SHE NEEDS A SAFE ROOM, APPARENTLY: Meet The Mizzou Media Professor Who’s Trying To Ban Media Coverage.

IF YOU DELIBERATELY SET OUT TO DESTROY THE U.S. INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY, COULD YOU DO MORE DAMAGE THAN HAS BEEN DONE UNDER OBAMA? NSA Morale Has Never Been Lower.

NATIONAL REVIEW: Abject Missouri.

Tim Wolfe, the president of the University of Missouri, is resigning his post, an act of extraordinary cowardice on the part of the university. The University of Missouri is purported to be convulsed by racism. How so? A drunk white student walking down the street used a racial slur in reference to a group of black students; he has been exiled from the campus and probably will be expelled when the disciplinary process comes to its conclusion. Expelling a student for ungentlemanly conduct is the sort of thing that universities probably ought to do more of, but of course punishing the guilty is never enough for the Left. The innocent must be punished as well.

Wolfe, black students insisted, has “enabled a system of racism” at the university. What exactly that system of racism consists of remains vague. The complaints include the by-now-familiar litany, beginning with the fact that the university administration was silent on the matter of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., a year ago. Multiple investigations of the Brown shooting, including the one conducted by Barack Obama’s Department of Justice, have concluded that there was no criminal conduct by police in the case. But even if there had been, what business is it of the University of Missouri? The purpose of a university administration is to administer the university, not to provide a salve for every hurt, real or imagined, that besets the increasingly childish adults it is intended to serve.

Other racial incidents have been reported by Mizzou students with varying degrees of documentation: A student says he was twice described with a racial slur, and a swastika was found applied to a dormitory wall with feces. But the University of Missouri is not besieged by the Ku Klux Klan. It is besieged by hysteria. Hysteria needs to be stood up to, not cravenly fed with acquiescence.

True, but Jay Nixon’s Missouri doesn’t have much of a track record for successful crisis management.

SO WHEN I STARTED TALKING ABOUT THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE, you thought I was just engaging in a little bit of book-selling hyperbole, didn’t you? And yet. . .

MISSOURI WAS ONCE PERHAPS AMERICA’S TOP SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM: Meet The Mizzou Media Professor Who’s Trying To Ban Media Coverage. “After desperately trying to gin up media coverage of student protests at the University of Missouri, once of the school’s media professors is now furiously trying to ‘muscle’ the press off campus to prevent them from covering student protests that rapidly spiraled out of control Monday. . . . On Monday afternoon, activists who had demanded Wolfe’s resignation abruptly demanded that media stop covering their activities on the public campus of the taxpayer-funded university. At the center of those demands was Melissa Click, an assistant professor of mass media within Mizzou’s communications department. In the video below, you can see Click ask for ‘muscle’ to help her bully a Mizzou student into not covering the ongoing mob protests.”

Remember: These “spontaneous” student demonstrations seldom are. Staff and faculty, along with some outside folks, are almost always actually behind them.

BOB MCMANUS: From Yale To The Twilight Zone:

In Peaksville, Ohio, “Twilight Zone” narrator Rod Serling reported in 1961, the people “have to smile; they have to think happy thoughts and say happy things.”

Lest there be consequences.

Like at the University of Missouri, or at Yale, circa now.

We live in a post-fictional America.

WHAT EVERYONE NEEDS: A 10-gallon whiskey still.

AT AMAZON, deals for Winter Decorators.

Also, the Home and Garden Gift Guide.

UNEXPECTEDLY! TERRORIST LEADER CAUGHT HIDING AMONG ‘MIGRANTS’  — “Angela Merkel is probably the only person in Europe who didn’t know this would happen.”

WHILE IT’S FUN TO SIT BACK AND WATCH THE  “REVOLT OF THE CODDLED” AS COLLEGE CAMPUSES SELF-DESTRUCT, it’s worth remembering who the real victims of the 1960s culture wars are, as City Journal founder Myron Magnet writes as he looks back at the magazine’s launch two decades ago:

You will find this hard to believe, but in 1994 I didn’t understand why underclass women were having so many out-of-wedlock children. After all, I reasoned, with my 1960s assumptions, doubtless everybody wants to have sex, but everybody also knows about cheap and universally available birth control. It was Kay S. Hymowitz who set me straight. Women, she explained politely but firmly, want to have babies. Accordingly, underclass girls, she argued from many interviews in a landmark City Journal article, have a different vision of life from that of middle-class girls. They haven’t been nurtured by diligent parents to develop the sophisticated cultural traits—orderliness, self-discipline, deferral of gratification, goal-oriented ambition, and so on—that prepare middle-class girls to go to college and professional school, defer childbearing, get married to Mr. Right, and become doctors or dealmakers.

Everything in underclass culture, where fathers are absent and marriage is dismissed—as useless as a bicycle to a fish—tells girls that sex before 14 is normal, and an out-of-wedlock baby at 16 is the mark of maturity. The grandmas in their thirties are as excited about the new baby as the teen moms, who imagine that finally someone will love them unconditionally and who revel in showing off their shiny new strollers and cute baby outfits. When the babies begin to toddle, their signs of independence and contrariety spark maternal disappointment. An all-too-common underclass cultural pattern has the oldest sibling left in charge of the younger ones when the grandmother won’t babysit, while the mother goes off on new adventures. As for careers or even work, most of Kay’s informants had only adolescent dreaminess, not plans.

Here, then, was striking confirmation of how the 1960s transformation of mainstream American culture had indeed produced seismic changes at the bottom of society, creating a self-subsisting underclass subculture with its own mores—its own life-script, in Kay’s apt phrase—which policymakers had to decode to understand underclass behavior, let alone change it. In years of wise, carefully observed, and irrepressibly witty articles on women, marriage, sex and sex roles, child rearing, and early education, Kay never lost sight of this central insight. And given the thinness of underclass culture, starting with the many fewer times that underclass mothers talk to their children than middle-class mothers do, with the result that their kids start school with much smaller vocabularies and fewer concepts than their middle-class counterparts—some teen moms themselves haven’t learned to do a budget or brush their teeth—it’s hard not to worry that even the best schools can’t fully make up the deficits in childhoods that are so culturally, intellectually, and often emotionally impoverished.

And that “life-script” isn’t exclusive to American inner-city ghettos; the above passage sounds very much like the conditions retired British prison psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple described in Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass.

HARRISON BERGERON, TEXT YOUR OFFICE: Regulators Want To Make Uber Drivers Wait 5 Minutes Because They Are Too Efficient. “Transport for London (TfL) has suggested that Uber drivers should be stuck with a five-minute delay, a ban on GPS driver-location in-app, and forcing ride-sharing companies to take bookings up to seven days in advance. TfL claims the regulations are intended to tackle traffic and air pollution due to the rising number of cars on the road. According to an in-house Uber study, the rules wouldn’t just make life more inconvenient for consumers, but would hammer the pocketbooks of Uber drivers. If TfL introduces the five-minute wait, the average Uber driver could lose as much as $1,500. The study estimated that 43 percent of trips booked with Uber in September began within five minutes.”

MIZZOU AND YALE SHOW WHY IT’S TIME TO BURN UNIVERSITIES TO THE GROUND, Robert Tracinski writes at the Federalist. Bertolt Brecht famously advised overly harried socialist governments to simply dissolve the people and elect another. The university system is the assembly line that performs the transformation, as Tracinski writes:

The most prescient thing said about this kind of student protest culture was an observation made by Ayn Rand back during the first go-around, in the 1960s. The purpose of all the marches and sit-ins and riots, she wrote, was to condition students to accept mob rule. Here we are fifty years later, and this is quickly becoming the openly declared purpose of universities.

This is higher ed’s time for choosing. If this is the new purpose of the universities—to nurture a crop of activists trained at whipping up angry mobs, and a generation of college graduates conditioned to submit to those mobs—then there is no longer any purpose served by these institutions. There is certainly no justification for the outrageous claim they are making on the economic resources of the average family, who sends their kids to schools whose tuition has been inflated by decades of government subsidies.

The universities have done this to themselves. They created the whole phenomenon of modern identity politics and Politically Correct rules to limit speech. They have fostered a totalitarian microculture in which conformity to those rules is considered natural and expected. Now that system is starting to eat them alive, from elite universities like Yale, all the way down to, er, less-than-elite ones like Mizzou.

They created this Frankenstein monster, and it’s up to them to kill it before it kills them.

I agree – it’s time for the rest of us to stand back and remember the sage advice frequently attributed to Napoleon: Never interfere with an enemy while he’s in the process of destroying himself.

(Apologies for that previous sentence being rendered in sadly all too cisgender normative language.)

Related: “If you hate seeing your kid grow up, for $50,000 a year we can transform your teenager back into a f***ing baby.”

HERE WE GO AGAIN: White House Not Sure if Closing GITMO With Executive Order is Constitutional, Hints Obama Might Do It Anyway.

Congress has repeatedly prohibited the transfer of Gitmo prisoners into the U.S., including most recently in the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act.  But as the Wall Street Journal editorial board put it last week:

Mr. Obama’s inability to negotiate honestly with the legislature is a hallmark of his Presidency. More damaging is the precedent he is setting by making major policy changes with no more than a wave of his executive hand. Press reports note that Administration lawyers are working on legal justifications for the Gitmo order. Decision first, the law later.

The 2016 NDAA recently passed by Congress would have extended the anti-transfer prohibition, which is likely one reason why President Obama vetoed the bill on October 22.  It is unlikely that there are sufficient votes in Congress to override the President’s veto (which requires a 2/3 supermajority of both houses of Congress). Consequently, the House leadership has indicated that it plans to markup an entirely new NDAA rather than attempt to override the veto.  Media reports suggest that GOP leadership does not anticipate that the President would veto this revised NDAA. 

If Congress cannot managed to pass a new NDAA or otherwise statutorily extend the anti-transfer provisions, President Obama’s legal position is strengthened considerably, as any transfer of Gitmo prisoners would no longer be contrary to law.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Plastic Grocery Bags Are Good For You. “A 2011 survey published in the journal Food Protection Trends found coliform bacteria in fully half of the reusable shopping bags tested in a random survey of shoppers in Arizona and California. The same 2014 Edelman Berland study that found consumers frequently forgot their bags also unearthed the fact that only 18 percent of shoppers reported cleaning their bags ‘once a week or more.’ An article in the Journal of Infectious Diseases traced a 2010 outbreak of norovirus to nine members of an Oregon soccer team who had touched or eaten food stored in a contaminated reusable bag.”

NOW WHO’S BEING NAIVE, KAY?

● “CNBC should treat the Democratic debate the same way they treated the Republican one.”

—Tweet from the Weekly Standard, today.

● “NBCUniversal Executive Hosts Fundraiser for Hillary Clinton.”

—Headline at the Weekly Standard, Thursday.

Does the Weekly Standard not read itself?

(Incidentally, if this schedule is accurate, CNBC won’t be holding a Democratic debate; parent channel NBC will in January. You’re forgiven if you missed Friday’s MSNBC’s infomercial featuring Maddow interviewing the Democrats; MSNBC apparently chose to deliberately bury their DNC lovefest on a night when the fewest people watch TV.)

THE UNITED STATES OF THE NEW YORK TIMES:

This temper tantrum at Yale is what the world would look like if we were run as a nation by the New York Times. A victim hiding under every bed and a grievance in every pot.

Also emotionally and mentally frail. If the left is truly interested in suicide prevention perhaps they should end the coddling that creates emotional basket cases the moment they encounter resistance or a differing opinion. In most cases, however, those who so readily embrace their victim status are, more often than not, the perp.

Progressives have spent decades dividing the American people, then convincing them their group is the victim of the “others” in order to win politically. Manipulation disguised as concern. And it’s worked.

Now it’s turning on itself; the monsters they’ve created are loose inside the castle walls. Grab a drink and watch it burn.

The Times declares, “In time, the bigots are destined to lose.” Considering how much they’re losing, both at the ballot box and their bottom line, it sure looks like they might be right.

Similarly, the American Spectator adds, “Houston, we don’t have a problem, though the N.Y. Times does:”

The sprinter’s pace of cultural transformation since the early 1990s leaves voters, such as those in America’s fourth largest city, asking: Where does it all end? When does the rejection of the romantic entreaties of a transwoman, the use of pronouns tethered to one’s biology, and restrictions on athletes bearing xy chromosomes from competing in women’s sports become proscribed by law, too?

Harris County, which voted for Barack Obama in the last two elections, and sanctuary city Houston, the most populous metropolis in America with a homosexual mayor, hardly strike as bastions of intolerance. But for the intolerant who cannot abide the will of the people, projection works as the order of the day.

Related: Question asked and answered.

I KNEW THERE WAS A HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE, BUT THIS IS RIDICULOUS: Coyote $21,000 in debt after wandering through university campus. “All I did was eat a squirrel near the Main Library and make eye contact with a professor. Many students spend five, sometimes six years bathing, breeding and foraging on this campus. I can’t imagine what their costs are like.”

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: How gun laws put the innocent on trial: If you care about civil rights for minorities, gun control is not the answer. “Police are horrible, racist monsters who want to lock up minorities over even trivial violations of the law! And police are also the only ones who should have guns!”

A MERE SEVEN PERCENT OF JOURNALISTS IDENTIFY AS REPUBLICANS, “and when they do give money to political campaigns they usually donate to Democrats, lending evidence to Republican presidential candidates’ claims that they are facing a hostile audience when they deal with the press.”

You don’t say. And the disparity has quite an impact on how stories are reported, as Hugh Hewitt tries to explain to Joe Scarborough, with little success:

Any story about Ben Carson is presented from the media as a sort of “ah HAH!! Got him!” moment, while the reluctant coverage of everything Hillary is reported by every network but Fox News with an eye roll and an exasperated sigh, as if to say “ugh, the stupid Republicans are trying another stupid attack against virtuous Hillary.”

That makes a difference. A big one. It is a bias they never admit to, that they refuse to see, and that if you bring it up, they simply mock it. Because that’s what they do. But it is there, and Hewitt knows it, and Carson knows it, and the base knows it.

As a wise community organizer once said, get in their faces, and punch back twice as hard.

Related: It’s Good to Be a Democrat.

A TALE OF TWO SHOOTINGS: Victor Davis Hanson compares the wildly differing BHO-DNC-MSM reactions to the deaths of Michael Brown and Kate Steinle and concludes:

President Obama apparently believes that because in the past people of color more inordinately were victims of police brutality and were more likely to die indifferently to the public, the corrective is not racially blind observations and disinterested commentary to ensure that everyone in a complex multiracial society is treated equitably. Rather, he feels a sort of reparations is necessary to “even the field” —  in that a person’s race or ethnic affiliation will trump facts in precisely the way he believes they once did in the past. Thus, 100 years ago, San Francisco would have gone ballistic over the murderer Sanchez and shrugged at Michael Brown’s death. In Obama’s universe, it is high time that someone at the highest levels of government shrugs at Kate Steinle’s murder and goes ballistic over Michael Brown’s death — facts in both cases be damned. The message counts, along with the political realities that follow from it.

Barack Obama is the most politically driven president since Richard Nixon and the most racially polarizing chief executive since Woodrow Wilson, whose combination of progressive politics and racialism (the former supposedly exempting the latter) in uncanny fashion he emulates. That dual accomplishment of trumping both Nixon and Wilson is difficult, but the president has found it useful for nearly seven years.

Read the whole thing.

JOHN COCHRANE: Sclerotic growth is the overriding economic issue of our time.

From 1950 to 2000 the US economy grew at an average rate of 3.5% per year. Since 2000, it has grown at half that rate, 1.7%. From the bottom of the great recession in 2009, usually a time of super-fast catch-up growth, it has only grown at two percent per year. Two percent, or less, is starting to look like the new normal.

Small percentages hide a large reality. The average American is more than three times better off than his or her counterpart in 1950. Real GDP per person has risen from $16,000 in 1952 to over $50,000 today, both measured in 2009 dollars. Many pundits seem to remember the 1950s fondly, but $16,000 per person is a lot less than $50,000!

If the US economy had grown at 2% rather than 3.5% since 1950, income per person by 2000 would have been $23,000 not $50,000. That’s a huge difference. Nowhere in economic policy are we even talking about events that will double, or halve, the average American’s living standards in the next generation.

Even these large numbers understate reality. GDP per capita does not capture the increase in lifespan—nearly 10 years—in health, in environmental quality, security and quality of life that we have experienced. The average American today lives far better than a 1950s American would if he or she had three rather than one 1950s cars, TVs, telephones, encyclopedias (in place of internet), or three annual visits to a 1950s doctor.

But even these less quantified benefits flow from economic growth. Only wealthy countries can afford environmental protection and advanced healthcare.

Yes, but policies that produce strong economic growth produce insufficient opportunities for graft, and our political class — which controls the policies — values opportunities for graft above all else.

GREAT NEWS — BUT HOW MANY VOTES DO THEY COUNT FOR IN THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE? Another Domino Falls: Conservatives Capture Croatia. As Michael Walsh writes, “First Poland, now part of the former Yugoslavia. Thank a migrant.”

HEH: Uber offering horse and buggy rides to protest regulations.

The “special service” is named after Council Member Ann Kitchen, the chair of the Mobility Committee that reopened the debate over regulating ride-hailing services this fall after a yearlong grace period.

“Kitchen’s plan would require Uber driver partners to undergo the same background requirements of horse and carriage operators in Austin,” Uber spokesperson Debbee Hancock said in an email. “One would hope that the City’s laws would innovate with technology but in this instance, that doesn’t seem to be the case.”

I love this spirit. And I love it that they’re going after her by name. This is a good example of how to deal with politicians.

SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: My Ben Carson Days:

I went to the USMA conference; my friend went to the USNA conference, as did 100s of other high school students that year. Everyone knew the score: (1) the government picked up your education costs; (2) the government paid you a salary as you worked towards an engineering degree; (3) when you graduated, you were made an officer; and (4) then you served for four years in the military. It was a great opportunity: but only if you could survive the rigours of military academy life. And the conference gave you a fair opportunity to observe those rigours close up.

During the conference, a major approached me individually, by name, and pulled me out of earshot of other student-attendees. I have always assumed he (or his colleagues) had similar conversations with many if not with all the other student-attendees. I was told that if I apply, I would get in. It was as simple as that. I had very good standardized test scores and very good grades from my high school. When the major told me that I would get in if I applied, I believed him. I was told that West Point would find a Senator or Representative to nominate me, or I would come in with a number of students the academy could choose itself. I did not inquire about the details of the application process.

Why?

I told the major—having observed what the academy expected of its students athletically and otherwise—that I was sure to fail his programme. So I thanked him for the opportunity to attend the conference, but my applying was not in the cards. I made the right choice that day—although my decision was a real disappointment to my late father.

My scores and grades were good, very good, but I have no reason to think mine were the highest among the many student-attendees. I cannot believe that I was the only person to have received, what was in effect, assurances that if I applied I would get in. By any fair-minded description: it was an offer to attend West Point. Albeit, the offer was not in writing; it was an informal oral offer. Surely, many, many other people received similar offers. I expect that large list also includes Ben Carson.

I had a similar experience with Marine Corps JAG; they actually made me a very generous (verbal, informal) offer. But I wasn’t interested in doing JAG. And, lacking a spleen, probably wouldn’t have passed the physical.