JOE PAPPALARDO: How Russia’s Strikes in Syria Can Tell Us What Putin’s Afraid Of: Don’t believe Russia’s claim that it was bombing “ISIS.” This is about propping up the Assad regime.

MIKE ADAMS ON HIGHER EDUCATION’S SEXISM PROBLEM:

This year, the freshman class at many universities could have been called the fresh woman class. Among those enrolling at my university this year, the percentage of females jumped to 70. Since we don’t yet have an “undecided” category for gender that means the percentage of males fell to 30. While many are asking why so many women are going to college it might make more sense to ask why so few men are going to college.

And maybe even to do something about it. Nah, that’s crazy talk.

PRAGER UNIVERSITY: Can We Rely On Wind And Solar Energy?

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 893.

RADICAL ENVIRONMENTALISM AS “MISANTHROPIC NOSTALGIA:” In “Environmental activists turn up the rhetorical heat,” Joel Kotkin writes:

What is the endgame of the contemporary green movement? It’s a critical question since environmentalism arguably has become the leading ideological influence in both California government and within the Obama administration. In their public pronouncements, environmental activists have been adept at portraying the green movement as reasonable, science-based and even welcoming of economic growth, often citing the much-exaggerated promise of green jobs.

The green movement’s real agenda, however, is far more radical than generally presumed, and one that former Sierra Club President Adam Werbach said is defined by a form of “misanthropic nostalgia.” This notion extends to an essential dislike for mankind and its creations. In his book “Enough,” green icon Bill McKibben claims that “meaning has been in decline for a long time, almost since the start of civilization.”

And you may have thought the Romans and ancient Chinese were onto something!

Rather than incremental change aimed at preserving and improving civilization, environmental activists are inspired by books such as “Ecotopia,” the influential 1978 novel by Berkeley author Ernest Callenbach. He portrays an independent “green” republic based around San Francisco, which pretty much bans fossil fuels and cars and imposes severe limits on childbearing. These measures are enforced by a somewhat authoritarian state.

As fellow Insta-contributor Virginia Postrel once told C-Span’s Brian Lamb:

The Khmer Rouge sought to start over at year zero, and to sort of create the kind of society that very civilized, humane greens write about as though it were an ideal. I mean, people who would never consider genocide. But I argue that if you want to know what that would take, look at Cambodia–to empty the cities and turn everyone into peasants again. Even in a less developed country, let alone in someplace like the United States, that these sort of static utopian fantasies are just that.

We’ve just had the annual Internet slugfest over Columbus Day, in which numerous lefties rue the day that Columbus discovered the new world. Isn’t the entire left, even beyond the private plane and ban the cars crowd simply an exercise in misanthropic nostalgia all the way down?

DID AP RIP-OFF THE DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION? AP “exclusive” today reports that “in each year from 2011 to 2014, the State Department’s poor cybersecurity was identified by the inspector general as a ‘significant deficiency’ that put the department’s information at risk. ” Great story, except for the fact the Daily Caller News Foundation’s Richard Pollock reported it first, on Sept. 27: “Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server to conduct official diplomatic business created many national security problems, but they may pale by comparison with the wreckage she left behind in her department’s main digital information security office.”

HOW CHINESE CORRUPTION corrupts the world.

China, like Russia, is a country based on a mix of Tammany Hall and Wild West capitalism. And like Russian oligarchs eager to stash their money where Putin can’t get at it, increasingly the Chinese mega-rich are trying to get their money where Xi can’t claw it back.

This presents tough questions for Western law enforcement. Neither Chinese nor Russian courts operate under clear legal norms, especially in cases that have political ramifications. So decisions reached by what are often kangaroo courts in these countries can’t be enforceable in the West without compromising our own adherence to the rule of law.

On the other hand, there is no doubt that large numbers of people have enriched themselves through criminal means. And as these thieves and crooks (and in more than a few cases, murderers and thugs) use Western banks and legal protections to shelter their gains, there is a serious erosion of standards of morality and legality.

It’s hard to get the balance right. . . . When we find evidence, as in this case, that exported money from China has been used in a corruption scheme aimed at subverting institutions outside China, then the hammer needs to come down hard.

The Clintons were an early version of Chinese-exported corruption. Nothing happened to them.

ANNALS OF MEDIA SEXISM: Hillary Clinton attracts a rarity on the campaign trail — an overwhelmingly female press corps.

JOHN PODESTA MOCKS MARCO RUBIO AS ‘FLORIDA MAN’; GETS GEOLOGY LESSON IN RETURN.

ROGER KIMBALL: Why The Left Hates Freedom. Insufficient opportunities for graft.

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IF YOU LIKE YOUR WINNINGS, YOU CAN KEEP YOUR WINNINGS.

THE CAMP OF THE SAINTS IS JUST A NOVEL, RIGHT GUYS? RIGHT? GUYS? Christopher Caldwell: The Rising Migrant Tide: What Merkel wrought.

The result is a rupture between politicians and publics that has spread across Central Europe. Sixty-one percent of Germans polled in February opposed migration from non-EU countries. In Merkel’s own party, 126 members of the Bundestag signed an angry petition distancing themselves from her policy. Horst Seehofer, state governor from her party’s Bavarian wing, is threatening to declare a state of emergency, due to crowded refugee conditions in Munich. Her Social Democratic coalition partners, generally more liberal on immigration than Christian Democrats, have called for a ceiling on newcomers. President Joachim Gauck, a Christian of a decidedly unworldly bent, has warned that Germany is reaching its limits. Opposition parties have sought to take advantage. . . . How could it not? Citizens of all the tiny countries that lie between the Middle East and Germany were witnessing a migration far too big for Germany to handle. They knew Germany would eventually realize this, too. Once Germany lost its nerve, the huge human chain of testosterone and poverty would be stuck where it was. And if your country was smaller than Germany—Austria, for instance, is a tenth Germany’s size—you could wind up in a situation where the majority of fighting-age men in your country were foreigners with a grievance. . . .

None dare mention Islam. One young Syrian-Austrian religion professor told the daily Der Standard that five of her students had gone off to join ISIS. “But Islam is not the problem,” she insists. Germanness is not mentioned, either. The Germans are often referred to in German-language accounts as die einheimische Bevölkerung—the native population. Nor do Austrians give the impression of having great resources of self-knowledge. There was a pretty young woman standing in front of an escalator in the Westbahnhof collecting money for refugees a few weeks ago. She was wearing a T-shirt bearing the Gloria Steinem slogan “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.” What did she think she was doing? Attacking men? Or summoning the kind of men who won’t be spoken to that way?

There is something in this that reminds one of the financial crisis of 2008. Like a too-big-to-fail bank, Merkel has made a bet that will allow her to pocket the credit if she succeeds and spread the baleful consequences to others if she fails. It appears now that she is going to fail. Her defenders exult that she is showing a different face of Germany than the one the world knows from the last century of its history. It is premature to say so. Merkel is showing the face of a Germany that is acting unilaterally, claiming superior moral authority, and answering those who object by saying they’ll thank her for this someday. As such, she is dragging the whole European continent towards unrest. No German role is older.

Read the whole thing.

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: ‘Why does hate thrive online?’ Because of the Greater Internet F*ckwad Theory, of course.

But isn’t this putting the cart before the horse? As Marshall McLuhan noted a half century ago, broadcast media is merely one of man’s tools, an extension of his mind. The hate was in the mind of the writer before it was typed in and disseminated to the world via a keyboard and cable modem. Slate — still owned by the Grahams, who a couple of years ago offloaded the Washington Post to someone who understands Internet psychology far better than they do — is merely angry that “the wrong people” now have access to the tools that amplify hate the MSM once reserved for itself. (QED.)

Related: The Desire to Punish.

More: Betsy Newmark writes, “Ah, the neutrality of MSM employees as one NYT staffer tweets out an FU to Jeb Bush for saying that intergenerational poverty is not due to racism and that one solution would be to have stronger families.”

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: These are STRATFOR’s disconcerting predictions for the end of 2015.

ASHE SCHOW: Bob Casey doesn’t get why numbers are important.

Sen. Bob Casey, in an interview with USA Today about his campus sexual assault bill, claimed that knowing just how many women are sexually assaulted “is important.”

Casey had been asked whether Congress accepts the myth that one-in-five women will be sexually assaulted while in college. Casey immediately followed up his claim that the exact number is important by suggesting the number didn’t really matter.

“The number is important. Even if the argument proves true that it’s not (valid) — that it’s one in six, one in seven, one in ten, one in 20 ­— that is still way too high,” Casey said. “I have four daughters, two in college. So this hits people in a very personal way. We could spend all day debating numbers. I’m much more concerned about taking action.”

(I wonder what Casey would have said if he had four sons at risk of being wrongly accused.)

In any event, the number truly is important, because it dictates (or should dictate) what action is taken. Of course one sexual assault is too many, but if the one-in-five number is true, then the draconian policies being enacted on college campuses (the guilty-until-proven-innocent-maybe mentality and mandated question-and-answer sessions during sexual activity) probably don’t go far enough.

Numbers that high would suggest that college is the most dangerous place for women in America. It would recommend a return to sex-segregated colleges, or even the abolition of higher education.

But the fact that women are now outpacing men when it comes to college graduation belies the notion that college is a hotbed of sex crime on par with the world’s most dangerous countries. If it were that dangerous, women would be stupid to step foot on any college campus.

But if the number were closer to say, 0.61 percent of women being sexually assaulted annually — a bit more than one in 164 — then such draconian measures are obvious overreactions. “Bystander awareness” programs might be fine for the problem we’re actually dealing with, but not the evisceration of due process rights for accused students, which creates entirely new problems while failing to solve the original, much-exaggerated one.

Never let a fake crisis go to waste.

KURT SCHLICHTER: Can Any Republican Defeat Ancient Socialist Crone Hillary Clinton? And if not, what does that say about the GOP?

HERE COMES THE BERNIEBRO: THE YOUNG, MALE, AND EARNEST BERNIE SANDERS SUPPORTERS: The Atlantic, which knows something about cults, considering the check it took from Scientology for a staggeringly ill-advised infomercial a couple of years ago, and for the many checks the magazine paid out to Andrew Sullivan’s uterus detective agency, spots yet another socialist cult in its nascent stage:

The Berniebro is not every Bernie Sanders supporter. Sanders’s support skews young, but not particularly male. The Berniebro is male, though. Very male.

The Berniebro is someone you may only have encountered if you’re somewhat similar to him: white; well-educated; middle-class (or, delicately, “upper middle-class”); and aware of NPR podcasts and jangly bearded bands.

The Berniebro might loathe one NPR podcast in particular.

The Berniebro might get into big performative arguments about how feminism saved his life. Or, the Berniebro might always seem like he’s going to say that we need economic equality for all genders but doesn’t actually say it, because he knows that it wouldn’t go over well.

The Berniebro says that Sanders isn’t only driving Hillary to the left, which you may agree is a good thing. Bernie, says the Berniebro, really could win.

The Berniebro doesn’t really have a good answer when you ask why the Democratic Party, which has spent six years explaining how its market-based health care policies aren’t socialist, would ever find national success nominating an actual democratic socialist.

That last line is the key; the Berniebro likely looks very much like this fellow, though perhaps, since this is 2015, with some serious chinbeard action — or at least an earnest attempt to cultivate it, along with the equally de rigueur top knot:

As they say at David Horowitz’s Front Page Magazine, “Inside every liberal is a totalitarian screaming to get out,” and Bernie’s err, nationalist-oriented socialism represents the last, best chance for the beta male Berniebro to really stick good and hard it to his more forthright conservative neighbors — or perhaps even to mom and dad themselves, those ancient reactionaries.

Though in the back of his mind, perhaps the Berniebro may be hearing a tiny voice uttering the concern that Christopher Caldwell wrote a decade ago at the Weekly Standard in answering why “the laments of the small-town leftists get voiced with such intemperance and desperation” — “If the Republicans aren’t particularly evil, then maybe I’m not particularly special.”

I’m sure he’ll quickly tamp out such concerns, though. There’s a moral equivalent of war to be fought after all — which way to the front?

CLINTON’S SOUTHERN STRATEGY? HILLARY FAKES HER ACCENT FOR LOCAL CROWD.

Even more so than in 2007, shay don’t feel in no wehhhhs tie-errrrred:

RON FOURNIER: The Streets Of Detroit Have No Waiting List.

KINDA LIKE PUTIN’S HELPING OUT IN THE MIDEAST: Pelosi: Democrats ‘Open’ to Helping GOP Elect Speaker.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi signaled Saturday there could be “an openness” among at least some House Democrats to voting for a Republican speaker on the floor — and she suggested the GOP turmoil could help put Democrats back in charge come 2017.

“I think in our caucus there is interest and support. There’s an openness to a bipartisan approach to this,” Pelosi said in an interview at the Texas Tribune Festival.

She’s just stirring the pot here, but the GOP leadership hasn’t exactly covered itself with glory.

THE WEEK IN PICTURES: IT’S DEBATABLE EDITION.

TRUMP’S ATTACK ON GWB IS SOFT TRUTHERISM.

Related: Trump Claims His Immigration Policies Would Have Prevented 9/11.

THE BIDEN ECLIPSE AND THE TRUMP PLATEAU: Peggy Noonan makes a couple of miscalculations in her latest essay. First on Hillary and Obama in 2008, Noonan writes, “The 2008 Democratic contest was a rush to the center, with both leading Democrats, Mrs. Clinton and Barack Obama, trying to show they were moderates at heart.”

But in retrospect, that isn’t quite accurate. In January of 2008, Obama famously told the editors of the San Francisco Chronicle in a chilling monotone that “if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them, because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted…Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”

But being good Democrat operatives with bylines, they buried the story instead of realizing the front page scoop they were just handed — “LEADING DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE TO BANKRUPT COAL INDUSTRY.” In the fall of 2008, Obama’s future Secretary of Energy Steven Chu mumbled, “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe,” to the yawn of a largely urban elite MSM who entirely agreed with his punitive goals.

Similarly, when news that Obama spent nearly two decades in the church of a radical socialist — and racist — who shouted “God damn America” in his “sermons,” the media built a wall around Obama that CNN dubbed — on the air while “interviewing” Obama — as “The Wright-Free Zone.” Much the same was true of Obama’s elitist bitter clingers speech.

It wouldn’t have taken much from old media to highlight Obama’s inner liberal fascist and egg him on to reveal more of it, but 2008 was the year in which any vestigial claims of “objectivity” were completely discarded and the mask was dropped.

Which brings us to Noonan’s second misfire, in which she writes:

The only thing I feel certain of is how we got here. There are many reasons we’re at this moment, but the essential political one is this: Mr. Obama lowered the bar. He was a literal unknown, an obscure former state legislator who hadn’t completed his single term as U.S. senator, but he was charismatic, canny, compelling. He came from nowhere and won it all twice. All previously prevailing standards, all usual expectations, were thrown out the window.

Anyone can run for president now, and in the future anyone will. In 2020 and 2024 we’ll look back on 2016 as the sober good ol’ days. “At least Trump had business experience. He wasn’t just a rock star! He wasn’t just a cable talk-show host!”

Yes, the road to Idiocracy’s President Camacho is paved with good intentions — not the least of which from pundits who held themselves out as conservatives, yet found themselves writing in the fall of 2008:

The case for Barack Obama, in broad strokes:

He has within him the possibility to change the direction and tone of American foreign policy, which need changing; his rise will serve as a practical rebuke to the past five years, which need rebuking; his victory would provide a fresh start in a nation in which a fresh start would come as a national relief. He climbed steep stairs, born off the continent with no father to guide, a dreamy, abandoning mother, mixed race, no connections. He rose with guts and gifts. He is steady, calm, and, in terms of the execution of his political ascent, still the primary and almost only area in which his executive abilities can be discerned, he shows good judgment in terms of whom to hire and consult, what steps to take and moves to make. We witnessed from him this year something unique in American politics: He took down a political machine without raising his voice.

You don’t need to speak very loudly when all of your enablers and useful idiots have the megaphones (and the Memory Hole.)