab’s poll on consent classes. Sure, readers of The Tab, Britain’s spunkiest student newspaper, which often raises a very arched eyebrow at the buzzkilling shenanigans of student unions, might not be completely representative. Yet it’s striking that of the 4,440 people who voted in its poll, 2,708 said they were against consent classes, with 1,732 in favour. That’s 61 percent who don’t think they need to be told how to have sex.

The big question is: Why didn’t this happen earlier?

In a just society, the first administrators to roll out these policies would have been tarred and feathered.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Every Job Is A Public Service.

Two students borrow to earn nursing degrees. The one who works at a public hospital can pay an “affordable” percentage of his income for 10 years, then erase the rest of the debt under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program (PSLF). The other works as a nurse at a private hospital. That’s not considered public service, so the debt has to be repaid in full. Every job is a public service, argues Alexander Holt on EdCentral. Under PSLF, anyone who works for a government agency or non-profit — payroll supervisor, computer tech, accountant — is a public service worker. About a quarter of the workforce qualifies. Nobody who works for a for-profit company — no matter what they do — can get the same debt forgiveness deal.

It’s as if it’s just a subsidy for groups of people who overwhelmingly vote Democrat or something.

IS TESLA DOOMED? “Tesla’s showing all the signs of a company in trouble: bleeding cash, securitized assets, and mounting inventory. It’s the trifecta of doom for any automaker, and anyone paying attention probably saw this coming a mile away.”

NEWS FROM THE CULTURE WARS: Feminists Are Panicking and Lashing Out at Cassie Jaye’s ‘The Red Pill’ Movie. “The movie sailed through its original goal of $97,000, and now — as icing on the cake — it is likely to exceed the amount raised by Anita Sarkeesian’s Tropes vs Women in Video Games, a series that had the entire weight of the progressive media behind it.”

IN THE MAIL: From Mike Cernovich, Gorilla Mindset.

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TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 908.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: VIDEO: Administrators literally shred Constitution after reporter calls it ‘oppressive’ and ‘triggering.’

THE ATLANTIC ON THE DECAY OF TWITTER:

But I’m still talking in terms of feel: a biased, decidedly non-precise way of discussing something which emerges from more than 300 million minds. And that’s why I like one theory of what’s changed about Twitter from the Canadian academic Bonnie Stewart. I think it makes clear why Twitter the Company is finding such difficulty attracting new users, especially in the United States. And I think it even helps answer the Instagram question, namely: Why is Instagram (or Vine, or Pinterest) so much more fun than Twitter?

* * * * * * * * *

“The rot we’re seeing in Twitter is the rot of participatory media devolved into competitive spheres where the collective ‘we’ treats conversational contributions as fixed print-like identity claims,” she writes.

In other words, on Twitter, people say things that they think of as ephemeral and chatty. Their utterances are then treated as unequivocal political statements by people outside the conversation. Because there’s a kind of sensationalistic value in interpreting someone’s chattiness in partisan terms, tweets “are taken up as magnum opi to be leapt upon and eviscerated, not only by ideological opponents or threatened employers but by in-network peers.”

For the left, this is an old habit; as Pat Moynihan said nearly 20 years ago, “[Hannah] Arendt had it right. She said one of the great advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.”

This would later be freeze-dried by Saul Alinsky into Rule #4 of Rules for Radicals, “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”

As for the right, well, we just want to make sure that both sides live up to that, in order to reduce the ever-growing danger of Alinsky inequality amongst the left.

But ultimately, the decline of Twitter can be boiled down to just four words: “Has Justine Landed Yet?”

FIRST MY COLUMN, NOW THIS. MOMENTUM IS BUILDING! Breaking the Ivy League Monopoly:

America’s top universities, for all their rhetoric about equality, diversity, and social justice, actually do far more to perpetuate and sustain the upper class than they do to promote those values, racking up billions in tax-exempt donations, connecting their disproportionately wealthy students to lucrative job opportunities, and fostering exclusive social networks of the rich and powerful. . . .

One possibility is a system of national exams, sponsored by employers, that would allow students from less prestigious schools to demonstrate that they had learned as much as or more than Ivy grads. As it stands, the top companies companies tend to recruit only at the top schools, so it is difficult for students from West Texas University or California State Chico to demonstrate their qualifications. Hundreds of companies use university prestige as an imperfect proxy for intellectual ability.

Needless to say, this system is deeply unfair. Whether or not someone impressed an admissions committee at age 17 (and admission committees are imbued with the usual higher education pieties and prejudices) is hardly the best way to measure what he or she has learned by age 22. People mature in different ways and at different paces, and use their time in college differently as well. Since it can be hard to perform poorly at grade inflation mills like Harvard, especially in the soft subjects, almost everybody who gets in graduates—no matter how little they learn.

Imagine if a coalition of companies that hire large numbers of recent graduates (Bain, McKinsey, Google, Teach for America, etc.) on a national basis were to set up a system of exams that allowed students to demonstrate what they had learned and what they can achieve—and then those companies chose employees based on scores, with no regard to undergraduate institution. Some British companies have already taken steps in this direction. If American companies followed suit, they would unleash tremendous potential by broadening their applicant pool to a much greater number of potentially qualified candidates. They would also do more to promote social justice in America than armies of Ivy League diversity bureaucrats and Halloween costume police could do in a lifetime.

True!

THE THEOLOGY OF LIBERALISM: HOW MUCH IS LIBERALISM LIKE A RELIGION?

Almost entirely, particularly for those drink deep all of the SJW/global warming/BLM/BDS* Kool-Aid.

Which comes in stereo these days.

IRONY ALERT: Russia Today Slams Media Outlets Too Close Too Power:

Notorious propaganda outfit Russia Today is running commercials bashing the media for being too cozy with power? No, really. In an ad airing on RT’s Policking With Larry King, journalist Erin Ade promoted the network: “When politicians and the mainstream media work side-by-side, the joke is actually on you. At RT News, we have a different approach.”

Russia Today has been called “the Kremlin’s propaganda outfit” by the Columbia Journalism Review. It’s also funded by the Russian government.

So basically, Putin’s version of PBS, the NBC networks and the House of Stephanopoulos.

VIDEO: WAPO REPORTER EJECTED FROM KERRY MEETING WITH UZBEK PRESIDENT.

To paraphrase Mr. Kerry’s boss, let’s face it — if the Secretary of State can’t handle some reporter from the Washington Post, I don’t think the Uzbekistanis are gonna be too worried. And considering their human rights abuses, they should be.

Related: Some things never change; from SCTV’s classic 1981 episode when Soviet TV hijacked their satellite broadcast:

A DEEP DIVISION ON GUNS AND COPS: Has the liberal wing of the Democrats finally pushed the party too far?

Absolutely not. Double down, dudes!

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GERMAN TOWN OF 102 TO ‘WELCOME’ 750 REFUGEES, Rick Moran writes:

It’s amazing that Merkel never imagined that when you throw open the doors to your country, people beyond counting will want to come in. Nothing has been prepared for the crush of humanity that took Merkel up on her generosity. There is no shelter, no allowance for schooling for children, no plan to employ those who can work. Her ultimate goal — to change the demographic decline of her country so that more workers can support the rapidly growing number of retirees — could not justify the chaos and massive dislocations her refugee policy has wrought.

Meanwhile, the good people of Sumte — no doubt tolerant and broadminded — are about to be buried in an onslaught of Muslims who will be a supermajority in the tiny town. What are the chances of German law, German traditions, and German life being maintained in the face of people who want to change all that to suit their own preferences?

Before too long, I suspect the residents of Sumte won’t be so tolerant and broadminded.

Eh — what’s the worst that can happen? it’s Germany; they’ve always been a friendly, forgive and forget volk, after all.

DIVERSITY PROBLEM: Report: 5 out of 6 top university donations go to Dems.

ANDREW KLAVAN: IS THIS BLOODSHED ISLAM’S REFORMATION?

The current chaos in the Levant did not just happen. It has its internal causes but no small amount of the horror can be laid at the door of Barack Obama too. From his re-establishment of relations with the tyrant Bashar Hafez al-Assad to his surrender of George W. Bush’s victory in Iraq, to his standing by with his thumb up his brain while peaceful protestors took to the Syrian streets and the country then descended into civil war, to his weak sauce bombing campaign, Putin stealing his lunch at the UN and Obama’s puny U.S. response — through it all, President Right-Side-of-History has been on the wrong side of every decision. And so yes, now, the current mess looks remarkably like the Thirty Years War with its religious underpinnings, warring states and over-involved mega powers. And so it does indeed raise the question of whether it will be the turning point in Islam’s reformation, leading to an enlightened Westphalia-style peace.

One can hope. But the tenets of Westphalia grew out of Christian thinking and Christian religion. Christians were appalled by the bloodletting of the the Thirty Years War precisely because it violated the central preachings of the Prince of Peace: Love your enemies; bless them that curse you; do good to them that hate you. The outline for modern statehood and separation of church and state were written into the Gospels: Judge not lest ye be judged; render under Caesar that which is Caesar and unto God that which is God’s, and so on.

Does the same hope lie in the tenets of Islam?

Well, it would be nice if it ultimately turned out that way, but if so, I suspect things may take quite a while – and I’m not sure if the west can wait as long as Zhou Enlai’s apocryphal quip regarding the French Revolution to determine the outcome. In the meantime, as Mark Steyn asked in 2007, “What if we’ve already had the reformation of Islam and jihadism is it?”

THE VIEW FROM THE REBELLION: “Daniel Henninger’s hymn to Paul Ryan and The Party of Governing in Monday’s Wall Street Journal is a great example of the power of the establishment. What’s interesting about the increasingly desperate attempts by the Ruling Class to clear away the pitchfork carrying insurgents is that they really don’t understand why they’re out there in the first place. . . . I would think that the first thing people would do if they are faced with an internal rebellion is to try to understand why. I can only conclude that they really don’t have a pipeline to the people in rebellion and have concluded that they are gripped by a form of insanity. To help them out, here’s the view from the rebellion.”

ASHE SCHOW: Video highlights lack of understanding of ‘yes means yes’ laws.

In a new video, New York college students demonstrate the difficulty of living under a “yes means yes” or “affirmative consent” policy. Shelby Emmett of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education asked students what they thought of the policy, and their responses were telling.

College students in New York have to live by the government-mandated consent policy known as “yes means yes,” or “affirmative consent.” The policy states that students must get ongoing consent before and throughout each stage of sexual activity. Under these policies, sex basically becomes a question-and-answer session rather than a passionate activity, because participants must verbally ask each other (nonverbal cues are considered too ambiguous, even though the law doesn’t explicitly forbid them) for permission at every step.

So a sexual encounter would begin with one person asking, “May I kiss you now?” with the other person saying “yes” and then asking if they may touch the other person in a particular place. Advocates insist it doesn’t have to be this way, but with false accusations being regarded as acceptable, college students need to protect themselves.

Upon reading portions of the law, the students seemed to question what constitutes a sexual act, with some saying kissing counted and others insisting it didn’t. Some students said they used nonverbal cues (body language) to show their consent and suggested the new policies discouraged that.

Students were most confused by a question about how one would prove that he had obtained affirmative consent. It’s one thing to say that if one or both parties don’t obtain such consent (even though, as we’ve seen from cases that the only person required to obtain consent is the person being accused, putting a retroactive burden on them), it’s another to prove it.

“Oh my gosh,” said one student when asked how she would prove she obtained affirmative consent. “Well, I think that’s really difficult because it ends up being your word against the other person’s.”

“I don’t know, actually,” said another student.

Yet another student said he would have anyone he sleeps with sign a contract just to be safe (that wouldn’t help him with an accusation, however, since the law states that consent can be revoked at any time). . . . The students who have to live by them don’t understand them (when sober, mind you) and the administrators who design classes on how to teach them don’t understand them. Even Vice President Joe Biden, who has been advocating for them, doesn’t understand them.

Yet colleges are forcing students (especially drunk students) to know the intricacies of a law its own advocates don’t understand.

It’s as if the whole thing is designed to create a hostile environment for male students.

IT’S DEJA BARRY ALL OVER AGAIN: Obama yesterday: “If you can’t handle [CNBC], you know then I don’t think the Chinese & the Russians are going to be too worried about you.”

Roger Ailes in June of 2007: “The candidates that can’t face Fox, can’t face Al Qaeda. And that’s what’s coming.”

There’s one big difference though: the GOP candidates simply want to prevent another debacle; they handled the CNBC moderators with aplomb, which is why the MSM-DNC media complex are acting so butthurt. But we never got to see Obama or any other Democrat candidates debate Fox News moderators in 2008, and now seven years later, we know definitively that they couldn’t handle Al Qaeda, ISIS, the Chinese, or the Russians.

And now that Obama’s opened the door, I’m sure there will be at least one conservative moderator at every presidential and vice presidential debate next fall, and at least one hosted by the Fox News moderators, right? Think of it as one of John Kerry’s “global tests!”

CHANGE: “There was a time when Democrats were horrified at the idea of a president having an ‘enemies’ list.’ Now their probably presidential nominee brags about it during a debate. And no one seems to care except Republicans and Joe Biden.”

PRESIDENT PISSY: Man Who’s Whined About Fox News for Seven Years Accuses Republicans of Being Thin-Skinned.

His premise is incorrect anyway. If Obama had stood up to Putin the way Ted Cruz stood up to John Harwood, our foreign policy might not be such a complete debacle.

SJW BLOG PUBLISHES 2300 WORD HALLOWEEN GUIDE TITLED “SO YOUR FRIEND DRESSED UP AS AN INDIAN. NOW WHAT?”

Presumably offer them university tenure, a Senate seat and/or presidency of a local NAACP chapter if past SJW experience with faux-Indians is any guide.

IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: Cruz asks feds to save documents in IRS probe. “This Administration’s recent announcement … has finally made it abundantly clear that the responsibility of ensuring a thorough, fair, and impartial investigation of IRS employees and their potential criminal conduct will fall to the next presidential administration, and relevant materials must be protected accordingly.”

NEWS FROM KNOXVILLE: Mayor Rogero scoffs at claims of KKK ties, calls them ‘ridiculous.’

DIVERSITY PROBLEM: Report: 5 out of 6 top university donations go to Dems.

As the higher education bubble bursts, I think academia may want to reflect on the unwisdom of turning itself into an arm of the Democratic Party while treating Republicans with open contempt — particularly as Republicans take over more and more state governments. A less partisan posture would have been wiser, as well as more fair.

CHINESE NEWSPAPER EDITOR TARGETED BY BEIJING FOR QUESTIONING PARTY LINE: An editor in China’s violence-prone region of Xinjiang was sacked and kicked out of the Communist Party after he expressed doubts over government policies.

Related: Joe Scarborough: No Republican Has Hosted Network Sunday Show or Newscast in 50 Years.

FUNDAMENTAL TRANSFORMATION, CANADIAN-STYLE: Investment flooding out of Canada at fastest pace in developed world — Money is flooding out of Canada at the fastest pace in the developed world as the nation’s decade-long oil boom comes to an end and little else looks ready to take the industry’s place as an economic driver.

Related: Fundamental transformation, America-style.

(Via SDA.)

WHY ARE LEFTY INSTITUTIONS SUCH HOTBEDS OF RACISM AND SEXISM? Yale frat had ‘white girls only’ policy at party, students say.

SO IS OBAMA SAYING THAT CHRISTIE . . . ACTED STUPIDLY? The Hill: White House rips Christie for saying Obama doesn’t back police.

The White House on Monday slammed New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) for criticizing President Obama’s record on criminal justice reform.

Press secretary Josh Earnest called Christie’s claim that Obama does not support police “particularly irresponsible,” suggesting it’s an attempt to “turn around” his struggling presidential campaign.

“They’re not surprising for somebody whose poll numbers are closer to an asterisk than they are double digits,” Earnest said.

The war of words between the White House and Christie comes ahead of the president’s visit to the Garden State to promote his effort to overhaul the criminal justice system.

During an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Christie suggested anti-police sentiment has contributed to an increase in violent crime in some major U.S. cities — and said Obama shares blame for the problem.

Given that Obama’s own FBI Director says the same thing, Christie isn’t exactly out on a limb here, politically. I’m sure he welcomes the Obama attacks, which can only boost those poll numbers.

And isn’t that a typically pissy remark from Earnest? Have we ever had a White House so petty and personal about, well, everything?

INTERVIEW: MICHAEL WALSH GOES INSIDE THE DEVIL’S PLEASURE PALACE.

As much as I’ve enjoyed Michael’s writing and spending time with him in person, after immersing myself in first Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism and then Fred Siegel’s The Revolt Against the Masses, I was a little weary about sitting down to read another history of “How the Left Was Won.” But Michael has managed to combine a much-needed history of the infamous Frankfurt School, which fled National Socialism in Germany only to import international socialism into the US in following decades, with a fascinating look at how socialism corrupted classical music in the 20th century, drawing upon his role as a music critic for Time magazine and his time spent behind the Iron Curtain in the last years of the Soviet Union. In addition to his history of the Frankfurt School and its corrosive invention of “Critical Theory,” Michael’s book does for the atonal horrors of 20th century classical music what Tom Wolfe did for the double-barreled disasters of modern art and architecture in The Painted Word and From Bauhaus to Our House.

Over at Ed Driscoll.com, I have a 20 minute audio interview and transcript with Michael — read and/or listen to the whole thing, to paraphrase an Insta-leitmotif.

ANOTHER NARRATIVE FAILS: Dashcam video undermines Texas prof’s claim of racial profiling, says chief.

A Texas journalism professor’s explosive charge that police hassled her for “walking while black,” a claim lodged in a guest column in the state’s biggest newspaper, doesn’t square with the videotape, according to the police chief. . . .

Bland uses the column to lay out her case for allegations of being racially profiled claiming that she was not offered a reason.

“I guess I was simply a brown face in an affluent neighborhood,” Bland said in her column.

But dashcam video provided by Corinth Police shows Bland walking in the middle of the street, and captures the two police officers politely advising her to stay on the side of oncoming traffic, so she can see approaching cars. After viewing the footage, Corinth Police Chief Debra Walthall told FoxNews.com she was proud of the way her officers behaved.

“When I saw the video, those officers were nothing but professional,” she said. “[The incident] just didn’t lend itself to racial profiling.

“If we didn’t have the video, these officers would have serious allegations against them,” Walthall added. “It would be their word against hers. Every white officer that stops an African-American does not constitute racial profiling.”

The video shows the two police officers as they get out of their squad car, without turning on the siren as the professor claimed in her column. After telling Bland it would be safer to stay to the side of the street, one cop explains how a truck had earlier tried to pass her but she did not notice that she was in the way.

I always wonder how many lies achieved currency before ubiquitous video, given how many we see now even with ubiquitous video.

What’s not surprising: That a dean of a journalism school would peddle a false story to advance a narrative.

IT’S GOING TO TAKE MORE THAN THAT: ‘Hamilton’ is saving NYC’s education system.

I DON’T THINK OBAMA EVEN KNOWS HOW TO FIDDLE: Islamic State Gains Ground in Syria.

IS THERE ANYWAY TO FALSIFY THIS HYPOTHESIS? Antarctica is actually gaining ice, says NASA. Is global warming over?

FOUND, THE HOLE THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT IS FLUSHING OUR WEALTH INTO:  Not really.  Just kidding.  This is just a hole in the ground.  That metaphorical hole would be a giant black hole swallowing universes. Mysterious “gash” forms on Wyoming Ranch.

TO NO ONE’S SURPRISE: For the first time ever, Israel is a real race issue.

YEAH, THIS WILL AFFECT OUR ECONOMY: Iran Launches Blockade On U.S. Goods.

SILLY KIDS, SCHOOLS ARE FOR UNIONS: How the teachers-union empire strikes back. [Yes, I do know the uses of the apostrophe.  I used to teach ESL.  Apostrophes for plural are one of my pet peeves.  Let that be a lesson to you: never try to post while you're exhausted from the day and dealing with three emergencies on pm.  Thank you to Eugene Volokh for catching this.]

THE IRONY, IT BURNS: Deep-Pocketed Donors Behind Campus Anti-Koch Movement. On the left it’s always astroturfing all the way down.

WELL, THAT’S COMFORTING: “Asked whether Obama has ever consulted a psychiatrist, a White House official declined to discuss the president’s medical care.”

I BLAME OBAMA: Tom Maguire looks into why so many middle-aged white Americans are dying.

WHY DO MUSCLES ACHE A DAY OR TWO AFTER EXERCISE? Good question. The harder I work out, the longer the delay seems to be. I find a jacuzzi helps.

PETER EGAN: How eBay Broke My Final Garage Rules.

AT AMAZON, The best holiday toys for everyone on your list.

WHEN PHILOSOPHERS ARE POLITICALLY PROBLEMATIC: “Germaine Greer is right about trans-women.” “In our society, to be a woman is to have arrived there by a certain route: for instance, by having been given a girl’s name, by having been made to wear girl’s clothes, by having been excluded from boys’ activities, by having made certain adaptations to the onset of puberty, and by having been seen and evaluated in specific ways. That is why the social significance of being a penis-free person is different for those who never had a penis than it is for those who use to have one and then cut it off.”

Sounds suspiciously conservative to me.

FINALLY: Rachel Dolezal Just Admitted That She’s White.

Well, I had a sneaking suspicion for a while. But presumably Milo Yiannopoulos won’t rescind his “Big Slobbery Welcome To My Newest Trans-Black Sister, Rachel Dolezal,” now that she’s officially come out as trans-black herself.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. “To make a case against the viability of a modern socialist state—particularly one that relies on exporting natural resources—one need only point to Venezuela.”

TOO BIG TO JAIL: “Hillary Clinton belongs in jail, but good luck getting her there,” Steve Green writes.