THEY TOLD ME IF WE RE-ELECTED BARACK OBAMA, SHARIA LAW WOULD GOVERN AMERICA’S HEARTLAND. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! Univ. of Missouri prof arrested for dragging hijab-less teenage girl by the hair. “Youssif Zaghwani Omar, an assistant professor at the University of Missouri, was arrested on suspicion of child abuse this past week for ‘allegedly grabbing a 14-year-old female relative by the hair and dragging her into a car after he noticed she wasn’t wearing a hijab.’ Omar was at a local high school when he saw the girl without the Muslim headscarf.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE: “Gaming Out The Holidays, and Why You Should Think Hard Before Doing It:”

So, you want to run a holiday-themed adventure for your tabletop roleplaying game (RPG) campaign.  Let’s skip ahead: yes, you really want to run one. No, you don’t care that they’re usually contrived and heavy-handed attempts to run a joke into the ground. Alas, you don’t have any other ideas right now — or, worse, you have this one killer idea, and you’re all agog to make your vision a reality.  Have I summed it up properly?

OK, So… this is going to happen, then.  Well, let’s see if we can mitigate the damage:

From Moe Lane at PJ Lifestyle blog. And yes, given the headline, I had fun putting together the Photoshop to accompany it:

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 934.

GEORGE WILL:

As the administrative state distorts the United States’ constitutional architecture, Clarence Thomas becomes America’s indispensable constitutionalist. Now in his 25th year on the Supreme Court, he is urging the judicial branch to limit the legislative branch’s practice of delegating its power to the executive branch.

In four opinions in 112 days between March 9 and June 29, Thomas indicted the increasing incoherence of the court’s separation of powers jurisprudence. This subject is central to today’s argument between constitutionalists and progressives. The former favor and the latter oppose holding Congress to its responsibilities and restricting executive discretion.

“The Constitution,” Thomas notes in Department of Transportation v. Association of American Railroads, “does not vest the federal government with an undifferentiated ‘governmental power.’ ” It vests three distinguishable types of power in three different branches. The court, Thomas says, has the “judicial duty” to enforce the vesting clauses as absolute and exclusive by policing the branches’ boundaries.

Particularly, it should prevent Congress from delegating to executive agencies the essentially legislative power of formulating “generally applicable rules of private conduct.” Such delegation, Thomas says, erases the distinction between “the making of law, and putting it into effect.” This occurs when Congress — hyperactive, overextended and too busy for specificity — delegates “policy determinations” that “effectively permit the President to define some or all of the content” of a rule of conduct.

Today, if Congress provides “a minimal degree of specificity” in the instructions it gives to the executive, the court, Thomas says, abandons “all pretense of enforcing a qualitative distinction between legislative and executive power.” As a result, the court has “overseen and sanctioned the growth of an administrative system that concentrates the power to make laws and the power to enforce them in the hands of a vast and unaccountable administrative apparatus that finds no comfortable home in our constitutional structure.”

Yes, the judicial abdication has been stunning.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: Walter Olson: Some Highlights Of The Student Campus Demands.

AT AMAZON, deals galore in the Holiday Gift Guide.

And there are fresh “lightning deals” every hour, so keep checking!

HOW’S THAT WHOLE “ARAB SPRING” WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? Ross Douthat compares Syria with Spain in the 1930s.

FLASHBACK: How To Spot And Critique Censorship Tropes In The Media’s Coverage Of Free Speech Controversies.

PETER THIEL: If You’re Serious About The Environment, You Need To Back Nuclear Power.

The single most important action we can take is thawing a nuclear energy policy that keeps our technology frozen in time. If we are serious about replacing fossil fuels, we are going to need nuclear power, so the choice is stark: We can keep on merely talking about a carbon-free world, or we can go ahead and create one.

We already know that today’s energy sources cannot sustain a future we want to live in. This is most obvious in poor countries, where billions dream of living like Americans. The easiest way to satisfy this demand for a better life has been to burn more coal: In the past decade alone, China added more coal-burning capacity than America has ever had. But even though average Indians and Chinese use less than 30 percent as much electricity as Americans, the air they breathe is far worse. They deserve a third option besides dire poverty or dirty skies. . . .

What’s especially strange about the failed push for renewables is that we already had a practical plan back in the 1960s to become fully carbon-free without any need of wind or solar: nuclear power. But after years of cost overruns, technical challenges and the bizarre coincidence of an accident at Three Mile Island and the 1979 release of the Hollywood horror movie “The China Syndrome,” about a hundred proposed reactors were canceled. If we had kept building, our power grid could have been carbon-free years ago.

The anti-nuclear movement was put together by Tom Hayden et al. in the 1970s as a means of keeping the Vietnam-protest infrastructure alive. It was a very expensive choice for America, but what did they care? They were externalizing costs and internalizing benefits, just like the polluters they purported to despise.

JAZZ SHAW: What to Do About Guns and the Mentally Ill?

LOVING BIG BROTHER: Occidental Professors Voting to Give Students Power to Report Them for Microaggressions.

ON CAMPUS, A CLIMATE OF FEAR: Student publication Mocks ‘Safe Spaces’ And Gets Targeted for Defunding.

WITH ALL EYES ON ISIS, IRAN ‘DRILLS’ ISRAEL’S DESTRUCTION.

Don’t worry, I’m sure they don’t mean it — and “unexpectedly,” neither does AP.

NOBODY TELL NOTORIOUS ROBOPHOBE MATT YGLESIAS: The ‘world’s sexiest robot’ revealed: Eerily life-like female android turns heads in China.

RATHERGATE: Hollywood Trying to Rewrite History Again.

DAN MCLAUGHLIN: The Myth of “4 Million Conservative Voters Stayed Home in 2012.″

To the extent that any of these analyses are based on the proposition that Romney got millions fewer votes than McCain, they are provably wrong. What happened is pretty simple: some states and localities take longer to count the votes than others – some big cities are notorious for this, some count absentee ballots slowly, California traditionally counts very slowly, and some of the jurisdictions hit hard by Hurricane Sandy in 2012 were understandably slow getting finalized. But the final numbers are not what was originally available in the immediate aftermath of the election:

In 2004, George W. Bush got 62,039,572 votes vs 59,027,115 for John Kerry.

In 2008, John McCain got 59,950,323 votes vs 69,499,428 for Barack Obama – in other words, McCain lost about 2 million votes from what Bush had received, while Obama gained over 10 million vs Kerry’s total.

In 2012, Mitt Romney got 60,934,407 votes vs 65,918,507 for Obama – a million more votes for Romney than McCain, and 3.5 million fewer for Obama (but still up around 6 million compared to Kerry).

Presumably, some of Bush’s voters in 2004 stayed home in 2008 and 2012, while others switched to Obama or one of many minor third party candidates. But even if we compare Romney to Bush, he’s off by only a little over a million votes, not such an enormous number in an electorate of around 130 million people. And exit polling doesn’t really support the notion that self-identified conservatives were noticeably missing. . . .

So, the cavalry isn’t coming. The number of people who voted for a past Republican presidential candidate and not for Mitt Romney likely isn’t be much above the 1 million to 1.5 million range, not enough by itself to cover the distance between Romney and Obama, and the missing stay-at-home voters did not appreciably cut into the proportion of voters who think of themselves as “conservatives.”

But this doesn’t mean the electorate really is static, or that there’s no opportunity to improve on it. What it means is that the missing potential Republican voters are mostly people who have not been regular voters in the recent past, and many of them may not be politically engaged people who think of themselves as conservatives, whether or not their actual beliefs are.

Read the whole thing.

MY FRIEND BLAKE POWERS IS HAVING A BLACK FRIDAY SALE: Flight of the Fantasy is 99c; Slaughterhouse is free; and A Different View, with an introduction by yours truly is also 99c

PROBABLY A COMET: Alien megastructure? Nothing to see around formerly weird star, scientists say.  Yes, Yes, I know.
Happy now?

IT’S MY BACKUP IF SMOD FAILS US AGAIN: CERN’s Large Hadron Collider hits 1-PeV milestone with heavy ions (and re-ignites doomsday talk).

BUT WHAT SOUND DOES GRASS MAKE AS IT GROWS: A Graphene Microphone Could Pick Up Sounds Far Beyond the Limits of Human Hearing.

SO IT’S NOT FOR SEX: What is it for? Why Are Tarantulas Blue?

INSOMNIA THEATER (FIREFLY EDITION): I hope you all had a very happy Thanksgiving! As a celebration of the holidays, today’s post features a fun blast from the past: legendary author Neil Gaiman takes a look at an absurd case at the University of Wisconsin – Stout that combined two of my passions—freedom of speech and the beloved, yet short-lived sci-fi series Firefly.

Back in 2011, UW-Stout tried to censor the posters Professor James Miller had put on his office door, including one featuring a quote from Firefly. Stout stood by its actions until FIRE’s advocacy campaign on Miller’s behalf inspired Gaiman, along with Firefly actors Nathan Fillion and Adam Baldwin, to take to Twitter to encourage their millions of followers to contact the university with their support of free speech.

You can check out the video below, as well as my write-up of the whole Stout-Firefly debacle over at The Huffington Post.

FASTER PLEASE: Super-Strong Diamond Nanothread Has People Dreaming Of A Space Elevator.

GEEK NEWS: Mystery Science Theater 3000 reboot lands Felicia Day as New Mad Scientist.