JUDGING THE PAST BY THE STANDARDS OF THE PRESENT: Parochial AND self-satisfied. ‘Suffragette’: A Lesson in Contemporary Smugness

WESTERN CIVILIZATION NEEDS TO STOP THIS NONSENSE: Because it affects everything, from the individual to the collective.  Kindness to the cruel is cruelty to the kind — or even the well behaved. — When robbery victims blame — themselves.

FEMINISTS WAR ON GENDER FLUIDITY: Or perhaps “My victimhood, mine, you can’t have my precious.”  Feminist Germaine Greer On Transgenderism: Surgery, Hormones Don’t Magically Make You Female.

HE WHO CONTROLS THE NARRATIVE CONTROLS THE FUTURE: The myth at the heart of Palestinians’ dilemma.

IF THE REPUBLICAN ISLAND SHRINKS ANYMORE: There won’t be a blue district outside NYC and Chicago. Whose Shrinking Island?

NOT FOR THE CHILDREN: The lawsuit the teachers unions don’t dare let go to trial.

WHAT CAN YOU BUY WITH 85 MILLION A YEAR: Turns out not much.

FRAUD FROM THE CLINTONS? INCREDIBLE! THE CLINTON FOUNDATION, SHADY ACCOUNTING AND AIDS.

AT AMAZON, deals on bestselling Candy & Chocolate.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: No, Judge Judy Is Not A Supreme Court Justice.

COMPARE AND CONTRAST: Sweden Opened Its Doors To Muslim Immigration, Today It’s The Rape Capital Of The West. Japan Didn’t.

LAURENCE JARVIK REVIEWS Michel Houellebecq’s Submission. “In any case, Houellebecq’s latest success de scandal, Submission: A Novel, published in translation this month in America, created a sensation when it hit the bookstores in France just as Islamic fundamentalists attacked Charlie Hebdo and the HyperCacher supermarket. In the aftermath of that horrific mass murder, Houellebecq was given police protection by the French government–then cancelled his book tour.”

SCOTT SHACKFORD: What Bernie Sanders Doesn’t Understand About Germany’s “Free” College:

Anyway, you won’t see any discussion in Sanders commentary about why college prices have exploded far above and beyond increases in the consumer price index or even the costs of healthcare. There will be no discussion of how subsidies and administrative bloat have massively driven up prices and eliminated any incentives for colleges to restrain costs. It’s just a thing that happened. . . .

ince Sanders left out any analysis of why college is so expensive, it’s worth exploring what exactly Sanders has left out when he invokes Germany’s college system. Note that Sanders has said “A college degree is the new high school diploma”? That attitude is exactly backwards from how Germany approaches higher education. Germany does not have a work environment that demands a college degree for every well-paying career. The apprenticeship program that Sanders bemoans having lost in America is well intact in Germany. Many careers that require college degrees in America do not require college degrees in Germany.

Even with the free tuition, Germany actually has a lower college enrollment rate than many other Western countries, including the United States (check out World Bank data here). Actually, America has a higher rate of college enrollment than all of the countries Sanders lists except for Finland.

Oh, also: America has a higher college graduation rate than Germany, too. And a greater percentage of young Americans have college degrees compared to every country on Sanders’ list except for Norway and Ireland.

Instead, Germany has a very robust vocational education track that partners businesses and the government to provide apprenticeships, so the government (and citizenry) is not paying the full burden for the students’ training, though Germany is still covering classroom costs.

It is also a highly regulated, centrally controlled, and very inflexible system that probably won’t fly in the United States. . . .

It’s certainly easy to see how a guy who thinks we have too many types of deodorant would not grasp that flexibility and innovation could be lost as a result of standardizing college the way we have public education. It’s also possible Sanders wouldn’t even grasp that this is a problem.

Indeed. Maybe he should do some remedial reading.

CLAIRE LEHMANN: The “no-platforming” campaign against Germaine Greer reflects a deeper sickness afflicting Western universities. While the stated aim is to reduce harm, the end result is enforced ignorance. Well, that’s the goal, certainly.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: Things Between the U.S and China are About to Heat Up in the South China Sea.

GERMANY CAN’T KEEP TRACK OF MIGRANTS: Hundreds of refugees disappear from centres. “Around 700 of the 4,000 refugees who have been housed in Lower Saxony over the past week have gone missing and authorities mostly have no idea who or where they are.”

What could go wrong?

YOU DON’T END CONTROVERSY WITH A WHITEWASH: Tea party targeting accusations, legal issues persist for IRS after Justice ends probe.

A DELIBERATE CAMPAIGN OF POLITICAL INTIMIDATION: Feds Ready Forced Disclosure of Donors to Conservative Groups. “Harassment of financial donors to conservative causes has become one of the standard tactics of the militant left. Speech regulations issued by the Federal Election Commission are, therefore, a necessary component of snuffing out financial support for conservative causes through harassment campaigns.”

RACISM IS EVERYWHERE: The Black/White Sleep Gap: An unexpected challenge in the quest for racial justice.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Bill Henderson: Is there a right way to respond to the “Law School Debt Crisis” Editorial?

Frank Pasquale: Bootleggers and Baptists in the Student Loan Debate.

THERE IS NO PHILOSOPHY WITHOUT ALCOHOL: The Cold Logic of Drunk People. “At a bar in France, researchers made people answer questions about philosophy. The more intoxicated the subject, the more utilitarian he or she was likely to be.”

This explains the Philosophers’ Song.

ROBERT HEINLEIN’S 1973 ADDRESS TO MIDSHIPMEN AT ANNAPOLIS:

As one drives through the bushveldt of East Africa it is easy to spot herds of baboons grazing on the ground. But not by looking at the ground. Instead you look up and spot the lookout, an adult male posted on a limb of a tree where he has a clear view all around him – which is why you can spot him; he has to be where he can see a leopard in time to give the alarm. On the ground a leopard can catch a baboon… but if a baboon is warned in time to reach the trees, he can out-climb a leopard. The lookout is a young male assigned to that duty and there he will stay, until the bull of the herd sends up another male to relieve him. Keep your eye on that baboon; we’ll be back to him.

Today, in the United States, it is popular among self-styled ‘intellectuals’ to sneer at patriotism. They seem to think that it is axiomatic that any civilized man is a pacifist, and they treat the military profession with contempt. ‘Warmongers’ – ‘Imperialists’ – ‘Hired killers in uniform’ – you have all heard such sneers and you will hear them again. One of their favorite quotations is: ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.’ What they never mention is that the man who made that sneering remark was a fat, gluttonous slob who was pursued all his life by a pathological fear of death.

I propose to prove that that baboon on watch is morally superior to that fat poltroon who made that wisecrack. Patriotism is the most practical of all human characteristics. But in the present decadent atmosphere patriots are often too shy to talk about it – as if it were something shameful or an irrational weakness. But patriotism is NOT sentimental nonsense. Nor is it something dreamed up by demagogues.

Patriotism is as necessary a part of man’s evolutionary equipment as are his eyes, as useful to the race as eyes are to the individual. A man who is NOT patriotic is an evolutionary dead end. This is not sentiment but the hardest of logic.

It’s funny how for so many people, belief in evolution is a proud self-label, but actually thinking about the social implications of evolution is doubleplusungood.

GERMANS SHOULD HAVE THOUGHT OF THIS BEFORE OPENING THEIR BORDERS: Immigration Backlash Has Germans Worrying About Anti-Muslim “Hate,” Right-Wing Politics. “Germany these days, it seems, is a place where people feel entirely uninhibited about expressing their hatred and xenophobia.”

FUNNY, EVEN THE LEFTY SITES AREN’T LOOKING SO HOPE-AND-CHANGEY ANYMORE: Alternet: Get Out While You Can: Why Young Americans Should Emigrate. What’s really funny is the stuff about how greedy colleges are screwing students to feather the nests of the people who run them, from someone who almost certainly doesn’t understand that under socialism, everything works that way.

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR MITT ROMNEY, FEMINIST FILMMAKERS WOULD BE CENSORED. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! ‘The Red Pill’ Filmmaker Started to Doubt Her Feminist Beliefs… Now Her Movie Is at Risk.