SO I JUST NOTICED THAT COL. JEFF COOPER’S The Art Of The Rifle is available on Kindle, which it hadn’t been before. Likewise his Principles of Personal Defense. Honestly, you can’t go wrong reading any of his stuff.

THE FLAWED ‘MISSING MEN’ THEORY: Kay Hymowitz has an oped in the Wall Street Journal today debunking the “missing men” theory of black family disintegration:

What extensive data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and National Vital Statistics Reports show is that the black family was in deep disarray well before America’s prison-population increase. As the 1960s began, 20% of all black births were to single mothers. By 1965 black “illegitimacy”—in the parlance of the time—had reached 24% and become the subject of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s prophetic but ill-fated report “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.”

Yet the figure that so worried future Sen. Moynihan turned out to be the ground floor of a steep 30-year climb. By 1980 more than half of black children were born to unmarried mothers. The number peaked at 72.5% in 2010 and is now just below 72%. . . .

As the family unraveled, crime increased—the homicide rate doubled between the early 1960s and late ’70s, with more than half of the convicted being black—leading to calls for tougher sentencing to place more bad guys behind bars. In other words, family breakdown was followed by increased crime and more-crowded prisons. . . .

None of this means that incarceration policies aren’t ready for an overhaul. The country needs a vigorous examination of mandatory-sentencing laws, the war on drugs, and racial disparities in arrests and sentencing. But that debate shouldn’t be used to evade the realities of family life in neighborhoods like Ferguson and Baltimore’s Sandtown. Evasion has been the preferred modus vivendi over the past 50 years, ever since Moynihan’s warning of rising fatherlessness drew sharp condemnation. Look where it has gotten us.

There is much reform needed on sentencing and drug laws, to be sure. But Hymowitz is right that the breakdown of the black family predated the war on drugs and its concomitant higher rates of black incarceration. “Missing men” exacerbate, but do not solely cause, the breakdown of the black family.

Even assuming sentencing or drug law reforms could keep some black men from going “missing,” how do you convince black men to marry the women whom they impregnate (or conversely. convince the women to marry their children’s father), or alternatively, increase the use of contraception to prevent the pregnancies in the first place? How can you instill “family values” in a culture that seems to now have an unusually female/mother/grandmother-centric vision of what constitutes a “family”? It would be great to see a #BlackFamiliesMatter movement.

LIVING IN the Golden Age of Muscle Cars.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Fed-up New York cops post pictures of vagrants online.

Reminder to Bill de Blasio: Death Wish wasn’t filmed to be a style guide.

MORE THOUGHTS ON jury nullification.

HONESTLY, THIS SEEMS LIKE THE BEST POSSIBLE USE FOR VEGEMITE: Australian Government Concerned Over Vegemite’s Use In Moonshine.

IT’S ONLY MONEY: Hillary Clinton Proposes Debt-Free Tuition at Public Colleges: Plan, which would cost $350 billion over 10 years, is way for Democratic front-runner to woo young voters and provides ammunition against surging Bernie Sanders.

It’s a vote-buying scheme that also rewards the higher education industry, perhaps the Democratic Party’s largest source of donations and foot soldiers.

That said, notice this, where she adopts some proposals that I’ve been pushing for quite a while:

In another bipartisan signal, Mrs. Clinton also is calling for colleges to be held liable for aid when their students default on loans, an idea that has gained traction among members of both parties as a way to control costs. . . .

In addition, public universities would be required to spend the new money on instruction and learning, as opposed to administration or the student experience, such as building new athletic facilities. To address concerns that universities could game that requirement through creative accounting, new rules would ensure a certain portion of total spending is directed to instruction, officials said. States and colleges would be encouraged to come up with innovative cost savings, such as offering more online classes.

This addresses a common concern from members of both parties that if the government gives schools more student aid without reforms, the cost of education will simply rise. . . .

Hillary, you magnificent bastard, you read my book! I don’t think she really means to follow through with this, but hypocrisy is the tribute, yada yada.

Nonetheless, Dan Mitchell’s critique is on-point: Hillary Clinton’s Plan To Increase The Cost Of College.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, JUDICIAL COMMON-SENSE EDITION: Judge Faults University for Requiring Student to Prove He Was Innocent of Sexual Misconduct.

The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga erred in finding a student guilty of sexual misconduct based on his inability to prove he had obtained verbal consent from a woman who described her own memory of their encounter as clouded by intoxication, a state judge has ruled.

The state-court judge held that Steven R. Angle, the campus’s chancellor, had rendered an “arbitrary and capricious” decision last December in ordering the expulsion of Corey Mock, a senior.

In demanding that Mr. Mock prove he had obtained verbal consent in advance of sexual intercourse, Mr. Angle held the student to an untenable standard, partly because the campus’s code of conduct defines as consent not just verbal messages but “acts that are unmistakable in their meaning,” according to the judge, Carol L. McCoy of the chancery court in Nashville.

In addition, the judge held, Mr. Angle violated Mr. Mock’s due-process rights by interpreting the university’s code of conduct, which requires initiators of sexual activity to obtain consent, as establishing a judicial requirement that students accused of sexual misconduct prove that they had obtained consent in order to clear themselves.

That interpretation of the conduct code, the judge said in her ruling, “erroneously shifted the burden of proof onto Mr. Mock, when the ultimate burden of proving sexual assault remained on the charging party,” the university.

Let me take it a step further: Such burden-shifting, when coupled with a disciplinary system that disproportionately targets males, creates a hostile educational environment for male students, and is thus itself a violation of Title IX.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Trump indicts America’s ruling class: His rise is a symptom of an increasingly isolated and tyrannical elite. So is Bernie Sanders’.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 823.

FUNNY HOW THE BLUEST CITIES HAVE THE WORST RACISM-AND-VIOLENCE PROBLEMS: Discrediting the Blue Model One Crisis at a Time.

Last February, an investigation revealed that Chicago had a detention facility that lawyers claimed was “the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site”; those in the Homan Square site experienced a number of abuses, including being held without access to an attorney and suffering beatings by police. In a followup to its February investigation, the Guardian has released more information on the scandal. . . .

These abuses occurred in a deep blue city in one of the bluest states in the country. That shouldn’t surprise us. Blue modelers, of course, have seemingly endless faith in the power of big government to do well by the people it governs, especially the most vulnerable. Their rhetoric turns on the claim that blue policies alone can help the poor, and they brand those who disagree as racists who hate the poor. And when it turns out that no one was guarding the guardsmen, and that institutions have abused the power they’ve been given, blue modelers are surprised and disappointed, but somehow still earnestly convinced that the solution is. . . yet more big blue government.

Chicago, with its metastasizing pension crisis, its poorly functioning school system, and, as we now know, this detention site abuse, is one giant, city-sized argument to the contrary. Long hailed as the “city that works” in contrast to obviously failing places like Detroit and New Orleans, Chicago, too, is coming under pressure as the accumulating failures of an obsolescent social model reduce its economic viability and degrade its institutions. Handing over more power to blue institutions isn’t the way to help the poor; often, it is precisely that concentrated power that is turned against the most vulnerable.

Yep. All that talk of compassion for the little guy is a con. But the marks eat it up.

THIS IS NICE: When We Asked Ronda Rousey If She Had Apraxia of Speech.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Trump indicts America’s ruling class: His rise is a symptom of an increasingly isolated and tyrannical elite. With an Angelo Codevilla reference or two.

THINGS WERE A LOT BETTER IN 2008. IRAQ WAS STABLE, SYRIA WAS STABLE, YEMEN WAS STABLE, LIBYA WAS STABLE. . . . Michael Young: Obama alone bears the blame for the mess America has helped make of the Middle East. “The person most responsible for the foreign policy muddle is Obama himself. The president has often praised Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals, on the Lincoln administration and the strong, clashing personalities who served the president. This was Obama’s way of saying he sought to lead an administration of forceful individuals, no matter what their disagreements. This shows the president’s tolerance for confusion, and his hubris. Abraham Lincoln always had a clear sense of direction. No one would confuse Obama with Lincoln.”

SCOTT WALKER: EVERYTHING THAT HILLARY CLINTON TOUCHES IS A MESS.

As Jon Gabriel tweets, “I’m thinking a Scott Walker-led ‘Return to Normalcy’ campaign will be very appealing in this political climate,” particularly when compared to Hillary, Trump, and Sanders.

PUNISH THE BOURGEOISIE! Ninth Circuit Gives Unmarried Couples Double The Mortgage Interest Deduction Available To Married Couples.

WHICH JUST PRODUCES MORE DEPENDENT PROGRESSIVE VOTERS: Progressive policies drive more into poverty.

Across the nation, progressives increasingly look at California as a model state. This tendency has increased as climate change has emerged as the Democratic Party’s driving issue. To them, California’s recovery from a very tough recession is proof positive that you can impose ever greater regulation on everything from housing to electricity and still have a thriving economy.

And to be sure, the state has finally recovered the jobs lost in the 2007-09 recession, largely a result of a boom in values of stocks and high- end real estate. Things, however, have not been so rosy in key blue-collar fields, such as construction, which is still more than 200,000 jobs below prerecession levels, or manufacturing, where the state has lost over one-third of its employment since 2000. Homelessness, which one would think should be in decline during a strong economy, is on the rise in Orange County and even more so in Los Angeles.

The dirty secret here is that a large proportion of Californians, roughly one-third, or some 3.2 million households, as found by a recent United Way study, find it increasingly difficult to keep their heads above water. The United Way study, surprisingly, has drawn relatively little interest from a media that usually enjoys highlighting disparities, particularly racial gaps. Perhaps this reflects a need to maintain an illusion of blue state success. If Republican Pete Wilson were still governor, I suspect we might have heard much more about this study.

The narrative above all.

HOW TO WRITE A BULLSHIT ARTICLE ABOUT WOMEN’S LANGUAGE.

See also: The Sokal Experiment.

THEODORE DALRYMPLE: ISIS HAPPENS — ON THE LINGUISTIC CONSTRUCTIONS OF LIBERAL INTELLECTUALS.

In this case, a recent Guardian headline on “How the ‘Pompey Lads’ fell into the hands of Isis:”

There is a strange parallel here with how heroin addicts explained themselves to me. When I asked them why they started taking heroin, they almost invariably answered that they “fell in” with the wrong crowd, again passively, as if by some kind of natural force. By this means they denied responsibility for their situation, though it was obvious that they had not so much fallen in with as sought the wrong crowd. They knew that their explanation was bogus, because they laughed when I said how strange it was that I met many people who fell in with the wrong crowd but never any members of the wrong crowd itself.

But this contrived account of “falling” into drug addiction is often accepted at face value by liberal intellectuals, who want to divide humanity into the tiny minority of people with agency (perpetrators) and the vast majority without it (victims)—the latter requiring salvation by liberal intellectuals. The rich and powerful are perpetrators with agency; everyone else is a victim without agency. To preserve this worldview, the Portsmouth lads had to be described as “falling” into Isis’s hands.

Read the whole thing.

THE WHITE HOUSE AND JEWS: “It’s the kind of dark, nasty stuff we might expect to hear at a white power rally, not from the President of the United States—and it’s gotten so blatant that even many of us who are generally sympathetic to the administration, and even this deal, have been shaken by it.”

Well, you should have been paying attention earlier. (Bumped.) And this does kind of put Trump’s “disgusting” statements into perspective. Or should.

THE HILL: Ex-NATO supreme commander rips Obama over military cuts.

Former NATO Supreme Commander James Stavridis criticized President Obama, his former boss, for recent cuts to military spending while U.S. troops are still engaged on multiple fronts around the world.

“We have already cut defense … about 30 percent over the last 10 years, and we’re still at war,” Stavridis told radio show host John Catsimatidis on “The Cats Roundtable” Sunday on New York’s AM 970. “We’re actively involved on multiple continents in real combat operations. We should not be drastically reducing our troop levels.”

Stavridis, a retired U.S. admiral and the current dean of Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, also disagreed with the president’s recent decision to pull the sole remaining aircraft carrier patrolling the Middle East out of the Arabian Gulf.

“We have 11 active nuclear aircraft carriers today in the United States Navy,” Stavridis said. “It is hard for me to understand why we cannot manage a fleet of that size to maintain an aircraft carrier at all times in regions as dangerous as the Arabian Gulf.”

It’s as if national security is a low priority or something.

FASTER, PLEASE: The return of supersonic passenger flight.

IT JUST GETS WORSE: Amid the ongoing Calais migrant crisis, British lorry drivers have now been hit by a new worry – an invasion of fleas with giant penises. “Haulage companies claim the situation is so bad that teams of specially-trained dogs are being called in to sniff out the mites in lorry cabs. A recent report warned that the UK is now seeing ‘almost pandemic levels’ of fleas and bed bugs, which are invading millions of homes as well as hotels and hospitals. The fleas have mutated in such a way that not only do they have large manhood but they are now immune to poisons.”

It’s like some sort of creepy metaphor that, if you put it in a book, people would call too heavy handed.