BLURRED LINES: 50 Shades Of Red and Grey.

HUH. I ALWAYS THOUGHT SHE WAS FICTITIOUS, LIKE MRS. FILBERT. Lisa Frank Is Real. “If you are a female born in the 1980s, I don’t need to tell you what Lisa Frank is. In case you are not, Lisa Frank is a wildly popular brand of craft and school supplies featuring kaleidoscopic drawings of unicorns, stars, hearts, teddy bears, and the like. A lesser-known fact is that Lisa Frank is a real person – and the owner of Lisa Frank Incorporated.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: College enrollment dropped by half a million in 2012.

All is proceeding as I have foreseen.

READER BOOK RECOMMENDATION: Peter Ingemi writes to recommend Victor: The Monster Frankenstein, or the Trials of Igor Lavenza.

CLASSROOM ETIQUETTE: Think Before You Tweet, If You’re Sitting In Class. People need to be told this? Yes, they do.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Married to a Doll: Why One Man Advocates Synthetic Love. “40-year-old Davecat (a nickname acquired from videogames that he now prefers to go by) and others who call themselves iDollators see their dolls as life partners, not sex toys. Davecat and Sidore (or, as he sometimes calls her, Shi-chan) obviously aren’t legally married, but they do have matching wedding bands that say ‘Synthetik [sic] love lasts forever,’ and he says they’re considering some sort of ceremony for their 15th anniversary.”

Future generations of Robosexuals will view this man as a lonely trailblazer, like the Daughters of Bilitis or the Mattachine Society. Just don’t tell notorious robophobe Matt Yglesias, who clings to outdated prejudices against our silicon sisters with their manager misters.

RUSH LIMBAUGH’S CHILDREN’S BOOK ISN’T EVEN OUT YET, and it’s already #1 on Amazon.

NEW JERSEY’S MAN OF THE PEOPLE: Cory Booker made $689K from ex-law firm while mayor. And the firm got contracts.

THE HILL: Reid faces double-digit Democratic defections on Syria strike measure. I stand by my advice to the GOP: Not one Republican should cast a vote until all the Democrats have done so.

MARK STEYN: BLUNT WORDS ABOUT MUSLIM BACKWARDNESS.

In 2010, the bestselling atheist Richard Dawkins, in the “On Faith” section of the Washington Post, called the pope “a leering old villain in a frock” perfectly suited to “the evil corrupt organization” and “child-raping institution” that is the Catholic Church. Nobody seemed to mind very much.

Three years later, in a throwaway Tweet, Professor Dawkins observed that “all the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.” This time round, the old provocateur managed to get a rise out of folks. Almost every London paper ran at least one story on the “controversy.” The Independent‘s Owen Jones fumed, “How dare you dress your bigotry up as atheism. You are now beyond an embarrassment.” The best-selling author Caitlin Moran sneered, “It’s time someone turned Richard Dawkins off and then on again. Something’s gone weird.” The Daily Telegraph‘s Tom Chivers beseeched him, “Please be quiet, Richard Dawkins, I’m begging.”

It’s factually unarguable: Trinity College graduates have amassed 32 Nobel prizes, the entire Muslim world a mere 10.

None of the above is Muslim. Indeed, they are, to one degree or another, members of the same secular liberal media elite as Professor Dawkins. Yet all felt that, unlike Dawkins’s routine jeers at Christians, his Tweet had gone too far. It’s factually unarguable: Trinity graduates have amassed 32 Nobel prizes, the entire Muslim world a mere 10. If you remove Yasser Arafat, Mohamed ElBaradei, and the other winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, Islam can claim just four laureates against Trinity’s 31 (the college’s only peace-prize recipient was Austen Chamberlain, brother of Neville). Yet simply to make the observation was enough to have the Guardian compare him to the loonier imams and conclude that “we must consign Dawkins to this very same pile of the irrational and the dishonest.” . . .

Even a decade ago, it would have been left to the usual fire-breathing imams to denounce remarks like Dawkins’s. In those days, Islam was still, like Christianity, insultable. Fleet Street cartoonists offered variations on the ladies’ changing-room line “Does my bum look big in this?” One burqa-clad woman to another: “Does my bomb look big in this?” Not anymore. “There are no jokes in Islam,” pronounced the Ayatollah Khomeini, and so, in a bawdy Hogarthian society endlessly hooting at everyone from the Queen down, Islam uniquely is no laughing matter. Ten years back, even the United Nations Human Development Program was happy to sound off like an incendiary Dawkins Tweet: Its famous 2002 report blandly noted that more books are translated by Spain in a single year than have been translated into Arabic in the last thousand years.

What Dawkins is getting at is more fundamental than bombs or burqas. Whatever its virtues, Islam is not a culture of inquiry, of innovation. You can coast for a while on the accumulated inheritance of a pre-Muslim past — as, indeed, much of the Dar al-Islam did in those Middle Ages Dawkins so admires — but it’s not unreasonable to posit that the more Muslim a society becomes the smaller a role Nobel prizes and translated books will play in its future.

Read the whole thing. Islam may not have to be that way, but at the moment it pretty clearly wants to be that way.

IT IS KINDA LOOKING THAT WAY: Yes, Mitt Romney was Right about Everything.

AUSTRALIA: Conservatives Win Big. “Australia’s conservative opposition swept to power Saturday, ending six years of Labor Party rule and winning over a disenchanted public by promising to end a hated tax on carbon emissions, boost a flagging economy and bring about political stability after years of Labor infighting.”

Visit Tim Blair’s blog for more.

DOES THIS MEAN THAT IN 50 YEARS OUR PLATFORM WILL BE LARGELY ENACTED WITHOUT ANYONE ADMITTING IT? Libertarians Are The New Communists. “If this sort of ultra-crude and unconvincing style of argument (communists=bad; libertarians=bad; thereore, communists=libertarians) is the best that opponents of libertarian influence and policy can do, our future is indeed bright.”

AT AMAZON: Fall deals and markdowns in The Dockers Store.

Also, up to 25% off on Home Generators. Storm season is coming. Or you could always go with an inverter.

And, today only: Save 60% on the SINGER 14J250 Stylist II Serger. Me, I’m still hazy on the difference between a sewing machine and a serger, but if you know the difference, then this is probably a good deal . . .

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 121.

SMART DIPLOMACY: Samantha Power Agrees She Is Naive.

JAMES TARANTO: Reductio ad Obama: The logic of the president’s incapacity to lead.

Obama loves to speak in the first-person singular; he seems oblivious to the obnoxiousness of his habitual references (including one in today’s press conference) to “my military.” But suddenly it’s a matter of whether we mean what we say.

It’s the same dodge as “I didn’t set a red line.” In reality, as we noted Wednesday, Obama did introduce the idea of “a red line,” and his subordinates later affirmed that he had thereby set such a line. Obama is using the first-person plural to obscure what he’s really doing by asking lawmakers for approval: demanding that they say that they mean what he said. He blundered into a policy by speaking carelessly, waited months before thinking through its implications, then made a decision. He believes he has the authority to carry out that decision on his own, but apparently is unwilling to do so unless Congress affords him political cover.

I’m beginning to think that this President Obama fellow just isn’t up to the job.

Related: Ta-Nehisi Coates: Dumb Into Damascus:

Polls can never be the end-all, be-all of any policy. But when you have majorities in your own country opposing a war, when the president can’t convince his own party, when alleged allies in the region and your strongest ally in the world oppose war, then it’s time to rethink. A coalition isn’t something you assemble just for show. It demonstrates a broad range of concerns and interests have come to the same conclusion. This cuts both ways. And so it’s worth considering why a broad range of concerns and interests are now united in opposition.

Put simply — is this any way to go to war? I don’t think Senator Obama would have been convinced.

Yes, that Senator Obama guy seemed fairly sensible. Too bad we can’t have him as President.

ALEXIS MADRIGAL: On Becoming A Father.

PEGGY NOONAN: WHY AMERICA IS SAYING NO. Syria and Obama: Wrong time, wrong place, wrong plan, wrong man.

SYRIA: “It’s hard to find a precedent for a president imploding on something this big.” More fundamental transformation!

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: High Tuition Screws The Rich:

Many, if not most, Columbia students don’t actually pay $61,540 a year. Half of the students entering in 2011-2012 received some institutional aid, making the average net price, including room and board, around $21,274 that year. For low-income students, it was lower still. Students from families making from $30,000 to $48,000 a year paid an average of $6,719; those from families making between $0 and $30,000 paid about $12,018

Columbia is among many, many schools that charge vastly different prices for the same education, depending on students’ income, where they’re from, their academic achievement level, and so on.

This has always been the case, at least to a certain extent. . . . But today’s system takes that pattern to extremes. In the 2007-08 school year, students from families making $100,000 or more paid an average of $30,159 a year in tuition, fees and room and board to attend private four-year colleges and universities, and they paid $16,871 a year to attend public four-years, according to the College Board. Students from families making under $32,500 a year paid $17,050 a year on average to attend private schools and $9,404 a year to attend publics.

In each case, the poorest students are paying slightly more than half of what the richest ones are paying. The numbers are even more startling when you look at tuition apart from room and board. The typical poor student at a public four-year paid no tuition or fees in 2007-08.

This is bad for schools long-term, as I think the sense of being fleeced on tuition is likely to translate into less generous donations later on.

JOIN SARAH HOYT AND CHARLIE MARTIN FOR Book Plug Friday.

AT AMAZON, Hot New Releases In Political Fiction.

Also, TV Deal Of The Week: Homeland, The First Season. On DVD and Blu-Ray.

And, today only: Northern Exposure: The Complete Series, $59.99 (67% off).

OUR HOPEY-CHANGEY ECONOMY: “Our drop from 8.1% unemployment to 7.3% is analogous to losing 20 pounds by cutting off a body part.”