LAWS ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: UAW decides to skip election and form union at VW anyway.

HOMELAND SECURITY: Excerpts of Navy Yard report: 160 cameras and no one watching. “A private security guard was in an office with monitors showing the feeds from 160 security cameras while the shootings occurred. Those cameras, police now know, covered almost every inch of Building 197 and were documenting in real time every move by gunman Aaron Alexis. But the guard locked the door, hid and notified no one that he was there with access to the information.”

R.I.P., Tommy Ramone.

THE MYSTERY OF THE MISSING LIGHT: “As one participating scientist points out, to miss the mark by so much means what we understand about the universe is fundamentally wrong. The universe continues to be exciting, a little scary, but mostly—a mystery.” Just when you thought the science was settled.

CHANGE: Europe is dying, says France’s leading demographer, and Britain would be better off with the Anglosphere. This realization may help explain the anti-EU preference cascade that appears to be taking hold in Britain.

Plus, a nice plug for Jim Bennett & Michael Lotus’s America 3.0: Rebooting American Prosperity In The 21st Century. Here in the states, that’s a book that every 2016 candidate — or aspiring issues director — should be reading now.

WIRED: WikiLeaks Show WMD Hunt Continued in Iraq – With Surprising Results.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Whistleblowers Tell Congress about Culture of Retaliation at the VA.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 429.

ROSS DOUTHAT ON REFORM CONSERVATIVES AND THE CULTURE WARS. Excerpt:

As much as cultural outreach matters, I wouldn’t want the kind of conservative political party that essentially declines to represent populist and social conservatives at all on many issues, enforcing an elite consensus instead of representing its own constituents wherever those constituents seem too disreputable or insufficiently cosmopolitan. This is what you have on the center-right in many European countries, Sullivan’s native isle at times included, and I don’t think it’s worked out particularly well: When it hasn’t led directly to disaster (see Eurozone, disastrous anti-democratic expansion of), it’s often shunted important issues (immigration, religious identity, crime, multiculturalism, etc.) to a back burner, where they simmer and simmer until some crisis makes them boil over, and the next thing you know you have to deal with a Marine Le Pen (if not a Golden Dawn). And to a lesser extent this is the dynamic that’s made the Tea Party so angry, uncompromising and intermittently destructive in our own politics — the sense, often somewhat accurate, that their leaders want their votes but not their ideas, and that there are semi-deliberate conspiracies to deceive them about what their elected representatives are really after.

The reality is that, except in truly exceptional cases, our politics is better off in the long run when views held by large proportions of the public are represented in some form by one of our two parties. Right now (to run down a partial list of divisive cultural issues), a plurality of Americans want the immigration rate decreased; about half the country opposes affirmative action; more than half supports the death penalty; about half of Americans call themselves pro-life. Support for gay marriage and marijuana legalization has skyrocketed, but in both cases about 40 percent of the country is still opposed. Even independent of my own (yes, populist and socially conservative) views, I think these people, these opinions, deserve democratic representation: Representation that leads and channels and restrains, representation that recognizes trends and trajectories and political realities, but also representation that makes them feel well-served, spoken for, and (in the case of issues where they’re probably on the losing side) respected even in defeat.

As opposed, I guess, to an “I won” philosophy.

POINTS AND FIGURES: Should Robots Be Enabled To Kill?

AT AMAZON, deals on Bestsellers in Home Office Furniture.

Also, Outlet Deals in Tools & Home Improvement.

THE INSTA-WIFE: Helping Young Men Fight Back On College Campuses.

EXPIRATION DATE, REACHED: White House says photo ops have some value, after all.

ADVICE TO EDITORS: Before you assign or publish an article, ask yourself, “Will this article be more enjoyable than the Gawker blog post viciously mocking the article?”

That’s not setting the bar especially high. And yet. . .

YEAH, GOOD LUCK GETTING THEM TO FOLLOW THAT LAW, OR ANY OTHER, WHERE INCRIMINATING MATTER IS INVOLVED: National Archives Reminds IRS that Instant Messages Must be Retained.

“INDOCTRINATE” IS THE KEY WORD HERE: Sen. McCaskill Would Indoctrinate Judges About “Rape Myths.”

STAND UP AGAINST THE ABUSE: Stop Violence Against Men Day. Violence against men. There’s a lot of it. Who knew?

NEW YORK’S CAR WASHES STAFFED BY ILLEGAL ALIENS.

Are these jobs that Americans won’t do? As I’ve reported before, back when Knoxville had a brief spike in immigration enforcement, the car wash I go to somehow found American workers. But they probably had to pay them more.

GRAPHIC: Who Does Your College Think Its Peers Are?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Students Face Debt By 1,000 Fees.

That $4 is not a large fee. Even the poorest student can probably afford it. On the other hand, collectively, UCLA’s student fees are significant: more than $3,500, or about a quarter of the mandatory cost of attending UCLA for a year.

Those fees are made up of many items, each trivial individually. Only collectively do they become a major source of costs for students and their families and potentially a barrier to college access for students who don’t have an extra $3,500 lying around. . . .

Colleges seem to be subject to this budget problem in spades, because until very recently, passing on all the costs to the consumer was very easy. Highly motivated coalitions get together to demand something, and eventually the byzantine, quasi-democratic institutional governance often delivers that thing, along with the associated cost. Each of these new demands — a better gym, a new student center for underrepresented groups, fancy new buildings for alumni to put their names on (but not pay to maintain) — generates a small individual cost per student. Over time, however, those little individual costs aggregate into college bills that grow much faster than inflation year after year, decade after decade.

If UCLA had had to treat this as a budget problem — in other words, if they’d had to take money from something else in order to fund the concerts — then they probably would have decided that “more famous concert headliners” are not a core part of delivering a UCLA education. But instead, they made it part of someone else’s budget problem. Someone who is probably just going to sigh and increase the student loan a bit.

Or not, if they’re reasonably well-informed.

EVEN ELEANOR CLIFT IS CATCHING ON TO THE SCAM: Is the Campus Rape Crisis Overblown?

THE REAL REASON WHY CHILDREN FIDGET. “Fidgeting is a real problem. It is a strong indicator that children are not getting enough movement throughout the day. We need to fix the underlying issue. Recess times need to be extended and kids should be playing outside as soon as they get home from school. Twenty minutes of movement a day is not enough!”

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? The Museum Of Natural History Is Hosting A Grown-Up Sleepover.

LAWRENCE CUNNINGHAM: Babe Ruth, Warren Buffett, and True Icons.