IT WILL EVENTUALLY BE USEFUL FOR HOME DEFENSE. IF YOU’RE DEFENDING YOUR HOME AGAINST TERMINATOR ROBOTS. You Won’t Believe This Brilliant Maniac’s Homemade Railgun. “​Dabbling amateur armsmakers mess around with potato guns. Serious amateur armsmakers 3D print their own portable railguns. This man is clearly one of the latter.”

PUSH BACK AGAINST THE AGE AS HARD AS IT PUSHES AGAINST YOU: Washington State High School Football Coach Defies Order to Halt Postgame Prayers.

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? ‘Heroic’ Lena Dunham Halloween Costume Is Supposed to Empower Little Girls.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 894.

DEMOCRATS DON’T WANT A WAR HERO ANYMORE. THEY WANT A SOCIALIST: Webb to withdraw from Democratic presidential race. Perhaps Trump could pick him as a running mate in a gesture of bipartisan solidarity.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Kitchen Design Isn’t Sexist. It Liberated Women.

All that stuff in our kitchens is, of course, why were able to leave them. Women in the 1920s spent about 30 hours every week preparing meals. Thanks to food processing technology and labor-saving appliances, that number has dropped into the single digits. Men have taken up some of the slack — and it seems worth noting that standardizing kitchens too high for the average woman has probably made them more attractive to the average man. But even if you add in the culinary labors of our male partners, Americans are still spending less than a third as much time cooking dinner as our great-grandmothers did.

Women could never have gone into the workforce in the numbers they did if they had still been expected to spend 30 hours a week feeding their families. They were propelled into careers by the mass-produced modern kitchen, which, with all its flaws, remains one of the greatest feminist advances the world has ever seen.

Ironically, much of that freed-up time has been expended on complaints about what sexist prisons kitchens are, and how that’s all the fault of men.

NOTICE THAT THE WORLD IS ON FIRE, EUROPE IS FLOODED WITH INVADING MIGRANTS, WE’VE LOST IN IRAQ, LIBYA, SYRIA, AND ARE LOSING IN AFGHANISTAN, and the press is talking about George W. Bush and September 11.

AT AMAZON, fresh deals on bestselling products, updated every hour.

Also, coupons galore in Grocery & Gourmet Food.

Plus, Kindle Daily Deals.

And, Today’s Featured Digital Deal. The deals are brand new every day, so browse and save!

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Give Bankers Skin In The Game: Gambling billions in a single trade might vanish if losses hit traders’ personal wallets.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Tax The Blue Zones.

Though I used the term “blue zone” to refer to the flooded areas as they’re shown on the climate change map, it hasn’t escaped my notice that most of those areas are blue in another sense: Urban coastal cities that are heavily Democratic.

Urban Democrats, of course, are among the biggest believers in, and clamorers about, climate change. So you would expect them to support this sort of an approach. But unlike, say, high gas taxes or utility bills or closed coal mines that disproportionately affect people out in flyover country, the blue zone tax would have its greatest effect on, well, blue zones. And even there, people are more interested in talking about global warming than in sacrificing to fix it. (In Santa Barbara, a proposed “blue line” that would show where the new post-global-warming seacoast would be was withdrawn out of fear that it would hurt property values. A flood-risk tax, obviously, would have a greater effect).

Still, if global warming really is a challenge that deserves the equivalent of war mobilization in response, as some activists claim, then it’s hard to call my proposal too drastic.

Read the whole thing, of course.

WE SHOULD SEE MORE LAWSUITS LIKE THIS. FALSE ACCUSERS SHOULD BE NAMED AND PUNISHED. Ashe Schow: Brown University student sues his accuser for defamation.

At some point during the party, the two began a lengthy conversation, and as the party ended, they began kissing. “The couple continued their intimate conversation and public displays of affection among a group of mutual friends in another dormitory room down the hall,” John’s complaint says. At some point Jane texted her friends that she might be about to “hook up” with John.

The two decided to go back to John’s dorm, and once there, continued kissing and touching each other on John’s bed. John says Jane was an active, willing participant who “passionately” kissed John’s neck, leaving a hickey. John’s lawsuit claims Jane “expressed her consent and pleasure” with the sexual activity and at no time did she “express in actions or words that she was uncomfortable or withdrawing her consent.”

Jane said she did not want to have sex that night, and John said okay, but the two continued kissing. John escalated the sexual touching and asked Jane: “Do you like this?” The lawsuit says Jane nodded her head and said “yes.”

John then says that Jane guided his hand and told her what she wanted him to do. Jane then stood up and said again that she didn’t want to have sex, that she had to go meet a friend she had previously agreed to meet, but that she would see John again at her birthday party the next day.

John says Jane kissed him goodbye and left his room.

“In the week that followed, John Doe was unaware that Jane Doe considered herself the victim of sexual assault,” the lawsuit says.

John’s lawsuit suggests that Jane made the accusation against him after he didn’t talk to her at her birthday party the next day.

John is suing his accuser for defamation based on statements she made to other students at Brown that were false. The people she made the claims to would later testify on her behalf. Some of the false statements included her claim that she was “covered in bruises” despite claiming in future statements that she was only attacked on her lip and neck (which had no bruises according to Facebook photos and a medical report).

Like I said. . . .

OF COURSE SHE DID: Author: Hillary flooded Amazon with negative reviews of my book.

BERNIE SANDERS: THE PIED PIPER OF OUR TIMES, writes Ron Radosh:

Decades ago, the late socialist leader Michael Harrington used to say that there was a “socialist caucus in Congress,” referring to the few rather obvious House members who were far to the left. Now, the entire Democratic Party has moved in that direction, which is why Sanders gives the broadest definition of socialism he can come up.  This makes the line blurred between Democrats and self-proclaimed socialists. Since the 1920s, socialist candidates have run for president on their own Socialist Party ticket.  Now, Sanders, who is no less a socialist than Norman Thomas was in the Socialist Party’s heyday, is running in the Democratic Party and caucuses with them in the Senate.  No wonder Debbie Wasserman Schultz had such a hard time telling Chris Matthews what the difference between them is.

Sanders argues that his model for socialism is not the old totalitarian Stalinist system, but the Scandinavian countries like Denmark, Norway and Sweden.  The fallacy of a Scandinavian model  has been demolished by Jeff Jacoby, Mona Charen and Kevin Williamson. All three authors show just how it has failed, as their welfare state policies have proved to be unsustainable; their ruling political parties have been forced to reform or eliminate many of the programs similar to those favored by Sanders. They have, in fact, found it necessary to use market forces to help their economies and, like Clinton, Sweden even introduced welfare reform in the ’90s.

As Kevin D. Williamson noted in 2009 — dissecting a column championing European socialism by Sanders in the Boston Globe to boot, “A critic once asked Milton Friedman what he thought about the fact that Sweden has basically no poverty, and Friedman answered: We don’t have many poor Swedes in America, either.”

But that sort of attitude seems rather anathema to an American left busy reshaping America’s immigration policies and flooding its welfare ranks via the immigration model implemented by fellow leftist Teddy Kennedy. Or as Michael Walsh wrote at the start of the month, “Like America in 2015? Thank the Ted Kennedy of 1965.”

THE CAMP OF THE SAINTS IS JUST A NOVEL, RIGHT GUYS? RIGHT? GUYS? Behind Sweden’s warm welcome for refugees, a backlash is brewing. “The growing popularity of the far-right Sweden Democrats mirrors a backlash being felt across Europe as the continent reckons with a refugee crisis that has broken all modern records and shows no sign of abating. The impact can be seen in country after country, with far-right parties hammering away at authorities deemed too permissive in allowing those fleeing war and persecution to find a home in Europe.” Well, this isn’t something the public demanded. It’s something the political class — which doesn’t have to live with the downsides — adopted as a form of virtue-signaling.

RACHEL EDWARDS REFLECTS on World Patriarchy Day. I predict that the wave of immigration to the West will produce a resurgence of patriarchy.

BRENDAN O’NEILL: According to the left, Israeli citizens deserve to be murdered. Yeah, pretty much.

SOME PEOPLE ON TWITTER ARE SUGGESTING THAT THIS PIECE IS ACTUALLY A BIT OF SUBTLE HILLARY-PROMOTION FROM THE NYT: What Do We Really Know About Osama bin Laden’s Death? The history of Obama’s most important foreign-policy victory is still being written. The direct parallelism of Obama’s false story on Osama with Bush’s talk of Weapons of Mass Destruction is an interesting tell.

WHO ARE YOU GOING TO BELIEVE, ME OR YOUR LYING EARS? Team Clinton: Of course Hillary isn’t for gun confiscation, even though she said it’s “worth considering.”

Hillary having to tack to the left to placate Bernie’s supporters and then return to the center to have a shot at winning it all should be astounding to watch — I’m surprised her operatives are spinning so quickly for her, though.

FREDDIE DE BOER: “Lately it feels like whatever tenuous connection our political journalists and commentators had to real people has been severed completely.” Hint: It feels like high school politics and score-settling and gossip rather than an honest effort to reflect reality because . . . it is.

DONALD TRUMP’S LEAD EXPLAINED IN TWO SENTENCES: “The blue-col­lar wing of the Re­pub­lic­an primary elect­or­ate has con­sol­id­ated around one can­did­ate. The party’s white-col­lar wing re­mains frag­men­ted.”

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Middle school election results (temporarily) withheld because the winners aren’t “diverse” enough (principal has backed down). But though this is evidence of why sending kids to public schools is parental malpractice, it did teach a valuable lesson about how educrats feel about the voice of the people.

ROGER SIMON: Who Should Be Trump’s Veep? “Let’s play a game that no longer seems all that much of a game. If Donald Trump does win the Republican presidential nomination, who should he pick as his running mate?”

BRIAN DOHERTY: How Uber Wins: And how Uber winning can be a win for almost everyone. “Uber did its usual trick of trying to gin up public furor, which often works because the public really likes being able to use Uber. After that first year of operation in good ol’ San Antone, Uber was facilitating tens of thousands of rides monthly. In the end, Uber got a legal deal with San Antonio that both company and city are claiming they are happy with.”

WESTBORO BAPTIST CHURCH GOES AFTER DEFIANT KENTUCKY CLERK KIM DAVIS.

My scorecard really needs updating.