JOEL KOTKIN: Are We Heading For An Economic Civil War?

In this way California already shows us something of what an economy dominated by the intangible sectors might look like. Driven by the “brains” of the tech culture, the ingenuity of the “creative class,” and, most of all, by piles of cash from Wall Street, hedge funds, and venture capitalists, the tech oligarchs have shaped a new kind of post-industrial political economy.

It is really now a state of two realities, one the glamorous software and media-based economy concentrated in certain coastal areas, surrounded by a rotting, and increasingly impoverished, interior. Far from the glamour zones of San Francisco, the detritus of the fading tangible economy is shockingly evident. Overall nearly a quarter of Californians live in poverty, the highest percentage of any state. According to a recent United Way study, almost one in three Californians is barely able to pay his or her bills.

If you’re worried about economic inequality, the California model isn’t the way to go.

CHUCK TODD: BEN CARSON’S ‘PERSONAL STORY’ IN ‘DANGER’ BECAUSE POLITICIANS LIE: Well, the man for whom Chuck began his career* as a Democratic operative certainly did, as Glenn highlighted a decade ago.

Also in the same NewsBusters post, “In contrast to Todd, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos had a much more sobering assessment regarding the questions surrounding Carson’s personal biography during an appearance on Sunday’s Good Morning America:”

I think it’s going to be a question of whether the stories do stand up to further scrutiny. And whether they turn out to reveal a pattern of dishonesty or simply exaggerations that are being trumped up by the press, as Carson argues. That does remain to be seen.

Do you mean like claiming that you tried to join both the Marines and NASA, and later lied about being under sniper fire, and years later, was caught lying about a YouTube video getting an American ambassador killed, and then lying about your wealth, as the current Democratic presidential candidate to whose slush fund Stephanopoulos donated at least $75,000 has done on numerous occasions?

Related: Nine False Things Obama Said About His Bio That Didn’t Cause A Media Feeding Frenzy.

* A ranking executive in the corporation that currently employs Todd held a fundraiser last week for Hillary.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Hollywood is cashing in on tax benefits around the country while delivering little in return.

I say: Repeal the Hollywood Tax Cuts!

Also at the state level!

ROGER KIMBALL: Sowing the wind, reaping the whirlwind at Yale: Thoughts on breeding politically correct hothouse plants in the Ivy League and beyond.

“Be quiet,” the girl screams to the Master of her college. “As your position as master, it is your job to create a place of comfort and home for the students that live in Silliman.” But wait: Is it? Is that the job of the administrative head of a college dormitory at Yale? Is Yale an institution for the emotionally broken? Well, this girl appears to think so. When Christakis ventured to disagree with her, the student exploded: “Then why the fuck did you accept the position?” she screamed. “Who the fuck hired you?” She then demanded that he “step down” because being a master is “not about creating an intellectual space” but rather “creating a home.” In loco parentis? “You should not sleep at night,” she sobbed. “You’re disgusting.” She then turns and stomps off. End of tirade. Curtain.

Let’s step back and remember what prompted all this anger, not just on the part of the pathetic specimen who attacked Nicholas Christakis, but also the several hundred other students who confronted him and other university officials over the last week or so.

My cunning plan to bring down the Ivy League from within continues to bear fruit.

ROBERT BYRD COULD NOT BE REACHED FOR COMMENT: Media falls for claim the KKK has infiltrated the Senate.

UNHINGED: Meet The Privileged Yale Student Who Shrieked At Her Professor.

A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE SAFE SPACE FORUM AT YALE: If you missed Glenn’s posts over the weekend on the bizarre incident last week at Yale, John Hinderaker offers up an excellent capsule summary at Power Line titled, “We Live In a World Gone Mad, Yale Edition:”

The Daily Mail recounts one of the strangest controversies we’ve seen in a while. It relates to offensive Halloween costumes at Yale. Or rather, the potential for offensive Halloween costumes.

The story starts with the wife of Nicholas Christakis, Silliman College’s master, sending out an email addressing the subject of Halloween costumes, which, as we have noted before, has taken on a sudden importance at colleges and universities. The email suggested that if students didn’t like someone else’s costume, they should “look away, or tell them you are offended.”

This was seen by many students as soft on Halloween costumes. They accosted Professor Christakis and unleashed the fury that is characteristic, these days, of unstable college students. In the video below, a young woman, presumably a Yale student, screams profanities at Professor Christakis for reasons that appear unintelligible:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QqgNcktbSA

Read the whole thing. (And don’t miss the freaky-deaky cult-like finger-snapping rather than the more — I can’t believe I’m typing this — “triggering” sound of applause. Either that, or the Sharks and the Jets from West Side Story are getting ready to rumble on the Yale campus.)

I was afraid to say it, for fear of sounding too fuddy-duddy or Pollyanna-ish, but my first thought when watching the video on Friday was very much akin to the question that Hinderaker asks: “What happened to the girl who screamed at the professor? When I was in college this would have been unthinkable. But if someone had not only thought of it but done it, he surely would have been expelled from school. Somehow I suspect that won’t happen here.”

No, of course not — “Yale administrators apologize for not creating ‘safe spaces’ on campus.” Hot Air noted on Sunday. On Friday, Reason’s Robby Soave wrote, “Yale just became ground zero in the campus free speech wars” — but it looks like they’re more than willing to discuss surrender terms.

To paraphrase one of the subheads of the excellent write-up of the incident by Haley Hudler of FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), what does this moment say about the future of freedom of expression and the marketplace of ideas? (Or the lack thereof?)

Are the students’ protests against the Christakises protected speech? Of course.

But the students’ demand that the Christakises lose their jobs for their dissident opinions represents another strong example of the phenomenon Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt talked about in their September cover story for The Atlantic, “The Coddling of the American Mind.” In their article, Lukianoff and Haidt argue that students are increasingly engaging in a culture of “vindictive protectiveness” that seeks to control campus speech in a way that not only limits free expression and chills candor, but that can also promote distorted ways of thinking.

The theory proposed by Lukianov and Haidt, as blogger Ace of Spades paraphrases in his post on the Yale student’s meltdown, “is that colleges and the SJW left is now engaging in a very massive negative cognitive behavioral therapy session, which, instead of teaching people to control their feelings and remain in command of themselves, is instead conditioning them to be hysterics and neurotics who scream and foot-stomp over anything at all.” To become “the cry-bullies,” “a hideous hybrid of victim and victor,” that Julie Burchill profiled in the UK Spectator earlier this year.

And as Glenn noted, in linking to Hot Air’s post on Yale’s apology for its lack of “safe spaces,” “This is basically an admission that much of the student body is mentally ill.” Yale certainly played a role in making the students that way — which is why, as Milo Yiannopoulos tweets, “It gives me so much pleasure to see liberal professors face to face with the monsters they created.”

With a little help from the Obama administration, of course.

Exit quote from Daniel Lin, economics professor at American University: “Someone told me to ‘give it the old college try,’ so I crumbled into an incoherent mess when I heard an opinion that differed from mine.”

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Obama Fails To Fight Putin’s Propaganda Machine.

WHILE THE PRESS IS OCCUPYING ITSELF WITH MARCO RUBIO’S SPENDING ON TILES, A FLASHBACK FROM MARCH: The Jeffrey Epstein Affair Imperils Hillary Clinton’s Presidential Prospects: The case of the high-flying (alleged) pedophile reveals a broken American political process.

I wonder if George Stephanopoulos will have Hillary or Bill on to answer some tough questions.

GREATER FRIEND HAS NO CAT: Cat donates his kidney to fellow cat.

NEWS WE CAN USE: Why do all the other supermarket checkout queues always move faster than yours?

PERHAPS GROUPING KIDS WHO HAVE NOTHING IN COMMON BUT AGE IN A CLASSROOM IS NOT THE MOST EFFECTIVE TEACHING METHOD: Hillary Clinton: Most charter schools ‘don’t take the hardest-to-teach kids, or, if they do, they don’t keep them’.

A QUESTION WE SHOULD ALL ASK: Though his answers would become mush in the hands of the current establishment. A venture capitalist searches for the purpose of school. Here’s what he found. (I suspect for most places and parents the answer would be “Keeping the kids out of trouble while the parents work.  And that is the root of most of our educational problems.)

OF COURSE IT IS: ‘Trumbo’ is a whitewash of an unrepentant Hollywood commie.

NEWS FROM MY FIELD: Advance and Retreat.

I WISH IT WERE SILLY:Whose hands are on the warning triggers?

INSTEAD IT ECLIPSED PARIS: How New York City could have looked like Paris.

TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE: Migration crisis: EU gambles on sweeteners for Africa.

THEY ALSO SERVE: Homefront heroine: Sybil Stockdale’s fight for MIAs, POWs.