AS MARK STEYN SAYS, THE FUTURE BELONGS TO THOSE WHO SHOW UP: The Childless Millennial: A new report finds that today’s twentysomethings have a lower birthrate than any previous generation. Of course, birthrates always plunge under socialism. . . .

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ACE SUMMARIZES AS ONLY ACE CAN: At Brandeis, Where an Indifferent, Mediocre Semi-Education Will Set You Back $60,000 Per Year, An Attempt to Educate Students About “Microagressions” and “Triggers” Is Deemed to Itself be a Triggering Microaggression.

THE MORAL IMPERATIVE OF CAR CONTROL!:   Motor vehicle accidents killed 35,369 Americans in 2013.  So I’m sure the Democrats will be calling for “car control” soon.  Right?  We need to take these dangerous instruments out of peoples’ hands!  Too many people are dying because of cars!

The accidental discharge of guns, btw, was involved in only 505 deaths.  And of course there’s that pesky Second Amendment that impedes progressives’ gun-free nirvana.

HEY, BLOOMBERG PAYS HIM TO SPOUT THAT CRAP, NOT TO DEFEND IT: Michael Bloomberg gun group’s research director refuses on-air debate with longtime researcher. “The research director for Everytown for Gun Safety, the gun control advocacy group co-founded by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, recently refused to appear for an on-air debate with longtime gun law researcher John Lott on C-SPAN’s’“Washington Journal.'”

It’s an astroturf group with talking-point “research.” Dialogue is not their friend, and they know it.

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WHO COULD HAVE SEEN THIS COMING? When Minimum-Wage Hikes Hit a San Francisco Comic-Book Store. “I’m hearing from a lot of customers, ‘I voted for that, and I didn’t realize it would affect you.’”

Plus: “My jaw dropped. Eighty-thousand a year! I didn’t know that. I thought we were talking a small amount of money, something I could absorb.” Progressives don’t do the math. If they did, they wouldn’t be progressives.

WELL, IT’LL BE EASIER ONCE WE GET THOSE REACTIONLESS THRUSTERS UP TO SPEED: Europe’s Next Space Chief Wants a Moon Colony on the Lunar Far Side.

I DON’T KNOW, THEY’RE A POOR REPLACEMENT FOR MY GENERATOR: Tesla Home Battery Packs. Though the generator is for occasional outages, and these would be for power-rate arbitrage, buying at off-peak hours for a lower price to supply power at peak hours when prices are higher. Such batteries would also add resilience to the grid, which would be good.

FASTER, PLEASE: New test can predict cancer up to 13 years before disease develops: People who develop cancer have shorter telomeres, the caps at the end of chromosomes which protect the DNA. People have previously feared that artificially lengthening telomeres — which would tend to retard aging — might make cancer more likely. This suggests not.

IMMIGRATION: Disney Fires IT Staff En Masse, Replaces Them With H1-B Immigrants:

For the sponsoring company, what could be better? Management gets the compliant, lower-cost foreign labor often associated with outsourcing without having to deal with the hassles of unreliable remote monitoring or the overhead of having to open a satellite office in Bangalore.

But for foreign workers, there’s a catch: the employee is tied to the company that sponsors the visa. She cannot switch jobs, quit to found a startup, or indeed leave in protest of lower pay or dissatisfaction without forfeiting her immigration status. Moreover, upon termination, she is required to leave the country (unless, as is unlikely, she is able to find a second, established employer here in the U.S. to sponsor her directly).

A healthy U.S. immigration policy, as opposed to what we currently have, would encourage responsible levels of legal immigration, ideally adjustable to prevailing economic conditions, and have a high priority for skilled workers. It would also keep illegal immigration as low as is possible.

In addition, what a healthy immigration policy must not do—at either the low- or high-skilled level—is displace American jobs purely for corporate profit while at the same time creating an entire class of workers who do not enjoy the full rights of citizenship.

To many in our ruling class, this is not simply a feature, but the whole point. More here.

NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: 170-year-old shipwrecked champagne much like bubbly today, study finds. “We were thinking the chemical composition of this wine would be very different from the composition of wines today. . . . But that was wrong. We have found that the wines were very similar.”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 723.

OBAMALAW?:  Al Sharpton is calling for the creation of a national police force.  And it looks like President Obama is considering the option.  While the federal government undoubtedly lacks a “police power” and the concomitant authority to create a national police force, it does have a “spending power,” implied from the Constitution’s enumerated power to levy taxes, and the Supreme Court has upheld the imposition of “strings,” or conditions, on the receipt of federal funds.

In the March 2015 Interim Report of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing--a group created by Obama’s executive order in the wake of the Ferguson incident –certain recommendations foretell plans to provide federal funding for state and local police, the receipt of which would be dependent upon such police departments meeting requirements established by the federal government, such as:

1.8.1 ACTION ITEM: The Federal Government should create a Law Enforcement Diversity Initiative designed to help communities diversify law enforcement departments to reflect the demographics of the community.

1.8.2 ACTION ITEM: The department overseeing this initiative should help localities learn best practices for recruitment, training, and outreach to improve the diversity as well as the cultural and linguistic responsiveness of law enforcement agencies.

2.1 RECOMMENDATION: Law enforcement agencies should collaborate with community members to develop policies and strategies in communities and neighborhoods disproportionately affected by crime for deploying resources that aim to reduce crime by improving relationships, greater community engagement, and cooperation.

2.2  RECOMMENDATION: Law enforcement agencies should have comprehensive policies on the use of force that include training, investigations, prosecutions, data collection, and information sharing. These policies must be clear, concise, and openly available for public inspection.

2.6 RECOMMENDATION: Law enforcement agencies should be encouraged to collect, maintain, and analyze demographic data on all detentions (stops, frisks, searches, summons, and arrests). This data should be disaggregated by school and non-school contacts.

7.1 RECOMMENDATION: The President should direct all federal law enforcement agencies to review the recommendations made by the Task Force on 21st Century Policing and, to the extent practicable, to adopt those that can be implemented at the federal level.

For recommendation 7.3, the COPS Office should consider taking actions including but not limited to the following:

Many of the report’s recommendations are probably good ideas, but the worrisome part is that the Report contemplates federal control of local police practices via conditions placed on the receipt of federal funds.  This would allow the federal government to effectively “takeover” local police practices–something the Constitution clearly would not allow the feds to do directly.

This is one to watch, folks– dangerous constitutional territory.  State and local government can easily be coerced into adopting federal policies by dangling juicy federal funds in front of them.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Is the Lost Generation of Law School Graduates Still Lost?

KEVIN WILLIAMSON: Riot-Plagued Baltimore’s Catastrophe Is Entirely Of The Democratic Party’s Own Making.

A few weeks ago, there was an election in Ferguson, Mo., the result of which was to treble the number of African Americans on that unhappy suburb’s city council. This was greeted in some corners with optimism — now, at last, the city’s black residents would have a chance to see to securing their own interests. This optimism flies in the face of evidence near — St. Louis — and far — Baltimore, Detroit, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Atlanta, Los Angeles, San Francisco . . .

St. Louis has not had a Republican mayor since the 1940s, and in its most recent elections for the board of aldermen there was no Republican in the majority of the contests; the city is overwhelmingly Democratic, effectively a single-party political monopoly from its schools to its police department. Baltimore has seen two Republicans sit in the mayor’s office since the 1920s — and none since the 1960s. Like St. Louis, it is effectively a single-party political monopoly from its schools to its police department. Philadelphia has not elected a Republican mayor since 1948. The last Republican to be elected mayor of Detroit was congratulated on his victory by President Eisenhower. Atlanta, a city so corrupt that its public schools are organized as a criminal conspiracy against its children, last had a Republican mayor in the 19th century. Its municipal elections are officially nonpartisan, but the last Republican to run in Atlanta’s 13th congressional district did not manage to secure even 30 percent of the vote; Atlanta is effectively a single-party political monopoly from its schools to its police department.

American cities are by and large Democratic-party monopolies, monopolies generally dominated by the so-called progressive wing of the party. The results have been catastrophic, and not only in poor black cities such as Baltimore and Detroit. Money can paper over some of the defects of progressivism in rich, white cities such as Portland and San Francisco, but those are pretty awful places to be non-white and non-rich, too: Blacks make up barely 9 percent of the population in San Francisco, but they represent 40 percent of those arrested for murder, and they are arrested for drug offenses at ten times their share of the population. Criminals make their own choices, sure, but you want to take a look at the racial disparity in educational outcomes and tell me that those low-income nine-year-olds in Wisconsin just need to buck up and bootstrap it? Black urban communities face institutional failure across the board every day. There are people who should be made to answer for that: What has Martin O’Malley to say for himself? What can Ed Rendell say for himself other than that he secured a great deal of investment for the richest square mile in Philadelphia? What has Nancy Pelosi done about the radical racial divide in San Francisco?

Why, blamed Republicans, of course. Plus: “Yes, Baltimore seems to have some police problems. But let us be clear about whose fecklessness and dishonesty we are talking about here: No Republican, and certainly no conservative, has left so much as a thumbprint on the public institutions of Baltimore in a generation. Baltimore’s police department is, like Detroit’s economy and Atlanta’s schools, the product of the progressive wing of the Democratic party enabled in no small part by black identity politics. This is entirely a left-wing project, and a Democratic-party project.”

Ruin follows them wherever they go — but hey, so do splendid opportunities for graft, so what do they care?

FLASHBACK: Haddock And Polsby On How Riots Occur.

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AYAAN HIRSI ALI: Islam ‘not a religion of peace,’ but could become one.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an outspoken critic of Islam, said Friday that the religion she once belonged to was not peaceful, and any politicians that claimed otherwise were not to be trusted.

Hirsi Ali made the remarks at the National Review Institute’s Idea Summit in Washington, D.C.

“Islam is not a religion of peace,” Hirsi Ali said, “but it can become a religion of peace.”

She went on to separate Muslims into three categories: jihadists, a moderate majority and reformers. Hirsi Ali said she had been a member of each group at some point in her life, and that “if there was an Islamic State when I was 15, 16, I probably would have joined it.”

She claimed that Islam is not peaceful, yet she described the majority of Muslims as observers who aren’t radical and who are being pulled in two directions — either by the jihadists or the reformers (also called “heretics,” according to Hirsi Ali).

But her speech on Friday was actually somewhat subdued from her usual style. Last November Hirsi Ali described modern feminism as being too focused on “trivial bull—-.” This time, however, she avoided such inflammatory remarks.

To be fair, Western feminists have been making that point for her ever since.

PROGRESS: University of North Carolina Votes to Remove Controversial Anti-Harassment Rule.

Earlier this week, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) Faculty Council voted to eliminate a university anti-harassment rule that’s been suspended since 2013. UNC’s Student Congress has also approved the change to this speech-restrictive policy, meaning that only UNC Chancellor Carol Folt is left to approve it. UNC law professor Richard Myers, a former federal prosecutor and outgoing chairman of the university’s Committee on Student Conduct, told the Faculty Council the rule was “unconstitutionally overbroad” and had been a source of tension for professors and student groups for a number of years.

As we previously reported, former UNC chancellor Holden Thorp suspended the rule in 2013—which prohibits “disruptive or intimidating behavior that willfully abuses, disparages or otherwise interferes” with another individual. The suspension came after student Landen Gambill was charged with violating the policy for publicly criticizing the university’s handling of her allegations of sexual assault against a fellow student.

FIRE gives this policy a “yellow light” rating in our Spotlight database, meaning the policy could be used to ban or excessively regulate speech protected by the First Amendment. As Professor Myers correctly stated, this rule is unconstitutionally overbroad because it is too subjective and can conceivably be applied to cover a wide range of speech.

FIRE is happy to see the necessary changes occurring at UNC in order to protect the First Amendment rights of all students. UNC should be proud of tackling this unconstitutional code and removing it from its Code of Conduct. If the Chancellor approves this change, the university will be in line for FIRE’s highest, “green light” rating. We very much hope to add UNC to our green light list, just as we did George Mason University recently!

I’d like to see college guides report on each school’s FIRE rating.

THE SECRET OF WHITE PRIVILEGE IS IGNORING ALL THAT CRAP: ‘Students of Color’ Group at Marquette Demands ‘White Privilege’ Classes. Marquette is really a mess these days, isn’t it? What the hell happened?

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Why men won’t marry you.

THAT KEEPS HAPPENING: Another Attack On Scott Walker Boomerangs.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Texas Tech Dean of Students: Due Process has a “Chilling Effect” on Justice at College.

Amy Murphy, the dean of students at Texas Tech, believes that giving students of her college the rights that they have access to has a “chilling effect” on people’s ability to accuse others of assault.

Murphy told Texas Tech’s college paper that, as a part of the Student Code of Conduct, students at the university do not have the right to confront their accuser. More than that, they cannot have a representative ask questions of the accuser at all, and cross-examination is simply not allowed.

According to Murphy, this process is a “learning experience” that “will be conducted in the least adversarial way possible.”

During Texas Tech hearings about alleged crimes, “students are not able to cross-examine witnesses, nor are the students’ advisers.”

“If cross-examination were to be allowed,” Murphy told the paper, “it would create a chilling effect for future possible reports.”

“We already have the information,” she explained.

Amy, you’re coming across kinda creepy here.