HOW ACADEMICS INVENTED A NEW MIDDLE CLASS: “Why does this ‘attend college’ mania flourish despite ever more graduates struggling to find jobs worthy of a college degree? Many factors are involved, but one deserves special mention, namely how modern social science altered the definition of ‘middle class’ so just getting the degree, it was claimed, secured the American Dream. And with this new definition in place, a government committed to economic improvement began pushing as many young people as possible into college. What an uncomplicated solution to generating wealth–just award scholarships, build more colleges, hire more faculty, and just watch as the American Dream comes to everyone.”

Of course, that ran into Reynolds’ Law.

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J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS: Brett Kimberlin Hearing Devolves Into Farce. If I read this correctly, Aaron Walker is in trouble because Kimberlin claims that his blogging has somehow led to other people making death threats. That doesn’t seem to pass the First Amendment smell test. Only if Walker were inciting those threats in a way that passed Brandenburg scrutiny would that work, and I don’t believe that’s the case at all. At any rate, under this approach George Zimmerman ought to be able to jail any number of journalists. . . .

UPDATE: More here. Also here. The judge seems unclear on how the Internet works.

FINDING THE AMERICAN DREAM ONLINE. This is a phenomenon I wrote about years ago.

NUTRITION: Folic Acid Tied to Lower Rate of Two Childhood Cancers.

FASTER, DRONE CAT, KILL, KILL: The Secret “Kill List” and the President. Somewhere, Dick Cheney is smiling. And Glenn Greenwald is only making his smile broader.

CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW? “Researchers at Emory University School of Medicine have shown that introducing a gene called Atoh1 into the cochleae of young mice can induce the formation of extra sensory hair cells.”

A LOOK AT the gulags of North Korea.

SUGGESTION: U.S. EV makers should adopt cell-phone sales model.

RICHARD EPSTEIN: The United States of Cartels: “Price stabilization” and “harmonization” are dangerous euphemisms for anti-growth policies.

UNEXPECTEDLY! Consumer confidence in the economy plunged in May.

NOT WORTH THE DEBT: In today’s New York Post I talk about responding to the Higher Education Bubble.

UPDATE: Some comments from Donald Sensing. “College payments have to be evaluated the same way as any other spending, by present value and eventual worth. Fewer and fewer top-tier schools can pass that test.”

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Global Green Agenda Continues To Fail.

Remember when meetings to debate and negotiate an international carbon treaty were big news? The Copenhagen Summit was hailed as the largest assembly of world leaders ever to gather for one event; when it fizzled in waves of shame and confusion, the green movement was shocked and dismayed.

There was a lot of happy talk, of course. The world remained committed to the treaty, more progress would be made, targets were agreed, blah blah blah.

Then there was the meeting in Cancun: fewer reporters, fewer first rank politicians, fewer hopes. That meeting too ended in disarray on the core issues, and then, too, desperate greens scrambling to maintain some kind of policy relevance tried to spin the meeting as a victory for the “process”. Nobody was paying much attention; the world’s news organizations sharply cut their budgets for green summitry.

By the time there was another meeting, this time in Durban, South Africa, the global green agenda had slithered even farther down the news ladder. Most people simply didn’t notice that diplomats and greens had gathered to discuss The Fate of The World last December. Once again, there was no real progress to report.

Now the latest meeting in this increasingly anti-climactic series has concluded, this time in Bonn. Yet again, much was said and nothing was done — and yet again even fewer reporters and officials paid attention to this increasingly irrelevant bureaucratic mess.

Global Warming was a hothouse flower, a child of the bubble. And, sometimes, sneering is a solution. . . .

EMILY MILLER: Drive Across America, Armed: Congress should force anti-gun governments to obey federal transport laws.

Rep. H. Morgan Griffith, Virginia Republican, has sponsored legislation that would amend current law to make it clear that individuals who transport their guns from state to state may stop for food, gas and vehicle maintenance. They also may seek medical treatment, tend to an emergency, stay overnight and conduct other activities incidental to the transport.

These things are legal already, but because the law does not spell it out in explicit detail, gun-grabbing areas take advantage of the ambiguity. Mr. Griffith’s language would force states and localities to pay the attorney bills for anyone who is arrested for illegal transport if they are exonerated based on this proposed law.

“The beauty of this is that the fear of having to pay the legal fees will make sure they bring charges that are valid and founded,” said Mr. Griffith, a former defense attorney, in an interview with The Washington Times. “It only has to happen one time, and every risk-assessment manager in the United States of America is going to inform their police that you better make sure he’s violated the law before you arrest him for having a locked gun in a case in the trunk, because that’s going to cost them a lot of money.”

This seems like a valuable civil rights law, and entirely consistent with my analysis in Second Amendment Penumbras.

K.C. JOHNSON: Student Editor Details The Corruption At Brown.

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Drones: How Obama Learned To Kill.

A “Special Troika on Targeted Killings.” It sounds so bracingly . . . Cheneyesque!

Related: More Rubble, Less Trouble! “The take-no-prisoners approach avoids dealing with the problems — which include, for Obama, political problems — of detention and interrogation.”

IS ANTI-MORMON BIGOTRY ACCEPTABLE IN ACADEMIA? Apparently so. “I’ve attended numerous scholarly conferences since that lunch where Mormonism has been discussed, and it is amazing to confront snide and disdainful comments and even overt prejudice. . . . And it seems perfectly acceptable to express this bias. Mormons are abnormal, outside the mainstream; everybody knows that.” Academia talks about tolerance and equality far more than it practices either.

Plus this: “Many of the academics consider themselves liberal, socially responsible, and broad-minded individuals, the repository of the best in America. They’re proud of themselves for voting for Barack Obama (a bit too smug maybe?). They would splutter and bluster and be generally outraged to be considered prejudiced. None would consider saying anything similar about African-Americans, Muslims, Jews, Native Americans . . . well, you get the idea. But anti-Mormonism is part of the same continuum that contains discrimination against any group. Why, then, is it allowable publicly express bias against Mormons?” Well, they’re not a Democratic Party constituency group.

DAN MITCHELL: In a Battle Between the IMF and Greece, I Want Both Sides to Lose.

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