AT AMAZON, deals galore in Training & Fitness.

And shop the Amazon Emergency Prep Store. Plus, Emergency & Long-Term Storage Food Deals. When bad things happen, it’s good to have food.

Plus, Generators and Portable Power for Storm Season. Though the Insta-Wife was a generator-skeptic when we installed ours, a couple of outages have turned her into a believer.

VIDEO: 10 Ways To Spot A Liberal Male.

THE HUNT FOR A GOOD BAD GUY: Gavin McInnes on Canada versus “pickup artist” Roosh V:

There is a severe rape drought going on in the West; not the violent sexual assault as is broadly defined by the law but a particular kind of rape. We want wealthy white males with blond hair high-fiving each other as they torture some poor girl who was just trying to get an education. The Middle East is resplendent with these scenarios, but the guy usually has a funny hat on instead of Richie Rich hair. Here in America prison tops the rape charts, but that’s men on men, and men are gross. Firmly planted behind the prison-rape stats we have black-on-white rape clocking in at tens of thousands a year (unfortunately, the white-on-black rape stats are negligible). That sounds racist. Women were getting gang-raped en masse at spring break this year, but that was mostly blacks too so no thanks.

There is a lot of currency behind the Duke lacrosse rapist ideal. Through Title IX, the government offers financial rewards to schools for digging up sexual offenders in varsity jackets. Rapists give feminists something to fight for in a culture where women have little to complain about. This means when a woman lies about frat boys, or carries a mattress around, or simply says someone resembles a rapist, the ax falls hard.

Read the whole thing.

HILLARY VOTER: I Didn’t Wear Deodorant for a Week and Here’s What Happened. Plus, the predictable conclusion: “So it turns out I could have saved myself, and everyone around me, a lot of trouble if I has just talked to an expert first.”

FROM THE GANG THAT BROUGHT US THE OBAMACARE WEBSITE: ‘NEXTGEN’ AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL COMPUTER SYSTEM BLOWS UP.

Unexpectedly.

EIGHT THINGS YOU COULD DO IN THE PAST THAT YOU WOULDN’T DO TODAY.

That list will likely only grow, as our freedoms continue to shrink.

ANOTHER OP’NIN, ANOTHER SHOW — BUT IS ANYONE NOTICING? At the Weekly Standard, John Podhoretz explores the latest in Broadway openings, novels, and the art world, and wearily concludes, “It’s the fact that so little of what’s made these days, or written these days, or filmed these days, or performed these days, seems to provoke the kind of anticipatory thrill that once went hand-in-hand with being a serious customer, consumer, and enthusiast of culture:”

Is there a recording artist at present whose new album might elicit the sort of tingling expectancy that a new Paul Simon or Talking Heads record would have in its day? For those with more highbrow tastes, is there a classical artist whose participation in a new recording of Wagner’s Ring cycle, or a new interpretation of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, might be the talk of the town?

I remember when, in the early 1980s, Americans for whom the visual arts were profoundly important could talk of little else than the German monumentalist painter Anselm Kiefer—and this at a time when it was simply taken for granted that a cultured person was familiar with the works of the Abstract Expressionists and the post-modernists that followed them. To put it most plainly: How many living painters are household names the way Jackson Pollock was? The answer, of course, is that there isn’t a one.

This summer, everyone in New York has been lining up to see the insides of the new, $400 million building housing the Whitney Museum of American Art, but it’s doubtful that more than a handful could have identified the painters or sculptors whose work they strolled by. As Michael J. Lewis wrote in “How Art Became Irrelevant,” his magnificent essay in the current issue of Commentary: “For a generation or more, the American public has been thoroughly alienated from the life of the fine arts while, paradoxically, continuing to enjoy museums for the sake of sensation and spectacle, much as it enjoyed circuses a century ago.”

There are several elements going on here, and we’ll get deep into the tall grass right after the “continue reading” break.

(more…)

TRAINWRECK UPDATE: Most Health Insurance Co-ops Are Losing Money, Federal Audit Finds. “Most federal insurance cooperatives created under the Affordable Care Act are losing money and could have difficulty repaying millions of dollars in federal loans, an internal government audit has found, prompting the Obama administration to step up supervision of the carriers.”

NO THANK YOU: Brilliant Bar Gets You Drunk With an Alcoholic Cloud. “For the past six years, Bompas and Harry Parr have been working with scientists to perfect getting drunk on vapor. They recently opened a pop-up in London where you can—you guessed it—inhale your intoxicant. The name of this bar, Alcoholic Architecture, is a nod to the fact that you’re breathing in alcohol on a room-sized scale.”

ZZZAPPP! US Air Force combat lasers for both burning out sensors and AC-130 gunships within two years and then laser pods for other aircraft.

FORGET DRIVERLESS CARS: Autonomous Operation Coming For Trucks First?

HANDY SLEAZY RATIONALIZATIONS FOR BUYING THAT GAMING SUPPLEMENT:

So you want to buy that latest gaming supplement, but you’re trying to justify the purchase in your head. It’s not a question of money, of course: you can afford to buy it (if you cannot afford to buy it, then don’t). It’s not even a question of whether you want the supplement. You do: you just feel the need to have what the folks at the folks at the legendary comic-dystopian roleplaying game Paranoia call a ‘sleazy rationalization’ in order to buy the book. Well. I’m not here to judge. Or at least: I’m not here to judge you. So here you go: sleazy rationalizations a go-go!

From Moe Lane, at the PJ Lifestyle blog.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: War in Space May Be Closer Than Ever. “The emptiness of outer space might be the last place you’d expect militaries to vie over contested territory, except that outer space isn’t so empty anymore. About 1,300 active satellites wreathe the globe in a crowded nest of orbits, providing worldwide communications, GPS navigation, weather forecasting and planetary surveillance. For militaries that rely on some of those satellites for modern warfare, space has become the ultimate high ground, with the U.S. as the undisputed king of the hill. Now, as China and Russia aggressively seek to challenge U.S. superiority in space with ambitious military space programs of their own, the power struggle risks sparking a conflict that could cripple the entire planet’s space-based infrastructure. And though it might begin in space, such a conflict could easily ignite full-blown war on Earth.”

Here’s something I wrote a while back.

THE 21^st CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I EXPECTED: The Free Bleeders Clearly Have Not Thought About What Happens to All That Blood.

EVERYBODY HATES THEM: Comcast VP: 300GB data cap is “business policy,” not technical necessity.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Yes, rats can swim up your toilet. And it gets worse than that.  Of course, the author lives in D.C. Rats of all kinds are ubiquitous there.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 828.

BAD LUCK: First Restaurants Raise Wages. Then What?

Restaurants are running out of chefs. The work is astonishingly unglamorous: hot, manual labor performed in a tiny space. It also pays abysmally; the median hourly wage is just $11 an hour, and the 90th percentile, the elite of the profession, makes a princely $15.35. As student loan burdens have gotten more burdensome and urban real estate prices have soared, restaurants in pricey areas are finding it harder to attract workers willing to endure a long commute in order to spend hours getting hot and dirty.

Why don’t they just pay more, demands Kevin Drum? “Offer them, say, $15 per hour, and who knows? Maybe there are plenty of good entry-level cooks available. This would raise your total cost of running the restaurant by, oh, 2 percent or so, but it’s not like restaurants are competing with China. They’re competing with other restaurants nearby that have the same problem. If the price of a good cook is going up, it’s going to affect everyone.” . . .

Would people really stop going to restaurants over a measly 7 percent of the check?

Well, yes. But not all people, and not all the time. Many people would eat fewer meals outside the home. There’s a restaurant near my house that I’d say is 20 percent overpriced for the neighborhood and the quality of the food it serves. It had no competition nearby but still opened empty, and remains mostly that way a year later. The food is good — not stellar, but I’d be happy enough to eat there, if it weren’t for the fact that everything costs too much. If prices at the pub that opened nearby went up by the same amount, I wouldn’t simply start splitting my time between the two; I’d eat out less.

Americans spend a phenomenal amount of money consuming food outside their homes, and a major reason is that with restaurant labor so cheap, the convenience and price are attractive to people who don’t feel like cooking. If the wages go up, that calculus shifts. And unfortunately those “rich bosses” can’t just take it out of their profits, because margins in the industry are under 5 percent, and the difference between making that profit and closing up shop can be surprisingly thin.

People who have never run a business are good at airily dismissing such things.

DEMOCRATS IN DISARRAY: Democrat to block Obama trade nominee. “Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) said Friday that he will block a trade nominee’s Senate floor vote until the Obama administration makes the text of a sweeping transpacific agreement available to eligible staffers. Brown said he put a hold on the Marisa Lago, whose nomination for deputy U.S. trade representative cleared the Senate Finance Committee earlier this month but awaits a final confirmation vote from the full Senate.”

AT AMAZON, fresh deals on bestselling products, updated every hour.

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And, Today’s Featured Digital Deal. The deals are brand new every day, so browse and save!

INDIA’S PRIME MINISTER: LET’S AIM FOR A PROSPEROUS INDIA BY 2022.

Hey, maybe America should aim for that by then as well!

ASHE SCHOW: Judge orders USC to let accused student return to school.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Robert H. O’Brien granted Dixon’s request for a stay of the results of a disciplinary process that was “lacking in due process, with no hearing, no right to counsel, no rules of evidence, no presumption of innocence, no right to possess copies of witness statements and evidence and no right to confront witnesses against him,” according to Dixon’s writ of administrative mandate. . . .

The next day, the accuser told her boyfriend, another USC athlete, about the encounter. He was never called as a witness during the disciplinary hearing, which Dixon believes is because the boyfriend felt the encounter was consensual.

The accuser had sought medical tests a week after the encounter, but declined at the time to participate in a criminal accusation. Two weeks after the sexual encounter, the female student filed an accusation with the university.

The accusation was investigated solely by Allee, who is named in Dixon’s lawsuit against the university. Not only did Allee conduct the investigation and interview witnesses, she also was responsible for determining a judgment against Dixon and assigning sanctions.

USC claims to provide students a “fair, thorough, neutral and impartial investigation,” yet Allee’s background is in victim advocacy. So not only was she the investigator, judge and jury determining Dixon’s fate, she was also an advocate for the accuser — a conflict of interest that is only exacerbated by the fact that Dixon’s guilt in this case is by no means clear-cut. . . .

This is another clear case of accused student’s lacking any semblance of due process. Dixon was not given a hearing, allowed to see the evidence and witness statements against him or allowed to confront his accuser. He was allowed legal counsel, but his attorney could not represent or speak for him during the disciplinary process.

Dixon’s attorney, Mark Hathaway, issued a statement in response to the judge’s ruling.

“Judge O’Brien agreed with Bryce that USC’s Title IX sexual misconduct investigation was unfair and lacks due process.” Hathaway said. “USC’s investigator acts as police, prosecutor and judge. There is no hearing, no right to counsel, no rules of evidence, no presumption of innocence and no right to confront witnesses. Courts are beginning to recognize the injustice imposed on students.”

Kangaroo courts. I hope that Congress will take a hand, but until then it’s mostly the judiciary that will have to enforce accountability.

UPDATE: Note the diversity at USC’s Office Of Equity And Diversity. (Thanks, Twitter!) Can an office that contains not a single male possibly be fair to male students? Can you say “hostile educational environment?”

THE COMING PERFECT STORM ON AMERICAN COLLEGE CAMPUSES — ONE THAT FEMINISTS AND OTHER PROFESSIONAL VICTIMS WILL HATE IT, at Bookworm Room:

In the Perfect Storm scenario, the ex-boyfriend, when called before the tribunal, refuses to bow down.  He does not beg for a lawyer.  He does not offer pathetic, chauvinistic attacks against his victimized accuser.  He does not beg for mercy.

Instead, the accused ex-boyfriend claims that the charge against him cannot possibly be true.  The reality, he says, is that during the time he was dating his accuser, his gender identity was feminine.  Not only was his gender identity feminine, it was also lesbian — and to the extent his appearance on campus was externally masculine, he behaved that way because he had discovered that he had much greater sexual success as a lesbian (with sexual success defined as encounters with other women) when those same women believed he was a man.  He knew, however, at all relevant times, that he was a lesbian having sex with the woman now hiding behind a screen and accusing him of the heteronormative crime of rape.

Not only does the accused ex-lesbian boyfriend deny the charges against him, he counterattacks.

Read the whole thing.