THE CARNIVAL OF NUCLEAR ENERGY IS UP!

IVY LEAGUE PROFESSOR GIVES STUDENTS THE ALF TEST:

Like a lot of professors in 2015, Columbia professor Joseph Howley had a problem with students “class shopping.”

Some would sign up for his class only to see if it was easy, then bail after the first session if it wasn’t. But only Howley thought to counter this quiet menace with something that could stop it: a cat-eating space alien who was expelled from Earth to face his inevitable death in 1990.

The assistant classics professor stuck a command for his students to send him a picture of Alf—the ’80s sitcom star and alien from the planet Melmac—into the middle of his syllabus to see if anybody noticed.

From the number of Alf images he received, he figured he’d be able to find out early on if he’d have enough students to keep the class engaged, or even to keep it going. And maybe, he thought, he’d teach them something along the way.

So did it work?

“Eight out of 20 have [responded] so far,” he said. “I don’t know what to make of that.”

Sounds like the Van Halen brown M&Ms test, which was there as a safety check to see if promoters had read the contract to ensure that the stadium had been properly configured for the band’s highly complex stage and light show, reconfigured to see if college students are paying attention.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Hundreds Of Colleges Provide No Earnings Boost. “Smart people make more money because they can do more. College does not make you smarter. Colleges with lower standards offer a way to get a degree without being very bright. . . . Kids who aren’t too bright are being economically harmed by delaying work to go to colleges where they won’t learn anything useful.”

Do tell.

WHO KNEW THE PUBLISHING INDUSTRY WAS SUCH A FEVER SWAMP HOTBED OF RACISM, SEXISM, AND HOMOPHOBIA? An Insta-reader forwards this Publisher’s Weekly-distributed survey, which was sent via the following email:

Dear *****
As part of our commitment to creating a diverse and inclusive work force, Publishers Weekly will be participating in the industry-wide Diversity Baseline Survey. This survey will examine several facets of staff diversity within the publishing industry including race, gender, sexual orientation, and disabilities. We hope this survey will give the publishing industry a better understanding of staff makeup and help all of us focus and improve our efforts to increase diversity. Adding more diversity to publishing’s ranks is a goal PW fully supports. To help move the process forward I hope you can spend a few minutes to take part in the following survey.

The link below will take you to a short 5-minute survey. This survey is being administered by Dr. Sarah Park Dahlen at St. Catherine University in Minnesota, and your individual answers to this survey will remain completely anonymous. Only the researchers handling this study at St. Catherine University will have access to full survey responses. Publisher’s Weekly will see their own numbers, but only in aggregate.

Please fill out the survey by September 30, 2015.

The survey is here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/7QY2K6T

The survey itself begins by claiming:

Publishing suffers from a major diversity problem. It is obvious that the vast majority of books published are by white authors and about white characters. The majority of the staff behind the scenes, which includes publishers’ employees, and reviewers, are white. For decades there has been overwhelming agreement in the industry that there should be more diversity at all levels and in all areas of the book world, but even with greater awareness, the problem never seems to go away. Is this problem too big to solve?

The answer is, we have no idea how big the problem is. While there is now data available about diversity among books published, there is still no data available about diversity among publishing staff and reviewers.

As in any business, when you have a problem you must understand it before you can solve it. Our goal with the Diversity Baseline Survey is to establish a baseline that shows where we are now. To learn more go here.

A Word About Privacy: Your individual answers to this survey will remain completely anonymous. Only the researchers handling this study at St. Catherine University will have access to full survey responses. Publisher’s Weekly will see their own numbers, but only in aggregate.

If you have any other questions contact, Jason Low, jlow@leeandlow.com. Otherwise, let us begin.

Things get even more…interesting...here:

Gosh — who knew there were so many choices? Or perhaps, there aren’t enough! It’s all so highly, highly problematic.

By the way, does increasing diversity apply to all industries? Instead of reflexively recruiting giants, it’s high time that the NBA forward a team, or the NFL an offensive line, that consisted of men the size of Woody Allen, Paul Simon, Wallace Shawn, and Peter Dinklage. Perhaps throw in Linda Hunt as well, for extra-added diversity.

STARBUCKS APOLOGIZES TO PHILLY COP AFTER HIS FACEBOOK POST ON BEING RUDELY DENIED RESTROOM ACCESS GOES VIRAL.

Earlier: Arby’s manager fired after drive-thru worker in Florida allegedly refused to serve a police officer just because she was a cop.

And to think Starbucks’ CEO was briefly counting on his “baristas” to lecture us all on race and civility.

THIS SHOULD BE GOOD FOR AT LEAST ANOTHER TEN POINTS FOR TRUMP: L.A. Touts Itself as “Northern Capital of Latin America” for 2024 Olympic Bid.

10TH PLANNED PARENTHOOD VIDEO: FRESH HEARTS, EYES AND GONADS FOR SALE: “Certainly, everything we provide — oh, gonads! Oh my God, gonads. Everything we provide is fresh.”

Pro Tip: if you’re using a line that sounds like it could be dialogue out of The Silence of the Lambs, you might want to consider if perhaps, you might be working for the bad guys.

PRESIDENT GOLDMAN SACHS HARDEST HIT: Wall Street’s latest panic: Trump could win:

The CEO of one large Wall Street firm, who declined to be identified by name criticizing the GOP front-runner, said the assumption in the financial industry remains that something will eventually knock Trump off and send voters toward a more establishment candidate. But that assumption is no longer held with strong conviction. And a dozen Wall Street executives interviewed for this article could not say what might dent Trump’s appeal or when it might happen.

“I don’t know anyone who is a Donald Trump supporter. I don’t know anyone who knows anyone who is a Donald Trump supporter. They are like this huge mystery group,” the CEO said. [Shades of Pauline Kael! -- Ed] “So it’s a combination of shock and bewilderment. No one really knows why this is happening. But my own belief is that the laws of gravity will apply and those who are prepared to run the marathon will benefit when Trump drops out at mile 22. Right now people think Trump is pretty hilarious but the longer it goes on the more frightening it gets.”

The latest frightening broadside for the Wall Street class came on Sunday when Trump said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that executive pay in America is “a complete joke” and promised to raise taxes on “the hedge fund guys.” In a statement sent to POLITICO on Monday from his campaign, Trump relished in the attacks from Wall Street, singling out both Bush and Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, another favorite on Wall Street.

“Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton will continue to let Wall Street and the ‘hedge fund guys’ rip off the people by paying no or very little in taxes,” Trump said. “They have total and complete control of Hillary, Jeb and others running. My campaign is self- funded. The only people that have control of me are the people of the United States.”

By the time of the 2008 election, Wall Street abandoned Republicans, preferring Michael Bloomberg’s nanny state and Barack Obama’s arugula to the GOP’s traditional values, as Kevin D. Williamson wrote the following year:

Wall Street isn’t politically agnostic, and there’s more to its politics than money. Culture matters, and you won’t find a lot of Pentecostal churches in Greenwich, Conn. Wall Street guys, for the most part, do not have time for social conservatives. “Of course these guys aren’t conservative,” says one longtime bond trader. “Why the [expletive deleted] would they be? We’re talking about guys who live in Manhattan, guys with manicures and eight-figure bank balances. And their wives–their wives aren’t showing up at parents’ day at Brearley with a Sarah Palin button. It’d be like showing up in flip-flops from Wal-Mart. Like showing up in a [rather lengthier expletive deleted] tracksuit.”

This cultural divide is particularly visible in New York City politics. “Ten to 15 years ago, half of the Upper East Side [officeholders] were Republican,” says John Mills, executive vice president of the Lexington Democratic Club. “There’s not one Republican there now. Abortion and gay rights are two of the biggest issues, and there are a lot of Jewish voters here not comfortable with Christian conservatives.”

Wall Street has no love for the southern, rural, and evangelical. But it’s not just the Jesus stuff–the southern and rural parts matter, too: Republican congressmen tend to represent places like Glasscock County, Texas, America’s most Republican jurisdiction, which reliably gives 90-odd percent of its votes to the GOP. Those districts are not going to feel the pain of the financial markets the way New York, New Jersey, California, and Connecticut are. The bailout is not very popular in farm country. Wall Street knew there was a gathering storm in the markets, and it didn’t want to find itself at the mercy of small-town and rural Republicans’ riding to the rescue.

And thus, the birth of the man Glenn likes to call “President Goldman Sachs.”

As Kevin noted, Wall Street abandoned the American heartland in 2008, so it shouldn’t be at all surprised to discover that someone showing up with an anti-Wall Street message resonates with voters there. I’m disappointed it’s a rather punitive and populist message than a conservative one, but historically, fire and brimstone populism has always allowed a candidate to position himself as the champion to a large group of disenfranchised voters.

CHANGE: Now Anyone Can Sell Stuff On Twitter Directly In The App.

AT AMAZON, take an extra 30% off already-reduced jewelry.

Plus, deals on Men’s Sneakers.

HOW DONALD TRUMP FIGURED OUT THE VALUE OF #SORRYNOTSORRY:

It seems to me that this is a wonderful game for the media to play, but the candidate is always the loser. And the reason is that when you apologize, no matter how sincere it may or may not be, the public only hears the admission that you were wrong. And despite your remorse over your error, you are now the person who was wrong. Given the unrealistic expectations we place on candidates in general, that’s not the best tag to have sewn on your jacket.

Contrast that with Trump. He’s been declared to have broken the rules now more times than I can count without the help of a Cray supercomputer. One of the more famous examples was when he seemingly implied that Megyn Kelly was on her time of the month during the first debate. You can argue for the next fourteen months whether or not that’s what he really meant, but the media latched onto it like a bull terrier. And yet when the reporters came to ask if he wanted to apologize, Trump basically told them, screw that. She should apologize to me!

For better or worse, Trump maintains a rock steady course of projected self-confidence, insisting that he’s right and anyone who disagrees with him must therefore be wrong. And the fact is, people respond to that. They don’t want some “loser” marching up to the microphone with a hangdog look on their face saying I’m sorry. They want a winner who tells them that things are going to get better. And that’s what Trump delivers.

It’s an idea that’s reminiscent of some other famous non-apologists. I’m reminded of one of Andrew Breitbart’s final tweets before he died, in which he simply asked, “Apologize for what?”

Perhaps by being fixture in the white-hot media world of Manhattan since the 1980s, Trump knows how the game is played in the MSM, and seems to have mastered it. Of course, Leon Wolf’s theory that “Donald Trump is the political equivalent of chaff, a billion shiny objects all floating through the sky at once, ephemeral, practically without substance, serving almost exclusively to distract from more important things – yet nonetheless completely impossible to ignore,” is also true as well. Yes Trump says a lot of crazy stuff (such as his slur against Kelly), but kudos to him for not apologizing and simply plowing on, rather than play by the MSM rules that have hamstrung other Republican candidates.

UPDATE: Trump as Political Pick-Up Artist: The Donald is “Negging” His Rivals Brilliantly: “The billionaire’s insult-laced patter is straight outta a scurrilous dating scene,” Nick Gillespie writes at Reason.

OH, IT’S BEEN A LIFESAVER FOR A LOT OF US: Oral sex may be a life saver for spider.

WHY IS AIR TRAVEL THE OBJECT OF SO MANY COMPLAINTS? “Not too long ago, flying could be a relatively pleasant experience, but executives focused on cutting costs have stripped away everything flyers associated with luxury or even dignity. Food, baggage handling, boarding in a logical manner: Things once taken for granted now must be paid for or done without. Flights are more crowded than they’ve been since World War II, when they were carrying troops.”

MICHAEL BARONE: Fecklessness 101: Obama in the Middle East.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Why You Shouldn’t Bother with a $699 Cancer Test.

JEFF BEZOS’ SPACE COMPANY, BLUE ORIGIN, will be launching from Florida. This adds to the Texas v. California space race.

TERROR ROAD: This Wildfire Escape Video Is a Drive Through Hell on Earth. “Wildfires are conceptually terrifying, but seeing one from the inside, up close and with a first-person view really brings home the horrific reality. Everything is on fire, and it’s only getting worse.”

WELL, THIS ISN’T GOOD: Hundreds Quarantined as Ebola Returns to Sierra Leone District.

THESE PEOPLE ARE IDIOTS: “Apparently the Obama administration turned down a [2012] Russian offer to dump Assad… because the Administration was sure he was going to fall on his own.” Plus:

If true, this was a staggering missed opportunity. The President’s string of misjudgments on the Middle East—on the peace process, Erdogan, withdrawal from Iraq, Libya, ISIS as the “J.V. team”, and Syria—is one of the most striking examples of serial failure in the annals of American foreign policy.

Generally speaking, what the President seems worst at is estimating the direction in which events are flowing. He thought Erdogan was taking Turkey in one direction; Erdogan was going somewhere else. He thought there was a transition to democracy in Egypt; there never was a prospect of that. He has repeatedly been caught flatfooted by events in Syria. And Putin keeps running rings around him.

Understanding the intentions and estimating the capabilities of people who don’t share his worldview are not our President’s strong suits.

No. Related item here.

BRADLEY AREHART: Accommodating Pregnancy.

SIX ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS PARENTS MUST ASK ABOUT THEIR KIDS’ SCHOOLS, from Susan L.M. Goldberg at the PJM Parenting section, including:

4. Is the academic program geared towards academics or political messaging?

In fifth grade we were introduced to the concept of “multiculturalism”. My school district felt the best way to introduce us to other cultures was by partnering with another elementary school in the district for special programming on cultures of third world nations. This boiled down to one primarily white school meeting up with another primarily white school, splitting into carefully crafted groups that included at least one student of color, and watching a bunch of white teachers shake rain sticks at us to demonstrate the culture of Africa. Sound highly hypocritical? It gets better.

We were told to work together to create group names. The “person of color” in our group was a goof off from my own class. When he suggested a name I felt was stupid, I as much told him so. Everyone else agreed. When the teachers came around to see how we were doing, the “person of color” accused me of bullying him. “That’s not nice, Susan. We have to respect other people’s cultures. I think that’s a great name for the group. That will be your name.” The name was “The Orange Juices.” Totally multicultural and reflective of his native culture, I’m sure.

Contrast that experience to the one I had in my gifted classes led by a very old school teacher, Mrs. Lenox. Our first class focused on learning Bloom’s Taxonomy, a method of study that would guide how we would approach every topic over the course of the year. Not only did she lay out topics of study, she explained the method she’d be using to teach. Everyone was on the same page from day one and it made sense.

If you want your child to grow up to be an independent thinker and a leader, take a look at the curriculum with this question in mind: Is your child being taught to learn in an objective fashion, or play political ball in a bureaucratic system?

Well, playing political ball in a far left bureaucratic system is what teachers do, so it’s no wonder they want to pass that “skill” onto the kids they indoctrinate teach. As Glenn noted in his 2014 book, The New School, it’s not a coincidence that the typical school is modeled after the factories of the early 20th century and is designed to churn out cogs to fill their assembly lines, even if there are less and less of them in the US. “Thus, the traditional public school: like a factory, it runs by the bell. Like machines in a factory, desk and students are lined up in orderly rows. When shifts (classes) change, the bell rings again, and the students go to the next class. And within each class, the subjects are the same, and the examinations are the same, regardless of the characteristics of the individual students.”

IN THE MAIL: Edited by Hank Davis, Future Wars . . . and Other Punchlines.

Plus, today only at Amazon: 68% Off “George Carlin: All My Stuff” — 14 Disc set. He couldn’t perform on college campuses today. Too triggering.

And, also today only: Up to 30% Off Select TP-LINK Networking Products.

Plus: Jawbone UP3 Fitness Tracker for $119.99 (33% off). Tracks your heart rate, too.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 859.

EUROPE’S FAILING DREAM:

If French presidential elections were held today, Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right National Front, could come out on top in the first round. Ms. Le Pen would easily beat the current president, François Hollande, and might even edge out the center-right’s most likely candidate, former President Nicolas Sarkozy, according to recent polls. Voters hostile to the National Front would still band together to hand Marine a defeat in the second round if elections were held today, the same polls show. She would, however, end up carrying between 41 and 45 percent of the vote.

And that poll was held before the migrant crisis convulsed Europe.

The National Front, the party founded by Ms. Le Pen’s father Jean-Marie Le Pen in 1972, has never been as popular as it is today. At the height of his own popularity, Mr. Le Pen won 16.9 percent of the vote in the first round of the 2002 presidential elections, but was soundly defeated in the second round. His daughter, who took over the party leadership in 2011, beat her father’s best showing on her first try, coming in with 17.9 percent of the vote in the 2012 elections. With the atmosphere in France increasingly uncertain, she may well have the shot in 2017 that her father never did.

And the National Front is not the only far-right party on the popularity upswing. All across Europe, far-right parties are making big strides. In Hungary, the ultranationalist Jobbik party, whose members have been accused of holding rabidly anti-Semitic views, is riding high in the polls and is now the second strongest party in Hungary. In April of this year, Jobbik’s Lajos Rig defeated the favored candidate from the ruling center-right Fidesz in a by-election that the party’s gloating leader, Gabor Vona, described as “historic.” Similar successes are on display in Austria, where the Austrian Freedom Party had one of its best performances in 2013 when it captured 20.5 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections; in Denmark, where the Danish People’s Party is the second largest party in parliament as of the 2015 elections; in the Netherlands, where the anti-immigrant PVV is currently pulling ahead of the mainstream VVD in aggregate polls; and in Finland, where the euroskeptic True Finns have joined the government after getting 13 percent in the latest elections. Even in traditionally left-leaning Sweden, the anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats are the number one force in the country. With far-right parties becoming a rule rather than the exception in mainstream politics, the political landscape in Europe has been transformed.

Who could have seen this coming?

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: North Korea says it has restarted its nuclear facilities, threatens the U.S.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: Wary of Russia, Estonian volunteers rush to join militia.

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IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: My USA Today column: Jared Polis (D-CO) and the War on College Men.

ALEX GRISWOLD: No, Hillary: Rape Victims Don’t Have A “Right To Be Believed.”

Does Hillary Clinton believe her husband is a rapist?

Now before you bite my head off, the question is a fair one given what the Democratic candidate said in a speech before a “Women for Hillary” event earlier today:

“To every survivor of sexual assault…You have the right to be heard. You have the right to be believed. We’re with you.”

The vast majority of conservatives and liberals who are deeply concerned about sexual assault will agree with Clinton’s larger point. I don’t think anyone would disagree that victims of sexual assault who come forward have a right to be heard, a right to be taken seriously, and a right to have their claims thoroughly investigated. But Clinton goes a step further and says they have “the right to be believed.”

Well, as it happens, her own husband has been accused of sexual assault. Not once, but several times. And contrary to Clinton’s bold new standard, the media and Democrats alike elected not to believe a single accusation. “In media accounts, [Paula Jones] tends to be portrayed as a trailer-park floozy digging for money and celebrity,” Newsweek admitted back in 1997. Clinton’s own stalwart ally James Carville was just as blatant: “Drag a $100 bill through a trailer park, there’s no telling what you’ll find,” he said.

Accountability is for the little people.

THE CAMP OF THE SAINTS IS JUST A NOVEL, RIGHT GUYS? RIGHT? GUYS? Hungary shuts key refugee route amid widening clampdowns across Europe.

Also: Migrant crisis: Hungary declares emergency at Serbia border. “From Tuesday, anyone who crosses the border illegally will face criminal charges, and 30 judges have been put on standby to try offenders.”

And: Germany Reinstates Passport Controls.

And this take:

And, of course, there’s this:

UPDATE: Finland Closes Its Border With Sweden.

REAP THE WHIRLWIND: Advocates Of Political Correctness Now Complaining About Blowback. If this is the best case they can make — especially with Obama himself targeting campus PC — then I’d say they’re in trouble.

RICHARD EPSTEIN: The Consequences of Obama’s Weakness.

GOOD IDEA: Scott Walker proposes ban on government unions.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker laid out a proposal Monday to completely overhaul the nation’s labor union laws, calling for eliminating most of the advantages private-sector unions have under federal law and prohibiting public-sector unions altogether.

The proposal, if enacted, would represent the most radical change to federal labor law in almost a century, making Walker’s labor reforms in his home state seem modest by comparison. They also would be a massive blow to the strength of organized labor, a major player in Washington politics and staunch ally of the Democratic Party.

Walker said the proposals were aimed at strengthening the rights of individual workers, which under current federal labor law are often sacrificed to bolster union strength. Unions would still exist, but they would be voluntary organizations with workers able to join or leave whenever they felt.

Related: Non-Union Workers More Happy With Work Than Union Members.

FROM THE MAN WHO HELPED BRING YOU THE ECO-PARANOIA THAT DEFINED THE EARLY 1970s: Quite a coup for Mark Steyn — Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, discovers Mark Steyn has a new book out questioning Michael Mann’s increasingly limp hockey stick and does not like what he reads.

Considering that much of what Ehrlich helped inspire in the early 1970s now sounds like Reefer Madness with bell-bottoms and long sideburns, that’s quite a glowing “reverse endorsement” indeed for Mark:

(Here’s the YouTube link if you’d like to watch the complete version of Matt Novak’s 2010 Paleofuture video, which nicely sums up the doomsday zaniness of the 1970s.)

THAT’S OKAY. WE’LL TAX THE RICH, OR PRINT MORE MONEY, OR SOMETHING. WE HAVEN’T RUN OUT OF OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY YET! Price Tag of Bernie Sanders’s Proposals: $18 Trillion.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose liberal call to action has propelled his long-shot presidential campaign, is proposing an array of new programs that would amount to the largest peacetime expansion of government in modern American history.

In all, he backs at least $18 trillion in new spending over a decade, according to a tally by The Wall Street Journal, a sum that alarms conservatives and gives even many Democrats pause. Mr. Sanders sees the money as going to essential government services at a time of increasing strain on the middle class.

His agenda includes an estimated $15 trillion for a government-run health-care program that covers every American, plus large sums to rebuild roads and bridges, expand Social Security and make tuition free at public colleges.

To pay for it, Mr. Sanders, a Vermont independent running for the Democratic nomination, has so far detailed tax increases that could bring in as much as $6.5 trillion over 10 years, according to his staff.

Hey, Hugo Chavez just didn’t implement socialism correctly. . . .

HIGH NOON: CARSON VERSUS TRUMP: As Roger Simon writes, “indeed, it’s not difficult to envision Ben Carson as a kind of Gary Cooper-type for our time, come to clean up America and return her to her former greatness.  The more humble he is in the process, the better, the more likely to succeed in the deepest sense:”

Of all candidates, Carson’s qualifications to handle the first of these disasters is unparalleled.  We know less of his qualifications for the second, but he says he has been boning up on foreign policy and (hello, Hugh Hewitt) he should be tested on that at the debate Wednesday.  My guess is that, unlike Donald Trump, Carson will know the difference between Hamas and Hezbollah.

This is not to say I bear any enmity toward Trump.  On the contrary, his influence on the electoral season has been hugely positive on balance.  He has brought attention to a process that is often largely ignored.  But more than that, his focus on the immigration crisis has proven prescient, not just because of the murderous domestic behavior of illegal aliens (Fisherman’s Wharf, etc.) but because of the escalating migrant crisis in Europe and the Middle East that is bound to hit our shores.  He has also spoken out definitively against the Iran deal.  Bravo, Donald!

I just think, however, that the time is ripe for Gary Cooper.  The bigger question is whether America is ready for him. Do we deserve Ben Carson if he is as moral a person as he appears to be?  Or will his political inexperience prove to be more important than some of us think? Is a decent man unfit to be president in the modern world?

RELATED: A Timely Reminder from Eisenhower and Reagan.

EVERYTHING’S A MONEY LAUNDRY OR A SLUSH FUND WITH THESE PEOPLE: Obamacare’s Blue State Money Laundry: Is Andrew Slavitt using failed exchanges to facilitate the creation of Democrat slush funds?

hen Maryland’s Attorney General announced last summer that his office had negotiated a settlement whereby $45 million would be recouped from the IT contractor that botched the state’s Obamacare exchange, it was widely reported as good news for taxpayers. It appeared that their investment in the mismanaged project would not be a dead loss. But the AG’s statement included this curious passage: “The agreement… will lead to the recovery of funds for both Maryland and the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services [CMS].” What’s so odd about that? Well, the state didn’t contribute any money to the project.

All of the money used to build the failed exchange, as well as its hastily constructed replacement, came from federal start-up grants. Maryland received more than $179 million in such grants. About $73 million was paid to the original contractor, Noridian Healthcare Solutions, and another $41 million was paid to the firm that cleaned up the mess. Yet, according to the Maryland AG’s office, the state is in negotiations with CMS concerning how the $45 million will be divided. But why would Maryland receive any part of the settlement if all the money used to build and repair the exchange came from Washington?

This very question, as it happens, occurred to Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch when he got wind of the Maryland deal. Hatch’s committee has been pressing Obama administration officials for information on their plans to recoup billions in federal tax dollars that have disappeared into the coffers of states that followed Obamacare’s directive to set up insurance exchanges. Only fourteen, all controlled by Democrats, set up these “marketplaces.” And, like Maryland, they used federal grants to do so. Those states, along with the District of Columbia,spent more than $5 billion to launch their exchanges.

Read the whole thing.

CHANGE: How bad could it get in Europe? So bad that the refugees might flee back to the Middle East.

JOHN HINDERAKER: Bullshit From Bernie.

Bernie Sanders, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, spoke at Liberty University today. You can read his speech here. It is useful, in that it exposes the extent of Sanders’s ignorance and radicalism.

Read the whole thing, for a good old-fashioned Fisking.

LOGGING OFF FOR TODAY: With the all important question — How your office would look like if your boss was a cat.

SOME PEOPLE HAVE BEEN WORKING VERY HARD FOR THIS: America’s Legal Order Begins to Fray.

SAY THE RACISTS: Color-Blindness Is Counterproductive.

GIVEN WHERE THE CULTURE HAS GONE SINCE, GOOD: Miss America CEO Offers Public Apology to Vanessa Williams as She Takes the Judge’s Seat 32 Years After Relinquishing Her Title.

SHOCKED, SHOCKED: Science Integrity Is The Lowest In 500 Years.

SO MUCH FOR THE BEEFEATERS: Corbyn, Cameron and the Vegan Choice.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE AMERICAN CHAVEZ: Price Tag of Bernie Sanders’s Proposals: $18 Trillion.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO) and The War On College Men.

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Q: ARE WE NOT MEN? A: WE ARE DEVO! The name Devo comes “from their concept of ‘de-evolution’ — the idea that instead of continuing to evolve, mankind has actually begun to regress, as evidenced by the dysfunction and herd mentality of American society,” as Wikipedia notes.

Sadly, the band themselves seem determined to live out their philosophy firsthand, instead of merely observing it: Devo singer sparks outrage with his 9/11-themed wedding — complete with Twin Towers cake and box-cutter favors.

Time to play the left’s favorite get-out-of-jail-free card, the “Botched joke” defense in 3…2…1…?

BEN CARSON: For Quality, Privatize Veterans’ Health Care.

FINALLY! Now you can brew Campbell’s soup in your Keurig with new savory pods.

ONWARD, CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS: Why Christianity is surging in the heart of Islam.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: College Graduates Don’t Know Basic Facts About the Constitution. “According to the study, nearly 10% of college graduates think Judith Sheindlin — commonly known as Judge Judy — is on the Supreme Court; one-third of college graduates can’t identify the Bill of Rights as a name given to a group of Constitutional amendments; and 32% believe that Representative John Boehner is the current president of the U.S. Senate. Shockingly, 46% of college grads don’t know the election cycle — six years for senators, two years for representatives. Turning to the general population, the report finds that over half (54%) of those surveyed cannot identify the Bill of Rights accurately, and over 1 in 10 (11%) of those ages 25–34 believe that the Constitution must be reauthorized every four years.”

JERRY POURNELLE IS ACCEPTING SUBMISSIONS:

Accepting submissions for a new volume of the There Will Be War series. Send with cover note to submission@therewillbewar.net. Stories should preferably be 20,000 words or less. Poetry encouraged, but see the previous series; it needs to make sense. Hard science fiction mainly; urban fantasy with a military theme possibly acceptable, but mostly we want hard, realistic stories. They need not be action adventure; good command decision stories encouraged. Space opera always considered. Again see the previous nine volumes.

Nonexclusive anthology rights only are purchased. Payment on acceptance is $100 advance against pro rata share of 50% of the revenues received from the publisher. Given the sales of the previous volumes we expect this to be a respectable payment. Original works will be considered, but author is welcome to sell it elsewhere; we purchase only nonexclusive anthology rights.

There will be a hardbound print edition, paperback if the sales indicate it, and eBook publication. Contributors will receive an author’s copy. Each contribution will have an introduction by the editor. The work will contain non-fiction essays by invited contributors: again see the previous volumes.

If this is up your alley, get in touch.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Field Expedient Body Armor.

TRANSHUMANISTS: The people hoping to continue to exist through technology.

THE WAR ON FUTBAL: Microaggressions: A Case Study, from Ace of Spades:

We have a major microagression situation at, get this, Oberlin College.

Apparently there was an intramural soccer match scheduled at the same time as a Latin Heritage Club meeting. A White Male (uh oh) sent out an email to a Hispanic girl noting that he’d like to have her at the match, if she wasn’t going to the Latin Club meeting.

He wrote the most racist sentence since Mein Kampf:

Hey, that talk looks pretty great, but on the off chance you aren’t going or would rather play futbol instead the club team wants to go!!

Anyone see the problem there?

That’s right, he said the f-word– Futbol. He racistly appropriated the Spanish language.

Uh-oh. Read the whole thing.

And speaking of being on the lookout for highly problematic microaggressions in everything, Helen Mirren, who over the past decade brilliantly transformed her career by seemingly eschewing her earlier, zanier days, is reverting to form: “It annoys me to see men with an arm slung round their girlfriend’s shoulders – it’s like ownership.” The London Independent added that “Mirren, 70, said that if she could give her younger self one piece of advice, ‘it would be to use the words ‘f*** off’ more frequently.’”

Sounds like excellent advice in this case.

GOOD GRIEF: Seattle Man Faces Felony Charge After Allegedly Punching a Lamborghini.

AT AMAZON: Deals Of The Week: Up to 71% off in Movies & TV.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO) and The War On College Men.

YALE PROFESSOR EXPLAINS HITLER’S MALTHUSIANISM, THINKS THERE’S SOMETHING TO IT: In contrast, as Bob Zubrin writes at NRO, “The real lesson of the Holocaust for our time is this: We are not threatened by there being too many people. We are threatened by people who say there are too many people:”

The fundamental question boils down to this: Are humans destroyers or creators? If the idea is accepted that the world’s resources are fixed, with only so much to go around, then each new life is unwelcome, each unregulated act or thought is a menace, every person is fundamentally the enemy of every other person, and each race or nation is enemy of every other race or nation. The ultimate outcome of such a worldview can only be enforced stagnation, tyranny, war, and genocide.

But if we choose instead to have faith in the power of unfettered creativity to invent unbounded resources, then every new life if a gift, and every person, race, and nation becomes ultimately the potential friend of every other, and, rather than suppression, the fundamental purpose of government must be to protect human liberty at all costs.

Only in a world of freedom can resources be unlimited. Only in a world of unlimited resources can all men be brothers.

But as Thomas Sowell once told an interviewer:

There’s something Eric Hoffer said: “Intellectuals cannot operate at room temperature.” There always has to be a crisis — some terrible reason why their superior wisdom and virtue must be imposed on the unthinking masses. It doesn’t matter what the crisis is. A hundred years ago it was eugenics. At the time of the first Earth Day a generation ago, the big scare was global cooling, a big ice age. They go from one to the other. It meets their psychological needs and gives them a reason for exercising their power.

Malthusianism provides the perfect mechanism for what William James dubbed at the start of the 20st century “The Moral Equivalent of War” — or war itself, in the case of post-Weimar Germany.

UPDATE: “L’Shanah Tovah! New York Times Compares ‘Climate Change’ to Holocaust,” Michael Walsh writes. But this is actually breaking news from 1989, when the Gray Lady allowed Al Gore to publish a self-serving op-ed there titled “An Ecological Kristallnacht. Listen.”

KAROL MARKOWICZ: Why The Lack Of Eligible Bachelors Is A Myth. You say “myth,” I say “artifact of female hypergamy.”

That’s ultimately what women want. It’s not that they need to ensure their future husband took classes like “Shakespeare in Film” or “Calculus for Poets” (both real college credit classes).

It’s that what women continue to look for in men is security — and a college degree goes a long way toward convincing them he can provide that.

We’ve just gotten to a point where it’s unacceptable to admit that, so we use the “college degree” code to say the things we won’t: We want someone with a good job who will take care of us — yes, even if we’re perfectly capable of taking care of ourselves.

It’s not as if women will turn down an entrepreneur, like, say Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, just because they didn’t finish college. Exceptions will be made.

Indeed.

BRING BACK DDT: Online bed bug reports gnaw at hotel revenues.

LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Map of the World’s Neutrinos Exposes Nuclear Activity Wherever It’s Happening. It’s cool, but not quite up to the hype, as some of it is constructed, rather than simply imaged.

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Conference video: Bringing Computational Programmability to Nanostructured Surfaces.

MAYBE YOU COULD NAME BILL YOUR SEXUAL ASSAULT CZAR: Hillary Clinton Pushes Crackdown on ‘Epidemic’ of Campus Sexual Assault.

It’s just more in the War On College Men.

SHE REMINDS THEM OF THEIR HUSBAND’S EX-WIFE? Poll: Sharp erosion in Clinton support among Democratic women.

LIFE AND DEATH IN THE 21ST CENTURY: A Dying Young Woman’s Hope in Cryonics and a Future: Cancer claimed Kim Suozzi at age 23, but she chose to have her brain preserved with the dream that neuroscience might one day revive her mind.

WHAT IT’S LIKE to lose 350 pounds. “Even the scales out front of Walmart wouldn’t take me.”

MICHAEL MUKASEY: “Cleaning Up After the Obama Team’s Iran Deal.”

The Iran deal is not a treaty and has no constitutional status. Congress should declare, and try to get a court to declare, that President Obama has no authority to lift sanctions in Iran because he failed to comply with the Iran Nuclear Review Act he signed earlier this year—specifically, the legal requirement that he show to Congress the entire agreement including “side agreements” like the one between Iran and the IAEA.

There are other steps to take. Gen. Michael Hayden, a former CIA director, has suggested an immediate congressional authorization for the use of force if Iran violates the deal; beefing up U.S. defenses in a meaningful way; and perhaps providing Israel with the Massive Ordnance Penetrator. This “bunker buster” could penetrate even the underground Iranian enrichment facility at Fordow, which is suitable principally for creating an atomic weapon.

. . .

However, before Iran can respond to a credible threat of force there must be a U.S. administration with enough steel to do more than talk about whether a vague military option is on or off a metaphoric table. That is assuredly not the current “we.”

True that.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO) and The War On College Men.

IN THE MAIL: From David Drake & Jim Kjelgaard, The Hunter Returns.

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And, also today only: 33% off Men’s and Women’s ’47 NFL Tees and Hats.

Also: Mohu Leaf 50 Indoor HDTV Antenna, $37.99 (58% off). Cut the cord!

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 858.

THE CAMP OF THE SAINTS IS JUST A NOVEL, RIGHT GUYS? RIGHT? GUYS? Hungary braces itself for massive surge of up to 30,000 migrants in just ONE DAY from huge Serbian ‘push through’ – as Germany admits it may take in record one million this year.

SEE, THIS COLUMN ABOUT “THE NEXT GENOCIDE,” KIND OF MISSES THE POINT:

The Holocaust may seem a distant horror whose lessons have already been learned. But sadly, the anxieties of our own era could once again give rise to scapegoats and imagined enemies, while contemporary environmental stresses could encourage new variations on Hitler’s ideas, especially in countries anxious about feeding their growing populations or maintaining a rising standard of living.

The quest for German domination was premised on the denial of science. Hitler’s alternative to science was the idea of Lebensraum. Germany needed an Eastern European empire because only conquest, and not agricultural technology, offered the hope of feeding the German people. In Hitler’s “Second Book,” which was composed in 1928 and not published until after his death, he insisted that hunger would outstrip crop improvements and that all “the scientific methods of land management” had already failed. No conceivable improvement would allow Germans to be fed “from their own land and territory,” he claimed. Hitler specifically — and wrongly — denied that irrigation, hybrids and fertilizers could change the relationship between people and land.

The pursuit of peace and plenty through science, he claimed in “Mein Kampf,” was a Jewish plot to distract Germans from the necessity of war. “It is always the Jew,” argued Hitler, “who seeks and succeeds in implanting such lethal ways of thinking.”

The piece goes on to the usual “climate change” boilerplate, but Hitler’s “limits to growth” attitude presages the modern environmental movement. Norman Borlaug, on the other hand, remains surprisingly unknown, and utterly uncelebrated, by the Greens.

SALENA ZITO: “More than 3 million people didn’t show up to vote in 2012, according to David Leip’s ‘Atlas of U.S. Elections.’ That number was not a show of apathy, but the beginning force of populism that sent a message to the establishment of both parties that neither recognized.”

ROGER KIMBALL: A Word About “Fundamentals.” “It would be cruel to compare Hillary circa 2008 with the bedraggled harridan of today.” It was cruel to let her run. But, then, who could have stopped her?

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KURT SCHLICHTER: The Obnoxious and Important Questions I Would Ask At The GOP Debate.

A LONG, SLOW RIDE TO HELL — AND WE’RE NOT THERE YET: Michael Walsh has a lengthy excerpt from his new book, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace at PJM, focused on “the Frankfurt School of mostly German Marxist philosophers, whose destructive, anti-cultural handiwork we can see all around us. For just about every social pathology that currently has Americans and Europeans scratching their heads — how the hell did we get here? — has its origins in the teachings of the Frankfurters and its practical application embodied by the pernicious doctrine of Critical Theory. Destruction of national sovereignty? Check. Redefinition of marriage and the family? Check. Replacement of the Individual-as-Hero with the collectivist ethos of the human ant farm? We have a winner. Antonio Gramsci, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Wilhelm Reich — the list of villains reads like Hell’s honor role.”

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: U.S. drops to 16th on ‘economic freedom’ list, behind Canada, Chile.

A TRAILER PARK CALLED CAMELOT:

Ethel was 40 and three months pregnant with her last child, daughter Rory, when her husband was assassinated. Bobby Jr. was 14, and one week after his father’s funeral, the family celebrated his brother’s 13th birthday. Bobby slipped laxatives into everyone’s drinks as a prank.

“Just leave home!” Ethel yelled at him. “Get out of my life!”

She often used such language with him. “Her moods could swing drastically,” Oppenheimer writes, and soon after, she “literally beat Bobby with a hairbrush.”

Unable to cope with her grief — let alone her children’s — Ethel shipped Bobby off to a series of boarding schools, each less prestigious than the last, each forced to expel the namesake son of a martyred political icon.

Bobby wasn’t even 15 and was already using drugs heavily. He insisted each school allow his pet falcon to stay in his room. He formed a gang, The Hyannis Port Terrors, and one of his favorite practical jokes was bumping the fender of a passing car, having a pal collapse in the road, then yelling, “You’ve killed a Kennedy!” He once spat in a cop’s face.

Ethel did nothing. She was sealed off in her McLean, Va., estate. Only her dead husband, his legacy and her privilege as a Kennedy widow existed. Nothing Bobby did got her attention for long, and that attention was usually negative.

“I never witnessed a civil conversation between Bobby and Ethel,” one of RFK Jr.’s ex-girlfriends told People in 1984.

When Bobby was arrested for buying pot in 1970, Ethel threw him in the bushes. “You’ve dragged your family’s name through the mud!” she yelled. . . .

In his 1994 biography of Ethel, “The Other Mrs. Kennedy,” Oppenheimer writes of her “uncontrolled rage” and the abuse that extended to her household staff. Her brother-in-law Peter Lawford was shocked when Ethel berated a new maid for going to throw out some old scraps of paper.

“You stupid n- - - -r,” Ethel yelled. “Don’t you know what you’re doing? You’re destroying history. Get out of my sight! You’re fired.”

One of Ethel’s secretaries, Noelle Fell, told Oppenheimer she was surprised by such outbursts.

“She would say things like, ‘Those black people are stupid,’ ” Fell recalled. “I really don’t think she liked blacks or Hispanics. She couldn’t stand it if they didn’t speak English.”

One such maid, who brought sanitary pads when Ethel asked for face cream, got a hard slap in the face. She quit on the spot.

Covered up by the press for decades, of course.

VDH ON THE WEARINESS OF THE WHINERS: “The cult of the whining victim is now ubiquitous,” Victor Davis Hanson writes:

The 21^st century has become a cowardly era in which we point to collective race, class, or gender rather than own up to our record of behavior and performance when our exalted expectations are not met. Or is it worse than that? Does a Brandon Marshall count on making unsubstantiated charges of racism in hopes of preemptory careerist advantage: one must prove he is not a racist in the future by offering beneficia in the present?

The culprits are not just our obsessions with race, class, and gender, or the careerist aspirations of elites. We also live in the most affluent and leisured era in the history of Western civilization. But given human nature, our bounty has not given us pause for appreciation, but rather increased our appetites in geometric fashion. The more we have, the more we think we deserve — or else. In an affluent society, society can afford now to have no losers. There is enough stuff and praise to be shared by all. In T-ball everyone is a winner; so is today’s student who feels A’s are his birthright. The poor man in the inner city has more computing power in his palm with an Apple smartphone than did the billionaire twenty years ago in his study — but, of course, not as versatile a phone perhaps as that of today’s billionaire, and thus he can legitimately whine that life is not fair due to the machinations of someone else.

The bane of our age is not poverty but parity, or rather the perceived absence of a state-mandated equality of result. It no long matters how much one has, much less in comparison to those abroad or to Americans of our past. The rub is whether someone has something more or better than your own — and why and how that can still be possible in the American horn of plenty. Given those requisites, whininess is the lubricant of our national machinery.

Read the whole thing.

UNEXPECTEDLY! A Hunting Ban Saps a Village’s Livelihood.

Lions have been coming out of the surrounding bush, prowling around homes and a small health clinic, to snatch goats and donkeys from the heart of this village on the edge of one of Africa’s great inland deltas. Elephants, too, are becoming frequent, unwelcome visitors, gobbling up the beans, maize and watermelons that took farmers months to grow.

Since Botswana banned trophy hunting two years ago, remote communities like Sankuyo have been at the mercy of growing numbers of wild animals that are hurting livelihoods and driving terrified villagers into their homes at dusk.

The hunting ban has also meant a precipitous drop in income. Over the years, villagers had used money from trophy hunters, mostly Americans, to install toilets and water pipes, build houses for the poorest, and give scholarships to the young and pensions to the old.

Calls to curb trophy hunting across Africa have risen since a lion in Zimbabwe, named Cecil by researchers tracking it, was killed in July by an American dentist. . . .

“We had a lot of complaints from local communities,” Ms. Kapata said. “In Africa, a human being is more important than an animal. I don’t know about the Western world,” she added, echoing a complaint in affected parts of Africa that the West seemed more concerned with the welfare of a lion in Zimbabwe than of Africans themselves.

This is what happens when you let your policy be driven by “social justice” virtue-signalling, instead of, you know, reason and consideration actual human needs.

IMMIGRATION: The H-2 visa program invites foreign workers to do some of the most menial labor in America. Then it leaves them at the mercy of their employers. Thousands of these workers have been abused — deprived of their fair pay, imprisoned, starved, beaten, raped, and threatened with deportation if they dare complain.

UPDATE: Hey, you know who loves H2 visas? Bernie Sanders, the worker’s friend.

FENCE JUMPERS BREAK LEGS TO GET INTO UNITED STATES: “We could spend the whole state budget on the border and I am not sure it would solve the problem,” Arizona state senator tells PJM.

Taking deportation for illegal immigrants seriously might. Or at the very least would certainly be a good way to start.

JOEL KOTKIN: Wave of migrants will give Europe an extreme makeover.

The massive, ongoing surge of migrants and refugees into Europe has brought up horrendous scenes of deprivation, along with heartwarming instances of generosity. It has also engendered cruel remembrances of the continent’s darkest hours. But viewed over the long term, this crisis may well be the prelude to changes that could dissipate, and even overturn, some of the world’s most-storied and productive cultures.

Some may prefer to ignore the long-term impacts of huge migration from the often-chaotic developing world – where 99 percent of the world’s population growth will be taking place – to the more orderly, prosperous and low-fertility richer countries. Separated from the daily drama, the human movement from Syria, the rest of the Middle East and Africa can be seen as potentially changing European society forever by breaking its already-weak Christian foundations and threatening the future of Europe’s elaborate welfare states. In many ways this invokes the vision laid out in the 1973 French novel “Le Camp des Saints,” which envisioned a Europe overwhelmed by a tide of poor refugees.

These concerns, of course, are not simply European. The flow of generally lower-income people from Central and South America has emerged – largely courtesy of the demagogic Donald Trump – as a key political issue in the Republican presidential race. Claims, based on federal employment data, that immigrants have gained far more jobs in the recovery is the kind of thinking that keeps Trump in business. Concerns about other transfers from the Third World to the First World have also surfaced in a host of other countries, including Canada, Australia and even orderly Singapore.

Everywhere that’s a better place to live than where people come from. In Neal Stephenson’s prediction, everything gets smeared around into something that a Pakistani bricklayer would regard as prosperity.

And Kotkin is right about this: “Previous waves of immigrants – including those of the 1960s – entered a confident society with strong values and a decent birthrate. Today, they confront a European society that does not much believe in anything but a post-modernist faith in their own emotions.” That will end badly.

UPDATE: Bottom line:

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Gaps in Alumni Earnings Stand Out in Release of College Data.

The Department of Education calculated the percentage of students at each college who earned more than $25,000 per year, which is about what high school graduates earn. At hundreds of colleges, less than half of students met this threshold 10 years after enrolling. The list includes a raft of barber academies, cosmetology schools and for-profit colleges that often leave students with few job prospects and mountains of debt.

But some more well-known institutions weren’t far behind. At Bennington College in Vermont, over 48 percent of former students were earning less than $25,000 per year. A quarter were earning less than $10,600 per year. At Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, the median annual earnings were only $35,700. Results at the University of New Mexico were almost exactly the same.

The data reveals how much money students are borrowing in exchange for earnings after graduation. While U.C.L.A. and Penn State are both prestigious public research universities, recent U.C.L.A. grads leave with about 30 percent less debt, even as their predecessors are earning about 30 percent more money than counterparts at Penn State. Harvard students borrow barely a quarter of what Brandeis students take on, and earn nearly twice as much.

In other words, a college degree isn’t a generic product, or a magic wealth-enhancer. It matters a lot what and where you study, and when you calculate return on investment, the size of the investment matters as much as the size of the return.

Who knew?

THUNDERBOLT IRON: Anthony Bourdain Melts a Meteorite to Make a Beautiful Blade.

OF COURSE THEY DO: Germany Imposes Border Checks Amid Migrant Wave.  I’ll note it’s the SANE thing to do.

A LONG KEPT SECRET: And a gallant lady.

YOU KNOW, IN CASE YOU NEED ONE: Building A Fantasy Army: Leaders.

DO I NEED TO SAY IT:  Okay, then.  Faster, please. Hidden in Einstein’s Math: Faster-than-Light Travel?

WELL AT LEAST THEY SHOW COURAGE FOR ONCE: WATCH: “I’m My Own Prophet”, Topless Feminists Storm Stage At Muslim Conference.

IN THE MAIL:  Clockwork Lives by Kevin J. Anderson and Neil Peart.  (I haven’t read it yet, but I’ve rarely seen Kevin — who is a friend — so excited about something he wrote.)

SOMEONE TO SCAM AT YOU: Fake recruiters on LinkedIn are targeting infosec pros.

“They will approach you by sending a general recruiter message with a profile picture of an attractive woman,” he then explained their modus operandi. “The job will be relative to your job. They will ‘scout’ a few people (besides you). After about a week they stop sending out new requests, the profile picture is removed and a bit later their name is changed making it hard to find these people back in your list if its big). In about a month the accounts disappear, not sure if on purpose.”

I THINK HEINLEIN KNEW THE ANSWER: A scarcity of economic growth.  From the article: “The causes of the productivity collapse are unclear.”
… if you don’t read Heinlein.  If you do, you’ll remember this:

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as “bad luck.”

YEAH, BUT I STILL WISH WE HAD ONE OF THOSE: Ta-Nehisi Coates: The United States needs more than a good president to erase centuries of violence. Instead, we’ve got Obama, the Worst President Ever.

ANALYSIS: MOSTLY TRUE. The Arab Press Reacts to the European Refugee Crisis: “We are a nauseating nation.” “We too could be like them and our countries could be like their countries, which do not persecute the citizens and do open their arms to the victims of natural and political disasters. Yes, we could be like them if we thoroughly examined our barbaric political regime, our backwards social order, our obsolete curricula, our media that operates without professional norms, and our religious establishment that interprets the texts in a barbaric fashion, inciting to hatred and to abuse of the other, even members of the Islamic faith! This situation clearly mandates a velvet revolution that the educated [sector] must launch.”

EVERYTHING IS POLITICIZED NOW: Secretary of the Navy Insults Marines, Dismisses Study on Gender Integration.