ISIS, SOCIAL MEDIA, and the flipside of the Arab Spring.

I THINK THAT’S THE RIGHT RESPONSE: Anti-Feminist Speaker Suzanne Venker Reinvited to Speak at Williams College, Declines. “Venker, a conservative author and social critic who describes herself as an anti-feminist, was initially scheduled to give a lecture, but the informal student group cancelled her appearance in the wake of vicious criticism from other members of campus. Group Co-President Zach Wood was accused of ‘dipping your hands in the blood of marginalized people’ by inviting someone like Venker to speak, which persuaded him that the lecture shouldn’t take place.”

The proper response to that accusation was “you’re a loony.” Once you’ve cowered, it’s hard to un-cower gracefully.

HORNETS: Awesome F/A-18 Video Will Make Your Day Go Supersonic.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: A Snarky Glossary for the Perplexed Newcomer to Massively Multiplayer Online Games.

MATTHEW CONTINETTI: The Ryan Revolution: The encounter between the Wisconsin congressman and his colleagues wasn’t a fight. It wasn’t a negotiation. It was unification.

Now Ryan is on track to become, according to National Journal, “the most conservative House speaker in recent history.” But Ryan is more than his voting record. The speaker he reminds me of most is Newt Gingrich. Not personality wise. Leadership wise.

Both men framed the argument for their party long before ascending to the speaker’s chair. And if Ryan, like Gingrich, becomes speaker, we’re not talking about a mere transfer of power. We’re talking about a revolution.

The story begins in 2008. The GOP was approaching a nadir—unpopular, exhausted, in the minority. What did Ryan do? He authored the first version of his budget, the Roadmap for America’s Future. He called for spending and tax cuts, changes to Social Security and Medicare.

He became the unofficial GOP spokesman for free markets and fiscal restraint. No one ordered him to do this. He alone among House Republicans took the initiative, much like his hero Jack Kemp had done in the 1970s.

You might disagree with Ryan’s ideas—Lord knows I have my differences—but you can’t deny his courage to stand in the public arena, his commitment to his program, his readiness to defend it.

The GOP moved toward Ryan. In 2010 he updated the Roadmap and submitted it to the Congressional Budget Office for analysis. His colleagues were curious about the plan, how to discuss it with their constituents. Ryan taught them the details. His dissection of Obamacare as Obama sat glaring before him made Ryan a viral video star.

Everyone on the left, from President Obama to the most insignificant troll on the most obscure DailyKos comment thread, went after him. Indeed, it was the left that made Ryan the figurehead of the GOP.

But the attack backfired. GOP gains in 2010 were historic. The Mediscare tactic didn’t work. And when Republicans took control of the House in 2011, Ryan turned the roadmap into a budget plan, the Path to Prosperity. The House passed it. Republicans were on record. The GOP was the party of spending restraint, tax cuts, entitlement reform.

There have been two elections since. The Republican House majority is now larger than it was in 2010. The Republicans hold the Senate. Remember the ad where a Ryan lookalike pushes grandma off a cliff? A big fail.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Not everyone is as happy. My question: If you don’t like Ryan, who else could have gotten the votes? I’m lukewarm, but somebody has to be Speaker.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Feminism flourishes in the West because the patriarchy is dead, but don’t count on it staying that way.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 898.

EUROPE: ORBANISM ASCENDANT.

In a blistering speech at European People’s Party conference in Madrid, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban drew applause at the expense of Angela Merkel as he called for a new approach to the migrant crisis in Europe—one not buttressed by unrealistic idealism and politically correct bromides.

“We are in deep trouble”, Orban intoned. “This is an uncontrolled and unregulated process. We did not get authorisation from [our citizens] for millions to walk into our continent.” He accused left-leaning parties of “importing future leftist voters to Europe” while trying to “hide it behind humanism.” “The German, Hungarian or Austrian way of life is not a basic right of all people on earth,” he continued. “It is only a right for those people who have contributed to it.”

Orban is a genuinely unsavory character, who has taken advantage of the migrant crisis to give his government quasi-fascist police powers in Hungary. But he is also speaking eminently good sense when he points out that immigration and refugee rights cannot be as unlimited as the EU has promised by law. Orban’s good sense on that point has been making a lot of the bien pensants in the corridors of Brussels and Berlin uncomfortable—as well it should. What does it say about your policies when it takes a figure like Orban to finally acknowledge that the Emperor is naked?

It says that PC virtue-signaling has replaced rational thought.

THAT’S BECAUSE IT’S, WELL, A LIE: Truth: A Terrible, Terrible Movie About Journalism.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Feminism flourishes in the West because the patriarchy is dead, but don’t count on it staying that way.

DEMOCRACY IS PARAMOUNT, EXCEPT WHEN IT ISN’T: Eurozone crosses Rubicon as Portugal’s anti-euro Left banned from power: Constitutional crisis looms after anti-austerity Left is denied parliamentary prerogative to form a majority government. I think that what EU countries could use is a lot more austerity, not socialist/communist fantasies. But still. . . .

OBAMA’S SCIENCE CZAR: ‘MAN-MADE’ CLIMATE CHANGE ENDANGERING SHRIMP, LOBSTERS, CRABS: John Holdren, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said at a White House-sponsored event that some of the excess carbon dioxide dissolves in seawater to form carbonic acid:

“This puts at risk all of the marine organisms that make their shells from calcium carbonate including shrimp, oysters, lobsters, crabs and many of the zooplankton near the base of ocean food webs,” Holdren said at the White House’s Summit on Climate & the Road through Paris: Business & Science. “We know too that climate change will continue for many decades to come.”

According to Holdren, the “pace and pattern of the changes in climate” that have occurred since the industrial revolution match with “great fidelity” what climate science told us would result from the buildup of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere.

“Clear beyond reasonable doubt is that the ongoing human-caused changes in climate are already causing harm to life, property, economics and ecosystems including more extremely hot days and longer and stronger heat waves often accompanied by worse smog,” Holdren said.

In a way though, perhaps things are getting better; Holdren sounds positively sanguine about the environment today when compared to his zany interview with AP back in mid-2009, the apex of Hopenchange, when every 1972-era leftwing dream seemed possible and not just outtakes from Soylent Green and The Andromeda Strain:

The president’s new science adviser said Wednesday that global warming is so dire, the Obama administration is discussing radical technologies to cool Earth’s air. John Holdren told The Associated Press in his first interview since being confirmed last month that the idea of geoengineering the climate is being discussed. One such extreme option includes shooting pollution particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays. Holdren said such an experimental measure would only be used as a last resort.

“It’s got to be looked at,” he said. “We don’t have the luxury of taking any approach off the table.”

And if that doesn’t work, the Dr. Strangelove-esque scientist is prepared to inflict sterner measures upon the population — or eventually, the lack thereof.

NARRATIVE CONTROL: NY Times implies people are advocating for nonconsensual sex.

“Students advocate for consensual sex,” reads the current subhead of a New York Times article. The article’s URL indicates this was originally the main title, but was changed to “Making consent cool.”

The implication from the original title is that there are those out there advocating – or at the very least, tolerating – nonconsensual sex.

This is simply not true. No one is advocating for nonconsensual sex. The fact that that even needs to be said shows just how extreme and dishonest activists have become.

There are those out there, however, who are advocating against a narrow definition of consent that defines nearly all sex as rape by default unless a specific and unworkable set of rules are followed.

High school students can’t figure out those rules. The person teaching those high school students can’t figure out those rules. Vice President Joe Biden can’t figure out those rules.

And yet, those rules will be used to brand as rapists those students who fail to adhere to them perfectly. The Times article even addresses the difficulty students are having in parsing the new rules.

But if you don’t support an approach to consent that has no parallel in American history, it means YOU’RE IN FAVOR OF RAPE!!!!

AMERICA’S TEST: IMAGINING A CLINTON VERSUS CARSON ELECTION. You may say Roger Simon is a dreamer, but he’s not the only one:

If you close your eyes and see Carson and Clinton standing together on a stage, you are almost envisioning a confrontation between good and evil, the forces of light and darkness, with the black man being light, of course.

I know that sounds Manichean, but there is no question that Carson is the kind of person the Founders had in mind to lead our country, the private citizen  who had led a noble life come to serve the public, a soft-spoken American Cincinnatus from Johns Hopkins by way of the Detroit ghetto. Yes, they might have been surprised to find that he is black, but I suspect some of them would not have been that surprised. And, although you may not agree with everything Carson says, it’s clear his convictions come from the heart.  They are not “political.”

Hillary Clinton is the antithesis.  Deep down, everyone knows it.

Read the whole thing.

AFFORDABLE LIVING, BAY AREA STYLE: Let’s travel up Route 101 in the Bay Area and explore how Jerry Brown’s economy is working out for young Californians looking to get ahead:

● “Meet Brandon, the young Google employee who lives in a $10,000 moving van parked in a Google parking lot.”

● Meet Heather, who “created Containertopia, a village of 160-square-foot shipping containers” in Oakland.

● Want another 50 square feet of space? In neighboring San Francisco, it’ll cost you: “In these rather insane days for San Francisco’s rental market, anything may pass as a studio. A glorified closet, if someone is willing to pay, may stand in. And unfortunately, even something as small as 210 square feet rents for $1890 a month.”

So what explains crazy Bay Area housing prices? Late last month Thomas Sowell explored “The ‘Affordable Housing’ Fraud,” noting that “Housing prices in San Francisco, and in many other communities for miles around, were once no higher than in the rest of the United States.” What happened in the last 30 years or so?

[L]ocal government laws and policies severely restricted, or banned outright, the building of anything on vast areas of land. This is called preserving “open space,” and “open space” has become almost a cult obsession among self-righteous environmental activists, many of whom are sufficiently affluent that they don’t have to worry about housing prices.

Some others have bought the argument that there is just very little land left in coastal California, on which to build homes. But anyone who drives down Highway 280 for thirty miles or so from San Francisco to Palo Alto, will see mile after mile of vast areas of land with not a building or a house in sight.

How “complex” is it to figure out that letting people build homes in some of that vast expanse of “open space” would keep housing from becoming “unaffordable”?

Was it just a big coincidence that housing prices in coastal California began skyrocketing in the 1970s, when building bans spread like wildfire under the banner of “open space,” “saving farmland,” or whatever other slogans would impress the gullible?

When more than half the land in San Mateo County is legally off-limits to building, how surprised should we be that housing prices in the city of San Mateo are now so high that politically appointed task forces have to be formed to solve the “complex” question of how things got to be the way they are and what to do about it?

However simple the answer, it will not be easy to go against the organized, self-righteous activists for whom “open space” is a sacred cause, automatically overriding the interests of everybody else.

In the meantime, think of it as implementing the Blue Zone Taxes, piecemeal style. Gaia and Sacramento demand their cut!