ANOTHER TRAGIC CONSEQUENCE OF GLOBAL WARMING. . . WAIT, WHAT? Farming moves north with the temperatures.

A century ago, corn was not a viable crop above North Dakota’s southern third. But an average temperature rise of 2.7 degrees over that period has let North Dakota farmers grow feed corn up to the Canadian border. The growing season there is three weeks longer. In farming, that’s huge.

For similar reasons, soybeans now grow in upstate New York. And though the state’s Finger Lakes region has produced hardy wine grapes for a long time, milder winters have enabled it to nurture fancier European grape varieties.

As for New England, the hope is that some centuries-old farms will become profitable, as well as picturesque. Agriculture never disappeared there, but it had to concentrate on dairy products and niche crops, such as cranberries and wild blueberries. Warmer weather opens new possibilities. For example, peaches may become a commercial crop in Maine.

A paper out of Brandeis University predicts that by 2030, the New England region could have three times as much farmland as it does now, thanks to warmer weather. Should that happen, New England may end up producing half its food.

Oh, no!

MATT LEWIS: Why satire not scandal could derail Hillary Clinton’s campaign: “Serious” stories about Hillary Clinton did not attract as much coverage as her failure to leave a tip at a Mexican restaurant.

IF YOU’RE MALE AND BELONG TO A FRATERNITY, YOU HAVE NO RIGHTS. YOU EXIST ON SUFFERANCE. Kansas fraternity suspended over sexually vulgar text messages. Seriously. Remember: Crucifix in urine — vital free speech! Vulgar private messages — Death penalty offense!

UPDATE: ACLU Says Speech Protected By First Amendment. Ya think? What’s troubling is that so many university administrators seem to assume that the First Amendment only protects lefty groups, and that they have a free hand to do whatever they want to groups they dislike. These administrators should be shamed, and, ideally, fired.

The President of Washburn University is Jerry Farley. According to the story above, “Farley said he plans to implement disciplinary action once the students involved are identified.” Remember, he wants to discipline students for things said in private conversations. I wonder if what’s in his emails and texts is beyond all reproach?

PERHAPS THE BIGGEST WORRY ISN’T THE PR ANGLE: Fleeing Libya, Muslims Throw Christian Refugees Overboard.

Stories like this are catnip for nationalist parties in Europe worried about the cultural effects of immigration and inter-religious tension.

Moreover, the world is seeing enormous and possibly still growing levels of refugee migration. According to the New York Times, Syria’s neighbors are being overwhelmed by more than four million refugees, and many are taking steps to restrict the flow. Western governments have still only taken in a relatively small number of Syrian refugees, despite the UN’s calls for them to open their doors.

If “refugees” aren’t willing to act grateful and behave in a civilized fashion, let them find refuge elsewhere.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Christina Hoff Sommers gets Trigger Warnings at Georgetown. “Do these people call themselves adults?”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: The Ugly Truth About What’s Going Wrong in American Law Schools: With test scores and bar-passage rates falling, academics grope for answers.

Hey, I have some ideas!

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HEH: Star Wars ‘reeks of misogyny’: SJW satirist punks BBC World Service.

Listeners of the BBC World Service’s World Have Your Say programme were treated to a bizarre analysis of the Star Wars franchise today by a caller who claimed that “Dark Raider” was a “racial stereotype” who listened to rap music and “the only female character ends up in a gold space bikini chained to a horny space slug.”

Godfrey Elfwick is a student from Sheffield who regularly fools observers with his parody Twitter account, an off-the-deep-end “social justice warrior” persona that tweets bizarrely and hilariously about racism, sexism, misogyny and other favoured topics of the political Left.

Elfwick attracted the attention of the BBC World Service today, when he tweeted that he had never seen Star Wars. A World Service presenter who was producing a segment in the wake of the recently-released trailer for Star Wars Episode VIII: The Force Awakens took the bait, inviting him onto the programme.

Because of course the BBC can’t tell the difference between an outlandish, obviously fake social-justice obsessed parody account and a normal member of the public.

Did I say “heh?” Heh. I mean, these people have pretty much moved beyond parody, which makes the successful parodists all the more heroic.

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Judge: City can’t enforce proposed gun ban at music festival.

BECAUSE EQUALITY: Female Group Ejected From Comic Expo For Criticizing Feminism.

HEY, WAPO, YOU SPELLED “DEMOCRATS GRATUITUOUSLY INJECT RACE INTO DEBATE” WRONG: Race creeps into debate over stalled nomination for attorney general. Remember, she’s actually being held up over an abortion controversy.

That said, I think from now on we should only have white males in positions of authority, because they’re the only ones who can’t play the race/gender card whenever any criticism comes up. America, as the Obama experiment has demonstrated, isn’t ready for diversity in government yet.

GOVERNMENT IS JUST A WORD FOR THE THINGS WE CHOOSE TO DO TOGETHER, LIKE JAIL PEOPLE BASED ON BOGUS EVIDENCE: FBI overstated forensic hair matches in nearly all trials before 2000.

The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.

Of 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory’s microscopic hair comparison unit, 26 overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors in more than 95 percent of the 268 trials reviewed so far, according to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and the Innocence Project, which are assisting the government with the country’s largest post-conviction review of questioned forensic evidence.

The cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death. Of those, 14 have been executed or died in prison, the groups said under an agreement with the government to release results after the review of the first 200 convictions.

The FBI errors alone do not mean there was not other evidence of a convict’s guilt. Defendants and federal and state prosecutors in 46 states and the District are being notified to determine whether there are grounds for appeals. Four defendants were previously exonerated.

The admissions mark a watershed in one of the country’s largest forensic scandals, highlighting the failure of the nation’s courts for decades to keep bogus scientific information from juries, legal analysts said.

Problems with the FBI forensic lab were a staple of InstaPundit in its very earliest days. And yet. . . . Would a private organization with such low standards have survived?

VICTOR SHARPE: There Is A Storm Coming.

AMERICA’S FIVE WORST WARTIME PRESIDENTS.

BRENDAN O’NEILL: Hopkins Hate and the inhumanity of political correctness. “What kind of twisted society would be made more irate by 400 words in a newspaper column than by the deaths of 400 human beings at sea? Our society. Britain in 2015…. It’s official: we’re now more offended by words than by death. Behold the otherworldliness, even inhumanity, of political correctness, which bristles more at the terms used to describe a horrific event than it does at the event itself.”

MEGAN MCARDLE: How the Internet Became a Shame-Storm.

Shame is one way we enforced good behavior in small groups before there were laws or trading networks. It is a very powerful motivator, and it helps us to come together in large cooperative groups with high degrees of trust and sharing. A hatred of being shamed ourselves and a love of shaming others who have transgressed both literally helped to make us human. . . .

So we need shame. The problem is, maybe we don’t always need so much of it.

In the small groups we evolved to live in, shame is tempered by love and forgiveness. People are shamed for some transgression, then they are restored to the group. Ultimately, the shamed person is not an enemy; he or she is someone you need and want to get along with. This is how you make up with your spouse after one or both of you has done or said something terrible.

In a large group, shame is punishment, but it still has a restorative aspect. One of the most surprising passages of Ronson’s book reveals that the drunken driver who had to stand by the side of the road with a sign detailing his crimes got more compassion and support than bitter catcalls from the people who drove by him.

On the Internet, when all the social context is stripped away and you don’t even have to look at the face of the person you’re being mean to, shame loses its social, restorative function. Shame-storming isn’t punishment. It’s a weapon. And weapons aren’t supposed to be used against people in your community; they’re for strangers, people in some other group that you don’t like very much.

Hence the term “Social Justice Warrior.” War is what you wage on the enemy, the other. And that’s what they do. They’re not well-meaning people who want to make our shared society better, and sometimes just get carried away. They’re angry, vicious people who want to eliminate disagreement.

THEOLOGICAL THOUGHTS, from Dalrock: “One of the problems with modern Christian culture is the misconception that loving is a synonym for nice. Jesus is often considered to be a sort of passive non judgmental friend, instead of our Lord, our Master.”

I am reminded of one of the Narnia books, where it’s pointed out that Aslan isn’t a tame lion.

UPDATE: Heh. And, heh, again. Also, heh.

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SEXISM IN SOCIETY: The denigration of men: Ridiculed, abused, exploited – the triumph of feminism has made today’s men second class citizens, argues a deliciously provocative new book. And it’s time the chaps fought back.

Men are brilliant. Seriously, we are. We invented philosophy, medicine, architecture, cars, trains, helicopters, submarines and the internet. Not to mention the jet engine, IVF, electricity and modern medicine.

We’ve led all the industrial revolutions and sent rockets into Space. We’ve fought wars with tin hats and bayonets and won them. The world we live in would be nothing without Alexander Graham Bell, Sigmund Freud, Horatio Nelson, Winston Churchill, William Shakespeare and Albert Einstein. The geniuses Leonardo da Vinci, Stephen Hawking, Michelangelo, Beethoven, Charles Darwin and Michael Faraday have all contributed immeasurably to our modern lives.

So why is it that, today, there has there never been a worse time to be a man? Rubbishing the male of the species and everything he stands for is a disturbing — and growing — 21st century phenomenon. It is the fashionable fascism of millions of women — and many, many men, too. Instead of feeling proud of our achievements, we men are forced to spend our time apologising for them. When people chide us for not being able to multi-task or use a washing machine we join in the mocking laughter — even though we invented the damned thing in the first place.

The new book is Peter Lloyd’s Stand By Your Manhood.

SEXISM IN THE GAMING WORLD: Alison Tieman on bullying by Expo Equality and Calgary Expo.

Related: Welcome to Calgary Expo (Alternate Opinions Unwelcome) : The Honey Badger Affair.

JOURNALISM: BuzzFeed Deleted Posts Under Pressure from Its Own Business Department.

VIDEO: Gorilla races toward girl, cracks zoo exhibit glass, almost fulfills our nightmares.

That’s worse than this. What’s amazing is how many of those lion-tries-to-eat-baby videos there are.

SEE, I’VE BEEN JOKING THAT I’M STILL IN “LATE YOUTH,” BUT NOW MY VIEWS ARE SUPPORTED BY SCIENCE!!! Middle age begins at 60, say researchers. “It was not so very long ago that hitting the milestone birthday of 40 was the time to accept that middle age had arrived. No more. Researchers have suggested that mid-life begins at 60, just as most people are contemplating the joys of retirement and a free bus pass. Scientists say that with increased life expectancy we need to rethink our ideas of what constitutes middle and old age otherwise the proportion of elderly people will continue to grow.”

I suggest that we define “old age” as starting at 90, thus drastically shrinking the “proportion of elderly people.” Because science!

MICHAEL S. MALONE: The Promise at Technology’s Powerful Heart: As Moore’s Law turns 50, the revolution in computing it foretold is on the cusp of even more-radical progress.

Moore’s Law is creative destruction on steroids. It regularly fosters the next wave of entrepreneurial opportunities made possible by the latest jump in chip performance. It can be blamed for much of the 90% mortality rate of electronics startups.

But because the usual graphic presentation of the law is tamed by the format into a nice shallow line, we don’t get to see the awesome power of the raw curve—which, like all exponential lines stays shallow seemingly for a long time, then suddenly curves almost straight upward in a vertiginous climb. It is the curve of a rocket’s acceleration, of a pandemic, of the cells born from a fertilized egg.

The great turning took place a decade ago, while we were all distracted by social networking, smartphones and the emerging banking crisis. Its breathtaking climb since tells us that everything of the previous 40 years—that is, the multi-trillion-dollar revolution in semiconductors, computers, communications and the Internet—was likely nothing but a prelude, a warm-up, for what is to come. It will be upon this wall that millennials will climb their careers against almost-unimaginably quick, complex and ever-changing competition.

Crowd-sharing, crowdfunding, bitcoin, micro-venture funding, cloud computing, Big Data—all have been early attempts, of varying success, to cope with the next phase of Moore’s Law. Expect many more to come. Meanwhile, as always, this new pace will become the metronome of the larger culture.

Moore’s Law has always induced de-massification: giant mainframe computers become smartwatches, giant vertically-integrated organizations are defeated by what Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds has dubbed an “Army of Davids.”

Rigid command-and-control structures in every walk of life, from corporations to governments to education, become vulnerable to competition by adaptive and short-lived alliances and confederacies. Now that process is going to attack every corner of society.

Be ready.