PRESUMED GUILTY: College men accused of rape say the scales are tipped against them. It’s not just the men who are accused who are being discriminated against. The entire structure is itself a hostile environment, and a Title IX violation. As one parent recently said, her son’s account of the mandatory sexual-assault orientation for freshmen was: “You’re a rapist, and we’re watching you.” If that’s not a hostile learning environment based on sex, what is?

UPDATE: From the comments: “We need students to start recording these orientation sessions and uploading the highlights.” Yes. Also suing.

REVOLVING DOOR UPDATE: Eric Cantor Joins Wall Street Bank.

Former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) has joined the global investment bank Moelis & Co. as vice chairman and managing director, the company announced Tuesday.

Cantor, who resigned from Congress during the August recess after losing his primary in June, will also be elected to the company’s board of directors.

Cantor will focus on client development and providing strategic advice.

Initially, Cantor will be given $1.4 million in cash and stocks. He will receive a base salary of $400,000 per year, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

On top of that, Cantor will receive $1.6 million in incentive cash and stocks in 2015.

The contract allows Cantor to leave the company after two years without a pay penalty to “take a full-time elected or appointed position in federal government, state government, or a national party.”

Just another argument for my revolving-door surtax.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: UNLV Law School Faces $3 Million Budget Shortfall Due to 25% Enrollment Decline.

FEMALE RAPE CULTURE: Statutory rape victim forced to pay child support.

WELL, THIS IS COMFORTING: Missing Libyan Jetliners Raise Fears of Suicide Airliner Attacks on 9/11. “Mekkaoui said the jets are being held by the Libyan group called Masked Men Brigade, which was designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department in December.”

And this seems poorly timed: Obama Lifts Ban Barring Libyans from US Flight Schools and Nuclear Studies. “In a recent interview with Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, Obama admitted he never thought much about what would follow the U.S. air campaign in a post-Gaddafi Libya.”

CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS: 5 Feminist Myths That Won’t Die. Here’s one:

MYTH 3: In the United States, 22%–35% of women who visit hospital emergency rooms do so because of domestic violence.

FACTS: This claim has appeared in countless fact sheets, books and articles—for example, in the leading textbook on family violence, Domestic Violence Law, and in the Penguin Atlas of Women in the World. The Penguin Atlas uses the emergency room figure to justify placing the U.S. on par with Uganda and Haiti for intimate violence.

What is the provenance? The Atlas provides no primary source, but the editor of Domestic Violence Law cites a 1997 Justice Department study, as well as a 2009 post on the Centers for Disease Control website. But the Justice Department and the CDC are not referring to the 40 million women who annually visit emergency rooms, but to women, numbering about 550,000 annually, who come to emergency rooms “for violence-related injuries.” Of these, approximately 37% were attacked by intimates. So, it’s not the case that 22%-35% of women who visit emergency rooms are there for domestic violence. The correct figure is less than half of 1%.

I tend to assume that most any factoid of this sort is bogus, and probably presented dishonestly. I’m seldom wrong, these days.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: GOP lawmakers probe EPA.

Republican lawmakers are launching an investigation to determine whether an environmental group wielded outsized influence in the development of Environmental Protection Agency power plant rules.

The GOP congressmen are concerned that the Natural Resources Defense Council might have coordinated with the EPA when the agency was crafting its proposed rule for limiting carbon emissions from power plants.

“It appears that the NRDC’s unprecedented access to high-level EPA officials allowed it to influence EPA policy decisions and achieve its own private agenda,” the lawmakers said in a letter to EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy.

Regulatory capture.

IS BRETT KIMBLERIN THE POSTER BOY FOR why we need a federal anti-SLAPP suit law?

THE HILL: Lawmakers Want Obama To Hit ISIS.

Lawmakers from both parties on Tuesday exhorted President Obama to broaden the military campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) after the group released a second video that appeared to show the beheading of an American journalist.

While the authenticity of the video has not been confirmed, lawmakers said the presumed execution of 31-year-old Time journalist Steven Sotloff demands a forceful American response.

“Let there be no doubt, we must go after ISIS right away because the U.S. is the only one that can put together a coalition to stop this group that’s intent on barbaric cruelty,” said Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) in a statement.

Nelson announced he would offer legislation next week that would give Obama clear authority to strike ISIS in Syria.

“This will ensure there’s no question that the president has the legal authority he needs,” Nelson said.

Reps. Ed Royce (R-Calif.), chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, and Eliot Engel (N.Y.), the committee’s ranking Democrat, similarly said the threat posed by ISIS warrants an air campaign in Syria.

“Target them and target the terrorist training camp where they’re bringing thousands of fighters from around the world, putting them through training over a period of weeks to teach them how to conduct terrorist activities,” Royce said on CNN. “Those camps and the munitions should be targeted as well.”

If you want to reach him, have them take a phone to the 19th hole.

ONLY ONE IS A REPUBLICAN: Roll Call’s 10 Most Vulnerable Senators of 2014.

LAWFARE: Professor Jacobson: How Prosecutors targeted Scott Walker and conservatives. Democrat prosecutors, it should be noted, with help from Democrat judges.

The Deep State isn’t that big on law, but it’s big on legal institutions.

RING OF FIRE: Richard Fernandez On The Failure Of Obama’s Minimalist Approach In The Middle East.

“DIVERSITY EXPERTS” TO TECH INDUSTRY: Stop Being So Analytical.

THE U.N. IS PATHETIC. IF I RAN IT, NOBODY WOULD FUCK WITH MY PEACEKEEPERS, OR THEY’D FIND THEIR PEACE KEPT FOR GOOD. Filipino Force Defied UN Commander in Golan Crisis. “The Philippine military said Monday that a U.N. peacekeeping commander in the Golan Heights should be investigated for allegedly asking Filipino troops to surrender to Syrian rebels who had attacked and surrounded their camp. Gen. Gregorio Pio Catapang said he advised the 40 Filipino peacekeepers not to lay down their arms, and they defied the U.N. peacekeeping commander’s order. Instead, they staged a daring escape from the Golan camp over the weekend, ending a tense, dayslong standoff. . . . Forty-five Fijian peacekeepers who surrendered their firearms to the rebels last week are still being held by the al-Qaida-linked insurgents.”

Never give them your guns. Your bullets, on the other hand, you can send.

IT’S LIKE IT’S ALL TWO-FACED POLITICAL CRAP OR SOMETHING: Rotherham has a real rape culture–which is why “rape culture”-obsessed feminists don’t care.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Aspiring Adults Adrift:

In their 2011 book Academically Adrift, authors Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, argued that colleges are failing to educate students. Many undergraduates, the authors wrote, are “drifting through college without a clear sense of purpose,” with more than a third of students not demonstrating any significant improvement in learning over four years in college.

Now Arum and Roksa have revisited a large sampling of those same undergraduates for a new book examining how they’ve fared after graduation. They’re no longer students, the authors write, but they are still adrift.

Aspiring Adults Adrift: Tentative Transitions of College Graduates, published today by the University of Chicago Press, is the story of a generation’s difficult transition to adulthood. Based on surveys and interviews with nearly 1,000 recent college graduates from the cohort featured in Academically Adrift, the book reports that a large number of graduates are having difficulty finding jobs, living somewhere other than a parent’s house, assuming civic and financial responsibility, and even developing stable romantic relationships. . . .

“Colleges are implicated in this,” Arum, a professor of sociology and education at New York University, said in an interview. “They’ve legitimated this. Students are going away to college for a longer and longer time. Colleges are disinvesting in faculty and investing in amenities.”

Many four-year universities attend to students’ social adjustment rather than developing their characters, he said, allocating resources toward what will attract teenagers to their campuses rather than what will help them learn. Campuses cater to satisfying consumer preferences instead of providing rigorous academics and connecting what students learn to the real world, Arum and Roksa write. Like students and aspiring adults, they argue, colleges and universities are also adrift. . . .

One in four of the students surveyed and interviewed for the book reported that they were living at home two years after graduation, a proportion that is nearly double than in the 1960s. More than half said their lives lacked direction. Seven percent reported being unemployed, 12 percent said they had part-time jobs, and 30 percent were working full-time but earning less than $30,000 a year. Half of those graduates were earning less than $20,000.

College selectivity did not significantly affect the graduates’ chances of employment, the authors write, and neither did gender, race or parental education.

It’s not a pretty picture.

THAT WOULD ENCOURAGE MY BUSINESS: 57,000 Businesses Fight Back, Post ‘Guns Welcome’ Signs On Front Door.

SPYING: First US appeals court hears argument to shut down NSA database.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: Obama Sends 350 More Troops To Iraq. Add a couple of zeros and they might do some good.

TRIFECTA: Whereabouts Unknown: Teacher Pens Mass-Shooter Fiction Book, Vanishes.

Related: Jerry Pournelle: Incarcerated for writing a science fiction novel? Or not?

UPDATE: Here’s more at Reason. Still very unclear what’s going on.

And here’s more from Popehat.

TED CRUZ TO BACK Marilinda Garcia in New Hampshire.

SO THERE’S THIS: Top Engineer and Futurist: Tomorrow’s Robots Might Mercy-Kill Mankind.

HOW DO YOU SHIP A $3 MILLION BUGATTI? Very carefully.

MY COLLEAGUE BEN BARTON —“THE RICHARD FEYNMAN OF LAW PROFESSORS” IS SPENDING THE YEAR IN SLOVENIA ON A FULBRIGHT WITH HIS FAMILY, and they’re blogging their experiences.

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