THE PROBLEM: INSUFFICIENT OPPORTUNITIES FOR GRAFT. Democrats vs. Uber And ‘The Sharing Economy.’

DEEZ NUTS: ANTHONY L. FISHER NOTICES SOMETHING THAT I NOTICED TOO. New Yorker Writer Thinks ‘Speech Nuts’ Are Like ‘Gun Nuts;’ Kelefa Sanneh thinks the American devotion to free speech is overrated because there’s less of it in Europe. I’m not sure why Europe’s record on political liberty over the last century is to be emulated — except, of course, that it offers greater power to the connected classes.

Plus: “Note the use of quotation marks around the words free and speech, implying that the use of the phrase is inappropriate when used to defend the right to express unpopular ideas that lack the social merit of the writer’s preference.”

To the left, civil rights are like a subway: When you reach your stop, you get off. Meanwhile, I’ll just repeat what I said yesterday: For the New Yorker’s target audience, the equivalence of free speech advocates to “gun nuts” is clear signal of where they’re supposed to fall on the argument. But all I can say is that if the “speech nuts” do as well as the “gun nuts” have done over the past couple of decades, we’ll be in pretty good shape. And the lesson from the “gun nuts” is: Don’t compromise, don’t admit that there’s such a thing as a “reasonable restriction,” don’t back down, and keep pointing out that your opponents are liars and hypocrites. And punish the hell out of politicians who vote with the other side.

SIMPLE MATHEMATICS: New study into lack of women in Tech: It’s NOT the men’s fault. “A new study into causes of the scarcity of women in technical and scientific fields says that it is not discrimination by men in the field keeping the ladies away. Nor is it a repugnance felt by women for possibly dishevelled or unhygienic male nerds. No, the reason that young women don’t train in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) areas – and thus, don’t find themselves with jobs at tech companies, in IT etc – is quite simply that they mostly don’t know enough maths to do those courses.”

WHY HILLARY SUPPORTS THE IRAN DEAL: “Hillary Clinton is in such deep legal trouble over her emails that she needs the backing of Obama to survive,” Roger Simon writes.

As Victor Davis Hanson wrote on Sunday, Hillary is “hoping that she can stay on the Obama reservation and not earn a David Petraeus-like indictment from the Obama Justice Department.” Will anyone in the MSM ask her — or Obama himself — about the threat he wields over her campaign?

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Legalise prostitution because 21st Century men need more sex says think-tank.

A MIGHTY WIND: Hurricane Trump blows away speech police: With every windy pronouncement, the cacophony cops look weaker and sillier. “In a sane world, we wouldn’t need Trump to save us from the cacophony cops. . . . But we don’t live there anymore.”

THE SUICIDE OF THE LIBERAL ARTS: The West has cut ties with the great thinkers of the past, David P. Goldman writes at his presciently-named Spengler column, as the Decline of the West proceeds apace:

Western culture has become inaccessible to the general public because we have lost the ability to see the world through the eyes of those who created it. A generation ago, the literary critic Harold Bloom complained in The Western Canon that it no longer was possible to teach English literature to undergraduates because they lacked the cultural references to make sense of it: imagine reading Moby Dick without knowing who Ishmael and Ahab were in the Bible, or Joyce’s Ulysses without knowing that someone named Homer had written an epic about a certain Odysseus. (Outside the English realm, Bloom is guilty of the same sort of ignorance, but that is a different matter).

There is a deeper problem, though: Why should we read works by long-dead authors with concerns entirely different than ours, and if we should, how can we do so?

Read the whole thing.

SECURITY: Imploding Barrels and Other Highlights From Hackfest DefCon.

FASTER, PLEASE: Universal plaque-busting drug could treat various brain diseases.

I WAS GOING TO POST A LONGER RESPONSE TO DANIEL DREZNER, BUT Walter Russell Mead pretty much covers it.

LIFE IN THE OBAMA ERA: After falling in the 1990s, the number of poor people living in high-poverty areas has been growing fast.

JON STEWART WANTED VIDEO EVIDENCE THAT HE WAS AN OBAMA PROPAGANDIST SO WE FOUND A BUNCH.

Unexpectedly.

BRAINNSS! MIT Robot Steals Human Brains to Help It Balance.

OF COURSE: GOV’T RECOMMENDATIONS ON BREAKFAST WERE BASED ON BASICALLY NOTHING, PROBABLY WRONG.

Well, this is the 21st century, as Glenn likes to say. It’s only a matter of time before the diet of the future becomes the norm:

LIFE IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: The Obama Administration’s War on the Press Could Become a Touch More Literal.

It’s well documented that President Barack Obama’s administration has been brutal in targeting whistleblowers who leak information to the press. The Department of Justice has spied on the Associated Press and Fox News to track down sources of information. It has slid down the World Press Freedom Index to 49th place, lower than several African and South American countries.

Now a new Pentagon document, a Law of War Manual, states that journalists can be treated like “unprivileged belligerents,” which is apparently the new term for “unlawful combatants,” which some may recall was the new term for “suspected terrorists.”

According to some media coverage of the manual, military leaders are insisting they’re not declaring that journalists are the enemy. Rather they’re pointing out that journalists just might be the actual enemy, as in terrorists, spies, and propagandists posing as journalists.

That would be more reassuring if it weren’t basically how the Obama Administration has described Fox News.

READY FOR HILLARY? “Millennials are no longer going to night clubs,” according to the London Independent, adding that “once costly high-end audio equipment can be easily and inexpensively sourced online, meaning that the house party represents a better value option, as indeed do the entertainment offerings from Netflix, Amazon Instant Video or games companies.”

Of course, in America, that house party is likely to be in the basement of mom and dad’s house. “More young adults are living at home than five years ago, despite the economic recovery, according to a new report by Pew Research Center that crunched U.S. Census bureau data from 2010 to 2015,” Forbes recently reported.

And they’re driving a lot less, as Ann Althouse noted in 2012, linking to a New York Times article which reported, “Back in the early 1980s, 80 percent of 18-year-olds proudly strutted out of the D.M.V. with newly minted licenses, according to a study by researchers at the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute. By 2008 — even before the Great Recession — that number had dropped to 65 percent.” As Althouse reminded the Gray Lady, “Isn’t that what the Boomer generation told them to do? Cars are bad. They are destroying the planet. Then, when they avoid driving, we scold them for being — what? — sedentary? unambitious? incurious?!”

So they’re not going out to night clubs, they’re not driving, and they’re staying home watching TV. Congratulations, millenials – you’re already leading the sedentary lifestyle my parents led in their 70s and 80s; and have we got an exciting, wild and crazy candidate whose lifestyle matches yours!

(Or perhaps, the millenials’ abandonment of night clubs makes them more attracted to this candidate whose anti-dance policies are straight out of Footlose.)

RAVING LUNACY: With talk of a Joe Biden run for the White House, it’s worth remembering his horrible anti-rave law.

This sounds like a joke, but it isn’t. Last year, the Department of Justice and the DEA tried to prosecute concert promoters in New Orleans under the federal “crackhouse law.” That law makes it a felony to maintain a building or facility for the purpose of drug consumption. Traditionally, the law has been applied to places that are, well, crack houses. But — calling glow sticks and bottled water “drug paraphernalia” — then-U.S. Attorney Eddie Jordan attempted to jail three New Orleans concert promoters by reasoning that (1) people come to raves; (2) people who come to raves sometimes use drugs; (3) concert promoters must know this (especially in light of the presence of “drug paraphernalia”); and so, (4) a rave must be an event that takes place “for the purpose of drug consumption” under the law.

The federal district court made short work of this claim, dismissing the charges and calling them a violation of the First Amendment. But that hasn’t stopped our drug warriors.

Now Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., has introduced a bill (the “Reducing Americans’ Vulnerability to Ecstasy Act of 2002,” cutely called “the RAVE Act”), also sponsored by Sens. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Richard Durbin, D-Ill. The bill would essentially write into the crackhouse statute the same approach already rejected by the district court in New Orleans.

Why does Biden hate young people and music?

RAND SIMBERG: STOP CALLING LEFTISTS ‘LIBERALS:’ As Fred Siegel wrote last year in The Revolt Against the Masses, “Progressives” stole a huge base from laissez faire classical liberals and rebranded themselves with the L-word in the early 1920s to paper over the totalitarian and racist policies of Woodrow Wilson, and have been finding new descriptions for their ideology from time to time ever since, usually right after news of the latest leftwing disaster begins to trickle out, despite the best efforts of their operatives with bylines.

Want to have some real fun with a leftist? Follow Daniel Hannan’s recent advice in the London Telegraph, and whenever he starts railing against “trickle-down economics,” say, I agree! No more Solyndras, or Government Motors. Get government out of the crony capitalism and corporate welfare business entirely!

LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Book a Spot Online to Put Your Satellite Into Space: New Zealand’s Rocket Lab wants you to be able to launch your satellite into orbit as easily as you buy a plane ticket.

KEVIN WILLIAMSON: Obsolete Social Technology:

We laugh at that 1980s technology. But we use a 1930s model for public pensions and a 19th century model of public education. Those things are important, but we organize them through economic processes inferior to the ones we use for pornography and bar trivia. If you are clinging to the belief that the New Deal is the best thing ever to happen to American government, don’t laugh too hard at Erik Sandberg-Diment.

A fair point.

GREG LUKIANOFF AND JONATHAN HAIDT: . . . have a terrific piece in The Atlantic, “The Coddling of the American Mind.”

The press has typically described these developments as a resurgence of political correctness. That’s partly right, although there are important differences between what’s happening now and what happened in the 1980s and ’90s. That movement sought to restrict speech (specifically hate speech aimed at marginalized groups), but it also challenged the literary, philosophical, and historical canon, seeking to widen it by including more-diverse perspectives. The current movement is largely about emotional well-being. More than the last, it presumes an extraordinary fragility of the collegiate psyche, and therefore elevates the goal of protecting students from psychological harm. The ultimate aim, it seems, is to turn campuses into “safe spaces” where young adults are shielded from words and ideas that make some uncomfortable. And more than the last, this movement seeks to punish anyone who interferes with that aim, even accidentally. You might call this impulse vindictive protectiveness. It is creating a culture in which everyone must think twice before speaking up, lest they face charges of insensitivity, aggression, or worse. . . .

There’s a saying common in education circles: Don’t teach students what to think; teach them how to think. The idea goes back at least as far as Socrates. Today, what we call the Socratic method is a way of teaching that fosters critical thinking, in part by encouraging students to question their own unexamined beliefs, as well as the received wisdom of those around them. Such questioning sometimes leads to discomfort, and even to anger, on the way to understanding.

But vindictive protectiveness teaches students to think in a very different way. It prepares them poorly for professional life, which often demands intellectual engagement with people and ideas one might find uncongenial or wrong. The harm may be more immediate, too. A campus culture devoted to policing speech and punishing speakers is likely to engender patterns of thought that are surprisingly similar to those long identified by cognitive behavioral therapists as causes of depression and anxiety. The new protectiveness may be teaching students to think pathologically.

The whole piece is excellent.

Sadly, the Socratic method is virtually extinct in undergraduate classrooms. In law school, where it has historically been the predominant lecture method, I’d say it’s now a vulnerable species.

It takes time and patience to teach in the Socratic method (one has to slog through many initial irrelevant answers and work to pull the student toward the relevant). It also requires students to think outside their comfort zone, as the teacher purposefully challenges the student’s answers. But it works like nothing else I’ve ever seen/experienced to instill critical thinking skills.

In today’s hypersensitive classroom environment, Socratic learning should probably come with a “TRIGGER WARNING: This class may make you think.” And this, of course, would cause legions of complaints and “accommodations” requests by delicate snowflakes who prefer to live their lives in gloriously, depressingly isolated “hear no evil” mode.

THE SCIENCE IS UNSETTLING: Campus Rape Expert Who Misrepresented His Work Faces Powerful New Criticism. “Dr. Mary Koss—a scientist, feminist, and acclaimed expert on the subject of campus sexual assault—says the psychologist who popularized the serial predator theory of student-on-student violence has misrepresented his research for years.”

I’m beginning to lose faith in the social science community.

MEDIA ADVICE FOR RIGHT-LEANING FOLKS: Ads sell everything from Apple to Zippo. Why aren’t they used to sell ideas?