ROSS DOUTHAT: What the West doesn’t get about ISIS’s appeal. The West doesn’t want to admit the appeal of evil, because that would require admitting that evil exists. And if evil exists, then that implies a duty to be good, which they would find onerous and tediously old-fashioned.

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PERSPECTIVES ON GENE EDITING: To people facing a devastating inherited disease, engineering humanity sounds like a good thing.

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Atomic precision in sculpting 3-D objects. Nice that it’s happening at Oak Ridge, where there’s actually a lot of interesting stuff going on.

PLANNING TO CARRY MORE OFTEN? Amazon Has Holsters.

MAYBE WE CAN GET ONE OF THOSE FOR BULLETS AND BOURBON NEXT YEAR: Electric Centrifugal gun could fire 240,000 rounds per minute in bursts of 20 to 40 rounds.

HELEN, AT BULLETS & BOURBON:

“COURAGE IS CONTAGIOUS. Yes, but so is fear.”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 941.

JOHN HAYWARD: Lefty Hatred Unleashed By San Bernardino Jihad. “Liberals told themselves Pam Geller had it coming, too. They pumped out halfwit ‘think pieces’ about how the murder of someone who alienated an officially-designated Oppressed Victim Group like Muslims would be, perhaps, a bit unfortunate, but also understandable. It was a major bit of signaling in the Left’s tactical alliance with radical Islam, a way of letting them know American liberals were fully on board with their quest to restrict the free-speech rights of U.S. citizens.”

Plus: “The most incompetent President in American history, the man whose multi-trillion-dollar government can’t launch a website, demands absolute faith and the scourging of unbelievers. His demands grow more strident as they become more absurd. Innocent American citizens will be sacrificed to his true religion, the religion of the State — unless he and his Party are confronted and decisively defeated.”

IT’S COME TO THIS: Universities: Avoid Basically Anything Holiday-Related to Be ‘Inclusive.’

At my school, the students are even calling for the Chancellor, Jimmy Cheek, to resign over UT’s no-Christmas-party policy, which seems a bit much. State universities can’t endorse a religion, though university “diversity” bureaucracies seem incapable of doing anything in moderation, and do seem particularly hostile to traditional values. And, alas for poor Jimmy Cheek, the bar for demanding resignations from university administrators has been set pretty low of late. These “student activists” just happen to be striking from the traditional-values side instead of the PC side. That said, I don’t think he should resign.

But what people really miss here is the class angle. The people holding (or at least attending) “holiday parties” on campus are mostly staff (at the law school, we have a potluck). The staff — secretaries, maintenance guys, groundskeepers, etc. — tend to have a lot more traditional values than faculty or administrators. These kinds of policies weigh heaviest on them, but this gets little or no sympathy from the campus types who usually purport to worry about the working classes.

Some really good related thoughts here, and more here.

JAZZ SHAW: How big is Hillary’s “Rahm problem” now?

WHAT WAS YOUR FIRST CLUE? Venezuela: A Dictatorship Masquerading as a Democracy.

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ANALYSIS: TRUE.

HEH: Hillary Clinton questioned about women who accused husband of sexual assault.

Two weeks ago, Hillary Clinton tweeted that “every survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed and supported.” Of course we had to assume that she wasn’t referring to the many women who accused her husband Bill of violating them.

At a campaign event in New Hampshire on Thursday, a woman in the audience asked Hillary if believing all “survivors” meant believing Bill’s accusers as well, including Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey and Paula Jones. Hillary’s response: “I would say that everybody should be believed at first until they are disbelieved based on evidence.”

This raises some interesting questions, namely about whether this means Hillary adheres to a “guilty until proven innocent” approach to sexual assault accusations. Hillary, a former lawyer, should know how much that sentiment flies in the face of our judicial system. . . .

Currently, many who are accused of sexual assault are instantly vilified, and even if it’s proven that they did not commit the crime, their lives can be forever tarnished by the accusation. Further, if someone is accused on a college campus, he is not offered the due process protections to properly defend himself from the accusation. He is not allowed to cross-examine his accuser (sometimes he is completely blocked from seeing his accuser), he is not allowed legal representation, he cannot compel evidence and testimony is not given under oath.

And often, when accused students do present evidence that would cast doubt on an accuser’s story, that evidence is twisted as evidence of the trauma the accuser is allegedly suffering.

Hillary has already walked back her claim that all accusers should be believed. But there are many more questions about her views on how sexual assaults are handled that need to be asked, and answered.

Note, however, that it wasn’t a member of the press who asked this question.

FLASHBACK: When Democrats Thought That Letting The Feds Look At Library Records Of Suspected Terrorists Was Outright Tyranny.

BOB ZUBRIN: Who Lost Eurasia? “I leave it to the reader to divine what possible connection all of these disparate developments might have, to determine their likely combined outcome, and to decide for himself or herself to what extent intentional design plays in the unfolding historical tragedy, as opposed to sheer folly.”

EVEN THE GUARDIAN IS NOT BUYING OBAMA’S CLAIMS: Isis is expanding its international reach. That is hardly a sign of weakness.

HANGING WITH DANA LOESCH, AT BULLETS & BOURBON.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: The U.S. is running out of bombs to drop on ISIS.

RARE FIRST EDITION KING JAMES BIBLE DISCOVERED: At Drew University in New Jersey. Nothing’s more lost than something misfiled or, in this case, mis-catalogued. From the NYT report:

Brian Shetler, a doctoral candidate in book history who works in the library, discovered the Bible when he was hunting through the rare-book shelves, pulling a sampling of 17th-century books printed in England to show to a history class. It was in a box with a label mentioning “Bible,” “1611” and “R. Barker,” a seeming reference to the London printer Robert Barker.

“I just thought, ‘Oh, that’s interesting,’” Mr. Shetler said. “I knew Barker had published the King James Bible, but I thought there was no way we would have one and not know about it.”…

Material in the library’s archives indicate that the volume, which was listed in a 1950 card catalog but not in the digital catalog, was exhibited at the library in 1935 and again in 1977.

Reminds me of when economist Alan Krueger sent a grad student to the Princeton library to look something up in The Wealth of Nations and she discovered that the university owned a copy that had belonged to George Washington–thereby demonstrating that Washington had in fact owned, and presumably read, the book.

ROGER SIMON: How the ‘New York Times’ and Loretta Lynch Made Me Join the NRA:

I wouldn’t doubt the editorial board of the NYT is also aware that the policy of the Nazi party was pretty close to what they are recommending, the confiscation of guns — for the National Socialists so that they could be sure they were only in the hands of those deemed acceptable (not Jews, etc.).  To use Orwell’s term this time, that would make the NYT “objectively pro-fascist.”

But perhaps less harmful than our own government.  Reacting to the San Bernardino Islamic ideology-based terror rampage… er, workplace violence… the first thing out of our attorney general’s mouth was to warn James Comey, director of the FBI, that the real danger from this event was anti-Muslim backlash and to watch his language.  In other words, don’t call a duck a duck. According to DCWhispers, the order had come down from Obama and Jarrett to Lynch, in which order was unspecified, that Comey’s statements should be bowdlerized. It was.

Okay, I’ve had it. Mr. LaPierre, as I told you, I’m in.  You’ve got another one-time Jewish lefty in the NRA.  That should make at least one of us.

(By the way, to demonstrate my new bona fides,  I am writing this from the Bullets & Bourbon event at Rough Creek Lodge in Glen Rose, Texas.  It’s been great.  Hope you can make it next time. Photo [below] features me with Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, PJM’s Dr. Helen, and Nina Yablok, PJM’s attorney, at Rough Creek Lodge’s tactical shooting station.)

Read the whole thing.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Millennials In The Gym: “But gyms are still unable to provide the one thing younger men in particular seem to really want: a way for them to shower and change without actually being nude.”