THE SOVIET UNION’S Secret Space Cannon. “Only after the fall of the USSR did Russian sources revealed that the cannon had actually fired in orbit. It happened on Jan. 24, 1975, onboard the Salyut-3 space station. Worried about how firing a giant cannon would impact the outpost itself, Soviet officials scheduled the test firing just hours before the planned de-orbiting of the station, and long after the departure of the crew on July 19, 1974. The outpost ignited its jet thrusters simultaneously with firing the cannon to counteract the weapon’s powerful recoil. According to various sources, the cannon fired from one to three blasts, reportedly firing around 20 shells in all. They burned up in the atmosphere, too.” Orbital dynamics would make gun-laying a challenge beyond close range.

IF IT’S JUST A SWAMP OF HATE, WHY IS YIK YAK SO POPULAR ON CAMPUS? After reading all the app’s bad press, I took a look. What I found astonished me.

A PERFECT EXAMPLE OF PROGRESSIVE FREE SPEECH ILLOGIC:  A writer in the Guardian exemplifies muddled progressive thinking about the meaning and value of free speech:

The American university system is currently the battleground for what looks to be our next great culture war: free speech versus political correctness. On one side are the ever-harrumphing Reasonable White Men, such as New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait, who fretted extravagantly over “political correctness” in an interview with National Public Radio: “I would define PC as a new ideology that is completely intolerant of dissent on issues relating to race and gender. So, it’s an illiberal kind of politics that does not grant any political legitimacy to criticism on identity issues. So, even if it’s made in response to legitimate racism and legitimate sexism that people have every right to be concerned about, it shuts down democratic politics in a way that we should be concerned about.”

The other side – which is not really a “side” at all so much as a vast, multifarious crowd of marginalised people all advocating for their own humanity with varying degrees of success and silliness – includes trauma survivors requesting trigger warnings, feminists criticising rape jokes, people of colour trying to explain cultural appropriation to white people who think the earth is their toy chest, and black students sick of universities gobbling their tuition money but treating them like dangerous interlopers. . . .

After setting up her false dichotomy between “ever-harrumphing Reasonable White Men” and “a vast, multifarious crowd of marginalised people all advocating for their own humanity,” the writer then draws a (predictable) false conclusion:

But here is the thing: white students parading around campus in blackface is itself a silencing tactic. Telling rape victims that they’re “coddled” is a silencing tactic. Teaching marginalised people that their concerns will always be imperiously dismissed, always subordinated to some decontextualised free-speech absolutism is a silencing tactic.

Framing student protests as bratty “political correctness gone mad” makes campuses a hostile environment for everyone except for students who have no need to protest. . . If you’re genuinely concerned about “free speech”, take a step back and look at what’s actually happening here: a bunch of college students, on the cusp of finding their voices, being publicly berated by high-profile writers in national publications because they don’t like what they have to say. Are you sure you know who’s silencing whom?

So basically, her argument is this: If individuals–mostly “white students”–express their disagreement with the views of the “marginalised people” (who may well come from very privileged backgrounds, but that doesn’t matter of course)–is a “silencing tactic” that is antithetical to free speech. She believes, in other words, that it is imperative to silence some speech so that others’ voices may be heard.

The writer has obviously not been schooled on the Constitution’s First Amendment, which is grounded in the theory that a robust–even offensive–marketplace of ideas is necessary to individual liberty and the quest for truth. But then again, I’m certain the writer does not care much for the pesky Constitution, which is precisely why her perspective is so dangerous.

UPDATE:  Just to be clear: the writer of this Guardian piece is an American journalist, not British.

UPDATE: C. Bradley Thompson points me to an open letter he and some colleagues at Clemson recently penned to Clemson students, pledging their opposition to any unconstitutional attempts by the university to suppress free speech, including speech that makes others uncomfortable. We need more faculty like this, but I won’t hold my breath.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 922.

FLASHBACK: Armed Citizens May Be the Solution to Terrorism, Says Interpol Secretary General.

RICHARD EPSTEIN: Spineless “Leadership” From Yale President Peter Salovey.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: A Creepy, Coercive Turn To Student Protests.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Foreign Students Pinch University of California Home-State Admissions.

With foreigners enrolling in U.S. schools at record numbers, students such as Noah Hernandez, a freshman at the University of California, San Diego, are getting a global view of the world without leaving their home state. The school has thousands of Chinese students, including Mr. Hernandez’s roommate, who pay three times the in-state tuition.

“If I were running a school, it would make sense” to accept them, said the biology major, as a clutch of Mandarin-speaking students walked by.

Then he began thinking of a childhood friend, who also had a stellar academic record yet didn’t get into UCSD to study engineering. Now, he says he wonders “whether taking so many international students is fair to California students who are going to stay here and benefit the state.”

Mr. Hernandez illustrates the mixed feelings with which students and educators regard the foreign undergraduates flocking to public universities nationwide.

A record 974,926 international students were enrolled at accredited two- and four-year U.S. schools for the 2014-15 school year, a 10% rise over a year earlier, according to the Institute of International Education. About one-third of those students—304,040—are from China.

These rising international admissions are making domestic admissions more competitive across the country, said Allan Goodman, president of the IIE. And he predicts “continuing and substantial growth” in the international student population, which is now 4.8% of students overall.

The growth in international students has contributed to tighter admission standards at many UC campuses. The UC system accepted 62% of in-state applicants in the 2014 school year, down from 84% four years earlier.

Sure, you paid taxes. But they’ll pay full tuition.

THEY TOLD GLENN REYNOLDS THAT IF HE VOTED FOR MITT ROMNEY, THERE’D BE A CRACKDOWN ON FREE SPEECH, AND THEY WERE RIGHT! State of Maine Sues to Muzzle Pro-Life Preacher.

YEAH, I DON’T THINK THIS ADMINISTRATION IS GOING TO MANAGE EITHER HALF OF THAT FORMULATION: Bernie Sanders says America should be “tough but not stupid” in destroying ISIS.

TOM MAGUIRE: ISIS wants an apocalypse? Let ’em have it.

FROM REALCLEARPOLITICS: The GOP Race for Delegates: An Interactive Tool.

TOM MAGUIRE: ISIS wants an apocalypse? Let ’em have it.

DO CORPORATE DONORS threaten academic freedom?

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!

CRUZ CONTROL: Rival Campaigns Starting to Notice the Potential Staying Power of Ted Cruz.

JAMES DELINGPOLE: Salon: Paris Was Wearing A Short Skirt.

As somebody said on Twitter the other day, Salon really does act like a Republican false flag operation to discredit the left, doesn’t it?

Related: Last Week, HuffPost’s Sam Stein Said Guns Were a Greater Domestic Threat Than ISIS.

Well, duh — ISIS is contained after all, as President Obama assured us all on Friday’s Good Morning America.

GOOD FOR HIM. HE’S ACTUALLY BEEN GOOD ON THIS ISSUE. Obama defends free speech in comments on campus protests.

Give President Obama some credit — when he was asked to comment on the wave of protests sweeping colleges across the country, he didn’t fully capitulate.

While he did praise the protesters, he noted that they needed to hear the other side and make sure they were “engaging in a dialogue.”

“The civil rights movement happened because there was civil disobedience, because people were willing to go to jail, because there were events like Bloody Sunday, but it was also because the leadership of the movement consistently stayed open to the possibility of reconciliation and sought to understand the views, even views that were appalling to them, of the other side,” Obama told ABC host George Stephanopoulos.

Obama said he teaches his daughters to stand up for those who lack a voice, but also to hear the other side of the argument.

“I don’t want you to think that a display of your strength is simply shutting other people up, and that part of your ability to bring about change is going to be by engagement and understanding the viewpoints and the arguments of the other side,” Obama said.

This is the second time Obama has publicly defended free speech on college campuses. At a town hall event on Sept. 14, the president told an audience that speakers should be allowed to give speeches on college campuses, even if students don’t like what they’ll say.

“I’ve heard of some college campuses where they don’t want to have a guest speaker who is too conservative or they don’t want to read a book if it has language that is offensive to African-Americans or somehow sends a demeaning signal toward women,” Obama said. “I’ve got to tell you, I don’t agree with that, either. I don’t agree that you, when you become students at colleges, have to be coddled and protected from different points of view.”

Obama made similar comments to Stephanopoulos, but left out the part about students needing to be coddled. He suggested students argue with those they disagree with rather than try to keep them from speaking. . . .

“You don’t have to be fearful of somebody spouting bad ideas,” Obama said. “Just out-argue them. Beat them. Make the case as to why they’re wrong.”

Obama said he was “worried” that young people were becoming “trained” to think that if they disagree with someone, that if their feelings get hurt, their “only recourse is to shut them up.”

Indeed.

THEY TOLD ME THAT IF GLENN REYNOLDS VOTED FOR MITT ROMNEY SHADOWY AGENCIES WOULD DEMAND THE NAMES OF VOTERS COMMITTING CRIMETHINK — AND THEY WERE RIGHT! Secret Email Group Helps States Demand Names of Donors to Conservative Groups.

OCEANIA HAS ALWAYS BEEN AT WAR WITH EL NIÑO:

● “El Nino could make 2015 ‘the hottest year on record’… and 2016 will be even hotter.”

—Headline, London Independent, September 14, 2015.

● “UK winter weather: El Nino could plunge country into long, snowy winter.”

—Headline, London Independent, September 14, 2015.

● “Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.”

—Headline, London Independent, March 20, 2000.

WELL, WHAT HE IS, IS SLIMY. Just Who Is Sidney Blumenthal, the Clintons’ Closest Advisor? Will Hillary’s hatchet man be up for White House job if she wins?

He’ll do for America what he did for Libya. Plus:

Sidney Blumenthal is all over the Benghazi affair. And Ms. Clinton’s long, strange, close relationship to this shadowy and increasingly untrusted figure might just keep her from winning the White House.

Last Friday, the State Department released emails showing that Mr. Blumenthal had reached out to Ms. Clinton on behalf of Jonathan Powell, ex-chief of staff to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Mr. Powell proposed establishing “below the radar” channels between insurgents and governments and making money off of it through an NGO of Mr. Powell’s. Ms. Clinton was receptive to the idea, according to the Daily Caller. When he was at The New Yorker, Mr. Blumenthal wrote an ass-kissing profile of Mr. Blair in which he called his subject, among other things, a man of “impeccable Oxford diction.”

Tina Brown, who hired Mr. Blumenthal at The New Yorker because he was close to the Clintons, later allegedly canned him for being too close to the Clintons.

To cite another striking example, Mr. Blumenthal sent then-Secretary of State Ms. Clinton reports on the political situation in Libya written by a former senior CIA officer, the recently deceased Tyler Drumheller. Those reports, which Mr. Blumenthal emailed to her in 2011 and 2012, apparently were intended to influence American policy toward Libya in a way favorable to a business project with which Mr. Blumenthal and Mr. Drumheller were involved.

Culture of corruption.

KARL MARX CALLS MEXICANS LAZY. WILL SOCIAL JUSTICE WARRIORS DEMAND NOTED RACIST KARL MARX BE BANNED FROM STUDY ON CAMPUS?

In addition to slurs against Mexicans, Marx, whose father had converted from Judaism to Lutheranism, was none too keen on Jews and blacks, as well.

But the SJWs are already on the case! They want to see Marx removed from the college criteria not because he was a stone cold racist totalitarian, but — wait for it! — because he’s yet another dead white European male. As James Lileks wryly observed back in January, “Some Berkeley students are mad about a class that is just plain othering the living heck out of them. From a piece they wrote for the Daily Californian:”

We are calling for an occupation of syllabi in the social sciences and humanities. This call to action was instigated by our experience last semester as students in an upper-division course on classical social theory. Grades were based primarily on multiple-choice quizzes on assigned readings. The course syllabus employed a standardized canon of theory that began with Plato and Aristotle, then jumped to modern philosophers: Hobbes, Locke, Hegel, Marx, Weber and Foucault, all of whom are white men. The syllabus did not include a single woman or person of color.

In response, Lileks wrote:

If there’s one thing you take away from the Daily Californian essay, it’s the pursed-lip’d narrow-eyed glare of someone who is being forced to sit in a room and NOT BE VALIDATED. (Some of the complainants may be angry because they are witnessing the non-validation of others and are compelled to be enraged on their behalf.) College, apparently, is now a place where the notions of people freshly matriculated from high school must be handled with oven mitts and lightly buffed with soft cloth lest their orthodoxies suffer the slightest abrasion. Like the school that canceled the annual performance of The Vagina Monologues because it othered non-traditional women who lacked the titular orifice, it’s a delightful example of leftist autophagy. Marx is in foul order in Berkeley not for his ideas, or the heaps of corpses accumulated in his name, but because he had a prostate.

By the way, Foucault died of AIDS, so you can dismiss everything the students wrote. Homophobes and haters. No, kids, don’t bother defending yourselves. As your heroes would no doubt say: If it wasn’t true, we wouldn’t have accused you.

Heh. Yet another reminder that as Ray Bradbury predicted in Fahrenheit 451, the books will be burned as much to protect everyone’s feelings as much as to block the ideas within them.

FLASHBACK 1974: CIA WARNED GLOBAL COOLING WOULD CAUSE TERRORISM: “This sounds eerily similar to arguments Sanders made during the Democratic presidential debate Saturday evening, in which he argued man-made global warming made Syria’s drought worse and led to the rise of the Islamic State. It’s an argument increasingly in the mouths of Democrats over the past year.”

As the mysterious Bay Area blogger Zombie wrote in 2012, “I just finished reading a terrifying new book about climate change. I learned this:”

• Climate change is happening faster than we realize and it will have catastrophic consequences for mankind.
• There’s very little we can do to stop it at this late stage, but we might be able to save ourselves if we immediately take these necessary and drastic steps:

– Increase our reliance on alternative energy sources and stop using so much oil and other carbon-based fuels;
– Adopt energy-efficient practices in all aspects of our lives, however inconvenient;
– Impose punitive taxes on inefficient or polluting activities to discourage them;
– Funnel large sums of money from developed nations like the U.S. to Third World nations;
– In general embrace all environmental causes.

You of course recognize these as the solutions most often recommended to ameliorate the looming crisis of Global Warming. But there’s a little glitch in my narrative. Because although the book I read was indeed about climate change, it wasn’t about Global Warming at all; it was instead about “The Coming of the New Ice Age,” and it isn’t exactly “new” — it was published in 1977.

As Zombie wrote, then as now, “The Solution Remains the Same.”

Update: Link to Zombie’s post was incorrect; now fixed.

THE HILL: Pressure Builds To Block Refugees.

Congress is coming under intense pressure to block the entry of Syrian refugees into the United States following the deadly terrorist assault on Paris.

A wave of opposition to the refugees quickly formed on Monday, with Republican presidential hopefuls and more than a dozen governors warning that the humanitarian effort is a threat to national security.

With the administration suggesting that states might not have the power to refuse the refugees, the issue is moving quickly into the congressional arena.
Republican White House hopeful, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, said Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) should either “reject the importation of those fleeing the Middle East” or resign, while Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.), another presidential candidate, proposed legislation that would impose an “immediate moratorium on visas for refugees” from countries with “jihadist movements.”

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), another White House hopeful, said he will be introducing legislation that would ban all Muslim Syrian refugees from entering the United States.

“What Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are proposing is that we bring to this country tens of thousands of Syrian Muslim refugees,” Cruz told CNN’s Dana Bash.

“I have to say, particularly in light of what happened in Paris, that’s nothing short of lunacy.”

With the calls for action mounting, GOP leaders could move to hold a vote on the refugee question before the Thanksgiving break, less than a week after the shocking slaughter in Paris.

Obama will probably veto it, but that won’t be good for the Dems’ 2016 prospects.

Related: Wary Governors Halt, Question Flow Of Syrian Refugees.

And also questions in Canada.