LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE AMERICAN CHAVEZ: Price Tag of Bernie Sanders’s Proposals: $18 Trillion.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO) and The War On College Men.

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Q: ARE WE NOT MEN? A: WE ARE DEVO! The name Devo comes “from their concept of ‘de-evolution’ — the idea that instead of continuing to evolve, mankind has actually begun to regress, as evidenced by the dysfunction and herd mentality of American society,” as Wikipedia notes.

Sadly, the band themselves seem determined to live out their philosophy firsthand, instead of merely observing it: Devo singer sparks outrage with his 9/11-themed wedding — complete with Twin Towers cake and box-cutter favors.

Time to play the left’s favorite get-out-of-jail-free card, the “Botched joke” defense in 3…2…1…?

BEN CARSON: For Quality, Privatize Veterans’ Health Care.

FINALLY! Now you can brew Campbell’s soup in your Keurig with new savory pods.

ONWARD, CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS: Why Christianity is surging in the heart of Islam.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: College Graduates Don’t Know Basic Facts About the Constitution. “According to the study, nearly 10% of college graduates think Judith Sheindlin — commonly known as Judge Judy — is on the Supreme Court; one-third of college graduates can’t identify the Bill of Rights as a name given to a group of Constitutional amendments; and 32% believe that Representative John Boehner is the current president of the U.S. Senate. Shockingly, 46% of college grads don’t know the election cycle — six years for senators, two years for representatives. Turning to the general population, the report finds that over half (54%) of those surveyed cannot identify the Bill of Rights accurately, and over 1 in 10 (11%) of those ages 25–34 believe that the Constitution must be reauthorized every four years.”

JERRY POURNELLE IS ACCEPTING SUBMISSIONS:

Accepting submissions for a new volume of the There Will Be War series. Send with cover note to . Stories should preferably be 20,000 words or less. Poetry encouraged, but see the previous series; it needs to make sense. Hard science fiction mainly; urban fantasy with a military theme possibly acceptable, but mostly we want hard, realistic stories. They need not be action adventure; good command decision stories encouraged. Space opera always considered. Again see the previous nine volumes.

Nonexclusive anthology rights only are purchased. Payment on acceptance is $100 advance against pro rata share of 50% of the revenues received from the publisher. Given the sales of the previous volumes we expect this to be a respectable payment. Original works will be considered, but author is welcome to sell it elsewhere; we purchase only nonexclusive anthology rights.

There will be a hardbound print edition, paperback if the sales indicate it, and eBook publication. Contributors will receive an author’s copy. Each contribution will have an introduction by the editor. The work will contain non-fiction essays by invited contributors: again see the previous volumes.

If this is up your alley, get in touch.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Field Expedient Body Armor.

TRANSHUMANISTS: The people hoping to continue to exist through technology.

THE WAR ON FUTBAL: Microaggressions: A Case Study, from Ace of Spades:

We have a major microagression situation at, get this, Oberlin College.

Apparently there was an intramural soccer match scheduled at the same time as a Latin Heritage Club meeting. A White Male (uh oh) sent out an email to a Hispanic girl noting that he’d like to have her at the match, if she wasn’t going to the Latin Club meeting.

He wrote the most racist sentence since Mein Kampf:

Hey, that talk looks pretty great, but on the off chance you aren’t going or would rather play futbol instead the club team wants to go!!

Anyone see the problem there?

That’s right, he said the f-word– Futbol. He racistly appropriated the Spanish language.

Uh-oh. Read the whole thing.

And speaking of being on the lookout for highly problematic microaggressions in everything, Helen Mirren, who over the past decade brilliantly transformed her career by seemingly eschewing her earlier, zanier days, is reverting to form: “It annoys me to see men with an arm slung round their girlfriend’s shoulders – it’s like ownership.” The London Independent added that “Mirren, 70, said that if she could give her younger self one piece of advice, ‘it would be to use the words ‘f*** off’ more frequently.’”

Sounds like excellent advice in this case.

GOOD GRIEF: Seattle Man Faces Felony Charge After Allegedly Punching a Lamborghini.

AT AMAZON: Deals Of The Week: Up to 71% off in Movies & TV.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO) and The War On College Men.

YALE PROFESSOR EXPLAINS HITLER’S MALTHUSIANISM, THINKS THERE’S SOMETHING TO IT: In contrast, as Bob Zubrin writes at NRO, “The real lesson of the Holocaust for our time is this: We are not threatened by there being too many people. We are threatened by people who say there are too many people:”

The fundamental question boils down to this: Are humans destroyers or creators? If the idea is accepted that the world’s resources are fixed, with only so much to go around, then each new life is unwelcome, each unregulated act or thought is a menace, every person is fundamentally the enemy of every other person, and each race or nation is enemy of every other race or nation. The ultimate outcome of such a worldview can only be enforced stagnation, tyranny, war, and genocide.

But if we choose instead to have faith in the power of unfettered creativity to invent unbounded resources, then every new life if a gift, and every person, race, and nation becomes ultimately the potential friend of every other, and, rather than suppression, the fundamental purpose of government must be to protect human liberty at all costs.

Only in a world of freedom can resources be unlimited. Only in a world of unlimited resources can all men be brothers.

But as Thomas Sowell once told an interviewer:

There’s something Eric Hoffer said: “Intellectuals cannot operate at room temperature.” There always has to be a crisis — some terrible reason why their superior wisdom and virtue must be imposed on the unthinking masses. It doesn’t matter what the crisis is. A hundred years ago it was eugenics. At the time of the first Earth Day a generation ago, the big scare was global cooling, a big ice age. They go from one to the other. It meets their psychological needs and gives them a reason for exercising their power.

Malthusianism provides the perfect mechanism for what William James dubbed at the start of the 20st century “The Moral Equivalent of War” — or war itself, in the case of post-Weimar Germany.

UPDATE: “L’Shanah Tovah! New York Times Compares ‘Climate Change’ to Holocaust,” Michael Walsh writes. But this is actually breaking news from 1989, when the Gray Lady allowed Al Gore to publish a self-serving op-ed there titled “An Ecological Kristallnacht. Listen.”

KAROL MARKOWICZ: Why The Lack Of Eligible Bachelors Is A Myth. You say “myth,” I say “artifact of female hypergamy.”

That’s ultimately what women want. It’s not that they need to ensure their future husband took classes like “Shakespeare in Film” or “Calculus for Poets” (both real college credit classes).

It’s that what women continue to look for in men is security — and a college degree goes a long way toward convincing them he can provide that.

We’ve just gotten to a point where it’s unacceptable to admit that, so we use the “college degree” code to say the things we won’t: We want someone with a good job who will take care of us — yes, even if we’re perfectly capable of taking care of ourselves.

It’s not as if women will turn down an entrepreneur, like, say Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, just because they didn’t finish college. Exceptions will be made.

Indeed.

BRING BACK DDT: Online bed bug reports gnaw at hotel revenues.

LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Map of the World’s Neutrinos Exposes Nuclear Activity Wherever It’s Happening. It’s cool, but not quite up to the hype, as some of it is constructed, rather than simply imaged.

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Conference video: Bringing Computational Programmability to Nanostructured Surfaces.

MAYBE YOU COULD NAME BILL YOUR SEXUAL ASSAULT CZAR: Hillary Clinton Pushes Crackdown on ‘Epidemic’ of Campus Sexual Assault.

It’s just more in the War On College Men.

SHE REMINDS THEM OF THEIR HUSBAND’S EX-WIFE? Poll: Sharp erosion in Clinton support among Democratic women.

LIFE AND DEATH IN THE 21ST CENTURY: A Dying Young Woman’s Hope in Cryonics and a Future: Cancer claimed Kim Suozzi at age 23, but she chose to have her brain preserved with the dream that neuroscience might one day revive her mind.

WHAT IT’S LIKE to lose 350 pounds. “Even the scales out front of Walmart wouldn’t take me.”

MICHAEL MUKASEY: “Cleaning Up After the Obama Team’s Iran Deal.”

The Iran deal is not a treaty and has no constitutional status. Congress should declare, and try to get a court to declare, that President Obama has no authority to lift sanctions in Iran because he failed to comply with the Iran Nuclear Review Act he signed earlier this year—specifically, the legal requirement that he show to Congress the entire agreement including “side agreements” like the one between Iran and the IAEA.

There are other steps to take. Gen. Michael Hayden, a former CIA director, has suggested an immediate congressional authorization for the use of force if Iran violates the deal; beefing up U.S. defenses in a meaningful way; and perhaps providing Israel with the Massive Ordnance Penetrator. This “bunker buster” could penetrate even the underground Iranian enrichment facility at Fordow, which is suitable principally for creating an atomic weapon.

. . .

However, before Iran can respond to a credible threat of force there must be a U.S. administration with enough steel to do more than talk about whether a vague military option is on or off a metaphoric table. That is assuredly not the current “we.”

True that.