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

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 858.

THE CAMP OF THE SAINTS IS JUST A NOVEL, RIGHT GUYS? RIGHT? GUYS? Hungary braces itself for massive surge of up to 30,000 migrants in just ONE DAY from huge Serbian ‘push through’ – as Germany admits it may take in record one million this year.

SEE, THIS COLUMN ABOUT “THE NEXT GENOCIDE,” KIND OF MISSES THE POINT:

The Holocaust may seem a distant horror whose lessons have already been learned. But sadly, the anxieties of our own era could once again give rise to scapegoats and imagined enemies, while contemporary environmental stresses could encourage new variations on Hitler’s ideas, especially in countries anxious about feeding their growing populations or maintaining a rising standard of living.

The quest for German domination was premised on the denial of science. Hitler’s alternative to science was the idea of Lebensraum. Germany needed an Eastern European empire because only conquest, and not agricultural technology, offered the hope of feeding the German people. In Hitler’s “Second Book,” which was composed in 1928 and not published until after his death, he insisted that hunger would outstrip crop improvements and that all “the scientific methods of land management” had already failed. No conceivable improvement would allow Germans to be fed “from their own land and territory,” he claimed. Hitler specifically — and wrongly — denied that irrigation, hybrids and fertilizers could change the relationship between people and land.

The pursuit of peace and plenty through science, he claimed in “Mein Kampf,” was a Jewish plot to distract Germans from the necessity of war. “It is always the Jew,” argued Hitler, “who seeks and succeeds in implanting such lethal ways of thinking.”

The piece goes on to the usual “climate change” boilerplate, but Hitler’s “limits to growth” attitude presages the modern environmental movement. Norman Borlaug, on the other hand, remains surprisingly unknown, and utterly uncelebrated, by the Greens.

SALENA ZITO: “More than 3 million people didn’t show up to vote in 2012, according to David Leip’s ‘Atlas of U.S. Elections.’ That number was not a show of apathy, but the beginning force of populism that sent a message to the establishment of both parties that neither recognized.”

ROGER KIMBALL: A Word About “Fundamentals.” “It would be cruel to compare Hillary circa 2008 with the bedraggled harridan of today.” It was cruel to let her run. But, then, who could have stopped her?

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KURT SCHLICHTER: The Obnoxious and Important Questions I Would Ask At The GOP Debate.

A LONG, SLOW RIDE TO HELL — AND WE’RE NOT THERE YET: Michael Walsh has a lengthy excerpt from his new book, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace at PJM, focused on “the Frankfurt School of mostly German Marxist philosophers, whose destructive, anti-cultural handiwork we can see all around us. For just about every social pathology that currently has Americans and Europeans scratching their heads — how the hell did we get here? — has its origins in the teachings of the Frankfurters and its practical application embodied by the pernicious doctrine of Critical Theory. Destruction of national sovereignty? Check. Redefinition of marriage and the family? Check. Replacement of the Individual-as-Hero with the collectivist ethos of the human ant farm? We have a winner. Antonio Gramsci, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Wilhelm Reich — the list of villains reads like Hell’s honor role.”

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: U.S. drops to 16th on ‘economic freedom’ list, behind Canada, Chile.

A TRAILER PARK CALLED CAMELOT:

Ethel was 40 and three months pregnant with her last child, daughter Rory, when her husband was assassinated. Bobby Jr. was 14, and one week after his father’s funeral, the family celebrated his brother’s 13th birthday. Bobby slipped laxatives into everyone’s drinks as a prank.

“Just leave home!” Ethel yelled at him. “Get out of my life!”

She often used such language with him. “Her moods could swing drastically,” Oppenheimer writes, and soon after, she “literally beat Bobby with a hairbrush.”

Unable to cope with her grief — let alone her children’s — Ethel shipped Bobby off to a series of boarding schools, each less prestigious than the last, each forced to expel the namesake son of a martyred political icon.

Bobby wasn’t even 15 and was already using drugs heavily. He insisted each school allow his pet falcon to stay in his room. He formed a gang, The Hyannis Port Terrors, and one of his favorite practical jokes was bumping the fender of a passing car, having a pal collapse in the road, then yelling, “You’ve killed a Kennedy!” He once spat in a cop’s face.

Ethel did nothing. She was sealed off in her McLean, Va., estate. Only her dead husband, his legacy and her privilege as a Kennedy widow existed. Nothing Bobby did got her attention for long, and that attention was usually negative.

“I never witnessed a civil conversation between Bobby and Ethel,” one of RFK Jr.’s ex-girlfriends told People in 1984.

When Bobby was arrested for buying pot in 1970, Ethel threw him in the bushes. “You’ve dragged your family’s name through the mud!” she yelled. . . .

In his 1994 biography of Ethel, “The Other Mrs. Kennedy,” Oppenheimer writes of her “uncontrolled rage” and the abuse that extended to her household staff. Her brother-in-law Peter Lawford was shocked when Ethel berated a new maid for going to throw out some old scraps of paper.

“You stupid n- - - -r,” Ethel yelled. “Don’t you know what you’re doing? You’re destroying history. Get out of my sight! You’re fired.”

One of Ethel’s secretaries, Noelle Fell, told Oppenheimer she was surprised by such outbursts.

“She would say things like, ‘Those black people are stupid,’ ” Fell recalled. “I really don’t think she liked blacks or Hispanics. She couldn’t stand it if they didn’t speak English.”

One such maid, who brought sanitary pads when Ethel asked for face cream, got a hard slap in the face. She quit on the spot.

Covered up by the press for decades, of course.

VDH ON THE WEARINESS OF THE WHINERS: “The cult of the whining victim is now ubiquitous,” Victor Davis Hanson writes:

The 21^st century has become a cowardly era in which we point to collective race, class, or gender rather than own up to our record of behavior and performance when our exalted expectations are not met. Or is it worse than that? Does a Brandon Marshall count on making unsubstantiated charges of racism in hopes of preemptory careerist advantage: one must prove he is not a racist in the future by offering beneficia in the present?

The culprits are not just our obsessions with race, class, and gender, or the careerist aspirations of elites. We also live in the most affluent and leisured era in the history of Western civilization. But given human nature, our bounty has not given us pause for appreciation, but rather increased our appetites in geometric fashion. The more we have, the more we think we deserve — or else. In an affluent society, society can afford now to have no losers. There is enough stuff and praise to be shared by all. In T-ball everyone is a winner; so is today’s student who feels A’s are his birthright. The poor man in the inner city has more computing power in his palm with an Apple smartphone than did the billionaire twenty years ago in his study — but, of course, not as versatile a phone perhaps as that of today’s billionaire, and thus he can legitimately whine that life is not fair due to the machinations of someone else.

The bane of our age is not poverty but parity, or rather the perceived absence of a state-mandated equality of result. It no long matters how much one has, much less in comparison to those abroad or to Americans of our past. The rub is whether someone has something more or better than your own — and why and how that can still be possible in the American horn of plenty. Given those requisites, whininess is the lubricant of our national machinery.

Read the whole thing.

UNEXPECTEDLY! A Hunting Ban Saps a Village’s Livelihood.

Lions have been coming out of the surrounding bush, prowling around homes and a small health clinic, to snatch goats and donkeys from the heart of this village on the edge of one of Africa’s great inland deltas. Elephants, too, are becoming frequent, unwelcome visitors, gobbling up the beans, maize and watermelons that took farmers months to grow.

Since Botswana banned trophy hunting two years ago, remote communities like Sankuyo have been at the mercy of growing numbers of wild animals that are hurting livelihoods and driving terrified villagers into their homes at dusk.

The hunting ban has also meant a precipitous drop in income. Over the years, villagers had used money from trophy hunters, mostly Americans, to install toilets and water pipes, build houses for the poorest, and give scholarships to the young and pensions to the old.

Calls to curb trophy hunting across Africa have risen since a lion in Zimbabwe, named Cecil by researchers tracking it, was killed in July by an American dentist. . . .

“We had a lot of complaints from local communities,” Ms. Kapata said. “In Africa, a human being is more important than an animal. I don’t know about the Western world,” she added, echoing a complaint in affected parts of Africa that the West seemed more concerned with the welfare of a lion in Zimbabwe than of Africans themselves.

This is what happens when you let your policy be driven by “social justice” virtue-signalling, instead of, you know, reason and consideration actual human needs.

IMMIGRATION: The H-2 visa program invites foreign workers to do some of the most menial labor in America. Then it leaves them at the mercy of their employers. Thousands of these workers have been abused — deprived of their fair pay, imprisoned, starved, beaten, raped, and threatened with deportation if they dare complain.

UPDATE: Hey, you know who loves H2 visas? Bernie Sanders, the worker’s friend.

FENCE JUMPERS BREAK LEGS TO GET INTO UNITED STATES: “We could spend the whole state budget on the border and I am not sure it would solve the problem,” Arizona state senator tells PJM.

Taking deportation for illegal immigrants seriously might. Or at the very least would certainly be a good way to start.

JOEL KOTKIN: Wave of migrants will give Europe an extreme makeover.

The massive, ongoing surge of migrants and refugees into Europe has brought up horrendous scenes of deprivation, along with heartwarming instances of generosity. It has also engendered cruel remembrances of the continent’s darkest hours. But viewed over the long term, this crisis may well be the prelude to changes that could dissipate, and even overturn, some of the world’s most-storied and productive cultures.

Some may prefer to ignore the long-term impacts of huge migration from the often-chaotic developing world – where 99 percent of the world’s population growth will be taking place – to the more orderly, prosperous and low-fertility richer countries. Separated from the daily drama, the human movement from Syria, the rest of the Middle East and Africa can be seen as potentially changing European society forever by breaking its already-weak Christian foundations and threatening the future of Europe’s elaborate welfare states. In many ways this invokes the vision laid out in the 1973 French novel “Le Camp des Saints,” which envisioned a Europe overwhelmed by a tide of poor refugees.

These concerns, of course, are not simply European. The flow of generally lower-income people from Central and South America has emerged – largely courtesy of the demagogic Donald Trump – as a key political issue in the Republican presidential race. Claims, based on federal employment data, that immigrants have gained far more jobs in the recovery is the kind of thinking that keeps Trump in business. Concerns about other transfers from the Third World to the First World have also surfaced in a host of other countries, including Canada, Australia and even orderly Singapore.

Everywhere that’s a better place to live than where people come from. In Neal Stephenson’s prediction, everything gets smeared around into something that a Pakistani bricklayer would regard as prosperity.

And Kotkin is right about this: “Previous waves of immigrants – including those of the 1960s – entered a confident society with strong values and a decent birthrate. Today, they confront a European society that does not much believe in anything but a post-modernist faith in their own emotions.” That will end badly.

UPDATE: Bottom line:

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Gaps in Alumni Earnings Stand Out in Release of College Data.

The Department of Education calculated the percentage of students at each college who earned more than $25,000 per year, which is about what high school graduates earn. At hundreds of colleges, less than half of students met this threshold 10 years after enrolling. The list includes a raft of barber academies, cosmetology schools and for-profit colleges that often leave students with few job prospects and mountains of debt.

But some more well-known institutions weren’t far behind. At Bennington College in Vermont, over 48 percent of former students were earning less than $25,000 per year. A quarter were earning less than $10,600 per year. At Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, the median annual earnings were only $35,700. Results at the University of New Mexico were almost exactly the same.

The data reveals how much money students are borrowing in exchange for earnings after graduation. While U.C.L.A. and Penn State are both prestigious public research universities, recent U.C.L.A. grads leave with about 30 percent less debt, even as their predecessors are earning about 30 percent more money than counterparts at Penn State. Harvard students borrow barely a quarter of what Brandeis students take on, and earn nearly twice as much.

In other words, a college degree isn’t a generic product, or a magic wealth-enhancer. It matters a lot what and where you study, and when you calculate return on investment, the size of the investment matters as much as the size of the return.

Who knew?

THUNDERBOLT IRON: Anthony Bourdain Melts a Meteorite to Make a Beautiful Blade.

OF COURSE THEY DO: Germany Imposes Border Checks Amid Migrant Wave.  I’ll note it’s the SANE thing to do.

A LONG KEPT SECRET: And a gallant lady.

YOU KNOW, IN CASE YOU NEED ONE: Building A Fantasy Army: Leaders.

DO I NEED TO SAY IT:  Okay, then.  Faster, please. Hidden in Einstein’s Math: Faster-than-Light Travel?

WELL AT LEAST THEY SHOW COURAGE FOR ONCE: WATCH: “I’m My Own Prophet”, Topless Feminists Storm Stage At Muslim Conference.

IN THE MAIL:  Clockwork Lives by Kevin J. Anderson and Neil Peart.  (I haven’t read it yet, but I’ve rarely seen Kevin — who is a friend — so excited about something he wrote.)