MILO YIANNOPOULOS: Game Of Thrones Is Relentlessly Sexist… But Not Against Women.

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THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED: Why It Pays to Be a Jerk: New research confirms what they say about nice guys. One can choose to be an old-fashioned gentleman, but the genuine article was not a Nice Guy in the modern sense, but a person who was never unintentionally rude and who could be, as Robert Heinlein noted, “a cast-iron son of a bitch” when it suited.

GOOD: New Electronics Kit-Makers Aim to Awaken the Next Generation of Engineers.

For years I’ve been profiling great engineers—Nobel Prize holders, IEEE Medal of Honor winners. And so very often they tell me that their first involvement in anything electronic was building a Heathkit project.

Heathkits, they tell me, were magical—they were simple enough to put together and well enough explained that just about anyone could succeed. And the projects were things that kids wanted and would use—mostly radios, amplifiers, and other equipment for listening to music that for millennials have been supplanted by iPods and Pandora.

Heathkit closed down its kit business in the early 90s; kids interested in technology at the time wanted to code, not build things. New electronic building toys did emerge, like Lego Mindstorms and SnapCircuits. But none have dominated like Heathkit.

So there’s still room for the next Heathkit—lots of startups are vying for that title. And there’s still a general sense that these kinds of toys are important—to interest boys and girls in STEM careers early.

My nephew likes both SnapCircuits and Mindstorms. He’s big on Arduino now.

NASA STUDY: These 18 Houseplants Help Purify Your Home’s Air.

STATE-BY-STATE CONSIDERATION IS HOW IT’S SUPPOSED TO WORK:  A psychiatry professor’s WSJ oped, “The Assisted Suicide Movement Goes on Life Support,” explains why voters in liberal/progressive states such as Massachusetts have refused, and California is presently hesitating, to follow in the footsteps of existing right-to-die states such as Oregon and Washington.

Californians are realizing that assisted suicide represents the slipperiest of slopes. This can be especially true for those who rely on emergency rooms for primary care, lack health-care access, or who predominantly come from minority or immigrant communities with documented health-care disparities where many remain uninsured. They would have every reason to mistrust a health-care system under considerable pressure to drive down costs.

Furthermore, what message are we sending to teens and young adults if California legislators promote suicide as an appropriate response to difficult life circumstances? Suicide in the U.S. is a public-health crisis. Studies have repeatedly demonstrated a “social contagion” aspect to suicide, which leads to copycat suicides. . . .

The suicide rates in Oregon rose dramatically in the years following the legalization of assisted suicide there in 1997. After declining in the 1990s, rates rose between 2000 and 2010, surpassing the rate of increase nationally. As of 2010, suicide rates were 35% higher in Oregon than the national average.

As a psychiatrist, I have evaluated thousands of individuals who tell me they want to die. If they are helped through these crises—given the medical, psychological and social support they need—they are later grateful for that intervention.

A large body of psychiatric research has demonstrated that 80% to 90% of suicides are associated with depression or other treatable mental disorders. Yet only 5% of the individuals who have died by assisted suicide under Oregon’s permissive law were referred for psychiatric consultation before their death. This lack of basic psychological evaluation and treatment constitutes medical negligence.

I’m not so sure that California will reject the measure as did Massachusetts. Earlier this week, the California Medical Association became the first medical association to withdraw formal opposition of physician-assisted suicide, in exchange for language in the ballot measure that would allow health care professionals to “opt out” of the practice, if enacted.

Allowing States to experiment with new social policies is the appropriate way to handle issues about which there is tremendous disagreement– whether assisted suicide, gay marriage, abortion, polygamy or anything else.  In a federal system such as ours, the national government has only limited and enumerated powers, and the residuum remains with the States.  The Constitution does not mention any of these things, of course, and constitutionalizing them upsets the federalism architecture, imposing a one-size-fits-all decision when it would be much better to simply allow the people to decide, state-by-state, via the democratic process.

TWO BIRDS WITH ONE STONES: Heavy radiation suits for Mars will also reduce low-gravity bone loss. Plus: “Someone taking a hike on the surface of Mars could easily carry a backpack that weights hundreds of pounds on Earth. A longer duration hiking trip on Mars would be possible because of the amount of weight hikers could carry. If the hikers had a cart to put their equipment on and pushed the cart a pair of hikers could probably easily push materials that would weigh 700+ pounds on Earth.” Do bear in mind, of course, that weight declines but inertial mass remains the same.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 744.

IF ISIS IS JV, THEN OUR ADMINISTRATION IS PEEWEE LEAGUE: Walter Russell Mead: A Tactical Success, A Strategic Failure.

This weekend saw U.S. Special Forces pull off a stunning raid, flying deep into Syrian territory in an attempt to capture a senior Islamic State leader called Abu Sayyaf. Sayyaf, a Tunisian citizen, was killed in the raid, but his wife was caught and the raid produced “a significant intelligence gain” according to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.
Around the same time, however, the Islamic State made huge strides in Iraq by taking over the city of Ramadi, the largest city in Sunni al-Anbar province, only 68 miles west of Baghdad. ISIS boasted of seizing tanks and executing dozens of Iraqi soldiers and militants. The United States increased its bombing campaign around Ramadi as Shi’a militia began massing for an assault to retake the city.

The success of the Syria raid and the collapse in Ramadi paradoxically point to the same grim fact: America’s chosen policies in the Middle East are failing—and the Obama administration faces uglier and uglier alternatives as it looks ahead.

The raid in Syria was a tactical triumph and points to the enduring strengths of America’s elite fighting units. But it also underscores a failure of administration policy: staying out of Syria is getting harder, the costs of inaction in Syria are growing, and the options for getting into Syria keep getting uglier.

When your preferred strategy is to put problems off until after the next election, problems that could have been easily addressed when small become problems that require major efforts, and risks, to address. Pretty sure Obama’s plan is to continue to put that off until . . . after the next election, when it’s somebody eles’s problem. In essence, that’s what Clinton did with Osama bin Laden in the 1990s.

SO NOW IT’S A CLIMATE “WAR”:  The rhetoric on global warming climate change is heating up  (pun intended).  In addition to President Obama’s recent remarks to the Coast Guard Academy–when he said “the science is indisputable” and “[b]y the middle of this century, Arctic summers could be essentially ice free”–the liberal/progressive forces are gearing up to scare LIVs into believing global warming climate change is a national security risk.  An oped by CNN’s homeland security analyst Juliette Kayyem is now trying to co-opt the overused “war on” shibboleth:

It is often a misleading analogy, but it is meant to get the public to respond to a dire need, just as they would in wartime. The terminology, however, is entirely accurate — and literal — when it comes to our need to address the changing environment as “the war on climate change.”

. . .

Skeptics of these global seismic shifts are not simply denying science, they are denying safety and security. Until we recognize — with the immediacy we would if a nation launched missiles against our cities — that climate change isn’t something that can be debated, but must be mitigated or, failing that, adapted to, we will not expend the effort or resources to prepare ourselves to the one phenomenon that we know is coming: simply, the waters are rising and this is a war.

So now, if one rejects massive economic reorganization based upon ever-changing evidence of cyclical, fluctuating global temperatures, one is not merely a “science denier,” but also putting U.S. national security at risk.  Ironic, given that this accusation is coming from the same people who are so intimidated by ISIS that they dare not insult Mohammed, and think that talking about “radical Islam” is discriminatory because hey, as President Obama said, “Islam is a religion of peace.”  But global warming climate change!– now that’s a real security risk!

These radical climatists don’t want to hear about contrary evidence, of which there is plenty.  And indeed, if someone dares to publicly disagree with the progressive orthodoxy on global warming climate change, he is likely to be branded a heretic.

I hope the Republican candidates for President are readying themselves to punch back twice as hard when the mainstream media and Queen Hillary hit them with this “national security” accusation.

WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE WHEN YOU RUN OUT OF OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY: Greek hospitals cannot afford painkillers, scissors or sheets as budget cuts bite.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The Other Lesson of Kennesaw: Social Media Puts A Face on Faceless Abusive Administrators.

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SO I’VE BEEN TALKING ABOUT THIS FOR YEARS, AND NOW IT’S FINALLY SEEING A BIT OF TRACTION: Senate would put colleges on hook for student loan default: Bipartisan push seen as way to make schools accountable.

Only 37 percent of student borrowers are current on their loans and paying down debt, and from 2004 to 2014 there’s been an 89-percent increase in the number of borrowers, and the average balance on their loans has increased 77 percent, according to a study released last month by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

The ripple effect is felt throughout the economy, as young adults delay purchasing homes or starting businesses.

Hey, that sounds kinda familiar. So does this:

Among other ideas, Mr. Alexander said part-time students shouldn’t be able to borrow as much as full-time students, and perhaps colleges should be allowed to counsel borrowers more frequently or cap the amount students can borrow.

Senate Democrats, including Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois, Patty Murray of Washington and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, are pushing Mr. Reed’s bill, which would force colleges repay a share of defaulted loans if at least a quarter of their students use federal aid.

As it stands, colleges do not face federal penalties unless the percentage of borrowers who default within three years of entering repayment, known as the “cohort default rate,” reaches a high bar of 30 percent. The national rate is much lower, close to 14 percent.

All is proceeding as I have foreseen.

STRAIGHT TALK: Ashe Schow: 2015 commencement speakers step away from preferred narratives.

Actor Matthew McConaughey (“alright, alright, alright”) had probably the best line of the season. He may not have intentionally decided to take on “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” — code words invented to explain why college students can’t handle reading or hearing things that challenge their worldviews — but he did.

“Life’s not fair,” McConaughey told University of Houston graduates last Friday. “It never was, isn’t now and won’t ever be. Do not fall into the entitled trap of feeling like you’re a victim. You are not.”

Although some students were unhappy that McConaughey was paid $135,000 for his speech, his message was probably worth the price. He offered a corrective for the seemingly endless stream of stories about the fragility of college students. (The latest example comes from a Columbia University student who thinks Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” is offensive.)

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright stepped away from the Obama administration’s preferred narrative that all is well in the world, that violent extremism is “on the run” and that only tepid responses to terror are necessary.

“The world’s a mess,” Albright told students at Tufts University. Before that she spoke of “rising sectarianism and extremism in the Middle East,” income inequality and how “technology has given new destructive tools to groups who use religion as a license to murder, as if God’s commandment were ‘thou shalt kill.'”

Some of what she said — income inequality, climate change and the “assumptions” of past generations — are among President Obama’s favorite talking points. But her central message – that the “world’s a mess” – is not so much. Obama seems to prefer making Americans think the true mess is at home. Albright cheered the U.S. as the “brightest beacon of human liberty,” and she managed to do it without the “but” that so often follows when Obama says such things.

Then there was English novelist Ian McEwan, who admonished Dickinson College students to defend free speech. He specifically mentioned Charlie Hebdo and the boycott from PEN America.

“There’s a phenomenon in intellectual life that I call bipolar thinking,” he said. “Let’s not side with Charlie Hebdo because it might seem as if we’re endorsing George Bush’s ‘war on terror’. This is a suffocating form of intellectual tribalism and a poor way of thinking for yourself. As a German novelist friend wrote to me in anguish about the PEN affair — ‘It’s the Seventies again: Let’s not support the Russian dissidents, because it would get applause from the wrong side.’ That terrible phrase.”

McEwan went on to defend Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former Muslim who now speaks out about what she sees as the dangers inherent in that religion. Last year, Brandeis University withdrew an invitation to Hirsi Ali to receive an honorary degree after complaints by her opponents.

“Campus intolerance of inconvenient speakers is hardly new,” McEwan said.

No, but it seems to be getting worse.

Related: Robert De Niro to NYU Grads: ‘You’re F*cked.’

DAVID POST: A New Twist On Asset Forfeiture: Can the federal government “seize” the trademark rights belonging to the Mongol Nation motorcycle club? They think they can, but I doubt it.

HILLARY’S FAILED WAR OF CHOICE IN LIBYA: Email calls Clinton ‘public face of US effort in Libya.’

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is referred to as the “public face of the U.S. effort in Libya” in a 2012 memo written by Jake Sullivan, a top Clinton aide at the State Department.

The email was written months before the attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi that killed four Americans.

Sullivan’s April 2012 memo detailed Clinton’s role in Libya, framing her as “instrumental in securing the authorization, building the coalition, and tightening the noose around Qadhafi and his regime.”

It notes Clinton’s role in those efforts, including her work lobbying for United Nations sanctions against the dictator and working with coalition forces around the NATO mission to intervene in the Libyan civil war.

One of those accomplishments is the March appointment of Ambassador Chris Stevens to Benghazi, one of the four Americans killed in the attack.

The memo highlights the shift in perception of America’s role in Libya between the successful removal of dictator Moammar Gadhafi and the Benghazi attacks. Before those attacks, many saw Clinton’s work in Libya as one of her crowning achievements at State. But that’s since been overshadowed by Benghazi, which has sparked intense criticism from her Republican foes, and the ongoing turmoil in Libya.

The State Department released the email as part of the first release of messages from Clinton’s private server.

This is a modified limited hangout. Everything you get is sanitized, and none of the worst stuff is being released. And given that this stuff is actually fairly bad, that may provide a sense of what they’re holding back.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Millennials Are Ditching College and Heading Back to the Workplace.

I GET MAIL: A Letter to @Instapundit on Higher Ed Lobbying and For Profit Colleges.

ED DRISCOLL: Gaslighting, Then And Now. “We’ve mentioned the left devouring its own several times in recent months. The ‘campus rape epidemic’ seems like a bizarre intellectual climate to serve as the background for Hillary’s campaign — and she has no one else to blame but her fellow Democrats for creating it. Or am I simply gaslighting myself?”

It certainly presents opportunities.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Report Blasts ‘Fantasy World’ of Presidential Benefits.

An Illinois Senate report will be released today blasting the “fantasy world of lavish perks” for presidents of public colleges and universities, The Chicago Tribune reported. The study criticizes funds given to presidents for cars, homes and clubs as well as large severance packages provided to a number of presidents. Some legislators are expected to introduce a bill that would, among other things, limit severance payments to one year’s salary.

Higher education leaders (and not just in Illinois) tend to defend various benefits for presidents as needed to recruit top talent. But the report says that these benefits have hurt important values. “This has led to a culture of arrogance and a sense of entitlement reflected in many of these executive compensation plans, with an apparent disregard for middle-class families whose taxes and tuition dollars are funding these exorbitant salaries and excessive fringe benefits,” the report says.

Well, yes. That said, the real harm isn’t done by fat salaries at the top, but by the swelling ranks of mid-level administrators with high-five and low-six figure salaries, plus expensive staffs, travel allowances, etc. And when you look at dumb, PC stuff happening on campus, it’s almost always the fault of one of these apparatchiks.

MATT DRUDGE: “If Republicans lose 2016, it can be traced to tonight’s trade deception. At least with Hillary we will get Sex, Drugs and Lawrence Welk…”

ROGER SIMON: A Memorial Weekend Review For Election 2016.