NEWS YOU CAN USE: The 9 Most Common Misconceptions About Hammers. I hear that, among themselves, hammers describe someone who isn’t very bright as “dumb as a bag of Bidens,” but that could just be a rumor.

LIFE LESSONS FROM JUSTICE THOMAS:  Scott Johnson over at Power Line has provided some balance to the ubiquitous radical progressive commencement speeches– one from Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to the 2008 graduating class of the University of Georgia. It makes me wish every precious snowflake could hear this before they enter the real world:

Next, remember that life is not easy for any of us. It will probably not be fair, and it certainly is not all about you. The gray hair and wrinkles you see on older people have been earned the hard way, by living and dealing with the challenges of life. When I was a young adult and labored under the delusion of my own omniscience, I thought I knew more than I actually did. That is a function of youth.

With the wisdom that only comes with the passage of years, the older folks warned me presciently and ominously, “Son, you just live long enough and you’ll see.” They were right; oh, so right. Life is humbling and can be hard, very hard. It is a series of decisions, some harder than others, some good and, unfortunately, too many of them bad. It will be up to each of you to make as many good decisions as possible and to limit the bad ones, then to learn from all of them. But I will urge you to resist when those around you insist on making the bad decisions. Being accepted or popular with those doing wrong is an awful Faustian bargain and, as with all Faustian bargains, not worth it. It is never wrong to do the right thing. It may be hard, but never wrong. . . .

Stay positive. There will be many around you who are cynical and negative. These cause cancers of the spirit and they add nothing worthwhile. Don’t inhale their secondhand cynicism and negativism. Some, even those with the most opportunities in this, the greatest country, will complain and grieve ceaselessly, ad infinitum and ad absurdum. It may be fair to ask them, as they complain about the lack of perfection in others and our imperfect institutions, just what they themselves are perfect at.

Look, many have been angry at me because I refuse to be angry, bitter, or full of grievances, and some will be angry at you for not becoming agents in their most recent cynical causes. Don’t worry about it. No monuments are ever built to cynics. Associate with people who add to your lives, not subtract; people you are comfortable introducing to the best people in your lives—your parents, your family, your friends, your mentors, your ministers.

Always have good manners. This is a time-honored tradition and trait; it is not old-fashioned.

Justice Thomas is a treasure. He has always been one of the most underrated Justices, merely because he is a black who “dares” not to be liberal/progressive, and is an originalist (and a very good one) to boot. The black community treats him shamefully.

FRACKING GOES GLOBAL: U.S. Shale Is Transforming the LNG Market.

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Open carry handguns will soon be legal in Texas. “Texas lawmakers on Friday approved carrying handguns openly on the streets of the nation’s second most-populous state, sending the bill to Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who immediately promised to sign it and reverse a ban dating to the post-Civil War era.”

The ban on carrying guns was no doubt, as in other states, a Jim Crow law intended to disarm blacks, so it’s nice to see an end to it.

HOW MATURE: A feminist group at Wesleyan University vandalized the Delta Kappa Epsilon (DKE) fraternity, trashing the house lawn with feminist flyers and spraying silly string everywhere. It’s the latest chapter in an ongoing dispute between feminist groups and fraternities at the university, which decided in September that fraternities must open their chapters to women.  In response, DKE filed a gender discrimination lawsuit against the University in February, pointing out that the university offers single-sex dormitories and allows numerous other organizations on campus to tout themselves as “safe spaces” for women and racial, sexual, or ethnic minority groups.

These radical feminists really need to chill. I highly doubt they would welcome alpha men in their private organizations, or at their parties. If we cannot voluntarily choose with whom we associate, there is no liberty.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 751.

FIGHT OVER WAR AUTHORIZATION INTENSIFIES: The White House rips “idle chatter” from Congress on war powers.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest chastised lawmakers for failing to act on President Obama’s use of force request, even as ISIS militants make gains in Iraq and Syria.

“Their job requires basically only fulfilling the bare minimum,” Earnest told reporters. “When it comes to our national security, something they say is so important to our country, it’s time for them to not just pay lip service but to actually follow through with some action.”

Lip service on national security?  Pot, meet kettle.  I don’t recall any other situation in which Congress wanted the President to be more aggressive in his use of military force to protect American interests, except for the Radical Republicans during Reconstruction, who imposed, through the Reconstruction Acts, military control over former Confederate States, overriding President Andrew Johnson’s veto.

ALAN DOWD: Answer The Baltics’ SOS.

NATO’s Baltic members—Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania—are formally asking the alliance to deploy a “brigade-level permanent allied military presence” on their territory to deter Russia from repeating its salami-slice invasion of Ukraine. NATO should swiftly approve this request. It’s the best way to prevent war and preserve the alliance. The Baltics are not overreacting. Just consider what’s happening in their neighborhood. After deploying troops to wage asymmetric, anonymous warfare against a sovereign, peaceful neighbor in Ukraine, annexing Crimea, and carving out an armed Russian zone in eastern Ukraine, Vladimir Putin unveiled a new military doctrine focused on confronting NATO.

Related: Why The Kremlin Has To Keep Lying.

DEMILITARIZATION OF POLICE: MAKE IT PERMANENT:  So argues this commentary in Roll Call:

It just got more difficult for police to arm themselves like soldiers. Recently, President Barack Obama announced a plan to de-militarize law enforcement with an executive order curtailing the federal programs that provide weapons of war to local police. This was a surprisingly bold announcement, given that national consensus post-Ferguson seems to be that the solution to an increasingly militarized police force is more training, or body-worn cameras. The Obama administration ignored that consensus by issuing this executive order. And it was exactly the right thing to do. . . .

To be clear, the administration’s bold action does not let Congress off the hook. To the contrary, it is now more important than ever that Congress pass legislation to codify these changes or even take them further. The next administration could just as easily reverse this policy as this one put it into place. That would be unacceptable, because we have learned far too much in the last year to move backward. Without real efforts to de-militarize police, there will almost certainly be more Fergusons.

The “more Fergusons” comment aside (the riots had no connection to the militarization of police), I agree with this, as I see no legitimate reason for police to have military weaponry, other than perhaps limited riot gear in larger cities. The section 1033 program should be scaled back by Congress. But the militarization of police and excessive use of miiltary-grade force has gone much farther than this, just ask Giggles the Deer, may she rest in peace, or more disturbingly, 75-year-old Roger Hoeppner of Stettin, Wisconsin, or the parents of toddler Bounkham Phonesavanh.

WEIRDLY, FEMINISTS ARE UNHAPPY: GOP senators call for over-the-counter birth control. “Groups like Planned Parenthood have opposed the idea, which they argue could drive up contraception prices. The group has pointed to ObamaCare’s contraception mandate — requiring insurance plans to cover all FDA-approved forms of birth control — and said that insurers may no longer cover the medication if it’s not prescribed by a doctor. Dr. Mark DeFrancesco, president of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, released a statement condemning Gardner’s bill shortly after he introduced it.”

Actually they’re unhappy because it threatens their gatekeeper status.

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ONWARD, CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS: This guy from Baltimore is raising a Christian army to fight ISIS. What could go wrong? Mother Jones is predictably appalled.

THE OBAMA BETRAYAL OF IRAQIS: Mario Loyola has a terrific oped in today’s WSJ explaining the human cost of Obama’s “hands off” policy toward Iraq:

In September 2007, I was in Ramadi for a gathering of Iraqi and American military commanders, politicians and local tribal leaders who had joined forces with the U.S. to defeat al Qaeda in Iraq. Then-Sen. Joseph Biden was there. “These are difficult days,” he told our Iraqi allies. “But as you are proving, you can forge a future for Iraq that is much brighter than its past. If you continue, we will continue to send you our sons and our daughters, to shed their blood with you and for you.”

It was a noble promise, and Iraqis believed it. . . .

In Ramadi I met an Iraqi police lieutenant who was earnestly pro-American, and who kept talking about the need for “honest leadership” in the local police stations. The police lieutenant (I’ll call him Ismail, for his protection) was hopeful, if also wary. He mistrusted some of his fellow police and was afraid that al Qaeda might return if U.S. forces left too soon.. . .

Then came President Obama, and the end of the fragile reconciliation process in Iraq. At the end of 2011, he withdrew all U.S. forces, ignoring the advice of commanders on the ground and the private pleas of senior Iraqi leaders. . . .

President Obama’s 2011 abandonment of Iraq was a betrayal of America’s promises to millions of Iraqi men, women and children. The ISIS victories, and the horrors that follow them, are a direct result of that betrayal. As Ismail said to me: “They shouldn’t leave us like that.” 

Obama’s abrupt abandonment has just bred resentment among Iraqis who were pro-American. We’ve turned our few friends in the region into enemies, and left them to the brutality of ISIS.

SCIENCE: Women of all ages more likely to have serious mental health problems than men, report says. “Pratt said she could not explain why women have higher rates of serious psychological distress. ‘As I’m sure you are aware, we see this in major depression as well, but I don’t know that anyone has ever come up with a definitive answer of why that is,’ she said.”

ROGER KIMBALL: The relevance of the House of Usher to the Way We Live Now.

Towards the beginning of Edgar Allan Poe’s macabre romance “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the unnamed narrator describes his first sight of that gloomy old pile. Among other eldritch features, he noticed “a barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn” below the house.

Careful observers will have noted analogous fissures in what, for lack of a better term, I will call the “progressive consensus.” “Progressive” is not quite right, because there is no progress—if by progress you mean movement from a given point to something better. But “progressive” is preferable to that other favored verbal specimen of evasiveness, “liberal.” As the word’s etymology suggests, “liberal” has to do with liberty, with freedom, and there is no mainstream ideology in modern Western democracies that is more inimical to freedom than “liberalism.”

If you doubt that, try starting a business or uttering a “non-progressive” sentiment on college, running a bakery, hobby shop, or jeweler’s. It is a curiosity of our times that many words now signify more or less the opposite of what they originally meant. This is not, of course, an entirely new development. “Sanctimonious” once meant “holy.” Now it means “pretending to be holy, while actually being venal.” Just so, “liberal” once meant “on the side of freedom.” Now it generally means “pretending to be on the side of freedom while actually working to enforce conformity and intolerance.” Again, a quick look at life on almost any college campus today will illustrate the truth of this assertion.

Read the whole thing.

RON RADOSH: The Long and Partisan Journalistic Career of Sid “Vicious” Blumenthal.

LIFE IN TODAY’S ACADEMIC POLICE STATE: Laura Kipnis: My Title IX Inquisition:

When I first heard that students at my university had staged a protest over an essay I’d written in The Chronicle Review about sexual politics on campus — and that they were carrying mattresses and pillows — I was a bit nonplussed. For one thing, mattresses had become a symbol of student-on-student sexual-assault allegations, and I’d been writing about the new consensual-relations codes governing professor-student dating. Also, I’d been writing as a feminist. And I hadn’t sexually assaulted anyone. The whole thing seemed symbolically incoherent.

According to our campus newspaper, the mattress-carriers were marching to the university president’s office with a petition demanding “a swift, official condemnation” of my article. One student said she’d had a “very visceral reaction” to the essay; another called it “terrifying.” I’d argued that the new codes infantilized students while vastly increasing the power of university administrators over all our lives, and here were students demanding to be protected by university higher-ups from the affront of someone’s ideas, which seemed to prove my point.

The president announced that he’d consider the petition.

Still, I assumed that academic freedom would prevail. I also sensed the students weren’t going to come off well in the court of public opinion, which proved to be the case; mocking tweets were soon pouring in. Marching against a published article wasn’t a good optic — it smacked of book burning, something Americans generally oppose. Indeed, I was getting a lot of love on social media from all ends of the political spectrum, though one of the anti-PC brigade did suggest that, as a leftist, I should realize these students were my own evil spawn.

That’s largely true. And the president should have told the students to grow up instead.

Plus:

Things seemed less amusing when I received an email from my university’s Title IX coordinator informing me that two students had filed Title IX complaints against me on the basis of the essay and “subsequent public statements” (which turned out to be a tweet), and that the university would retain an outside investigator to handle the complaints.

I stared at the email, which was under-explanatory in the extreme. I was being charged with retaliation, it said, though it failed to explain how an essay that mentioned no one by name could be construed as retaliatory, or how a publication fell under the province of Title IX, which, as I understood it, dealt with sexual misconduct and gender discrimination.

I think that when people file bogus complaints, there should be retaliation. But read the whole thing. For all the talk about the McCarthy era, what’s going on now is much worse, much more widespread, and much less opposed within the academy.

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CAN’T BLAME ‘EM:  Poland and Lithuania tell Congress they want the U.S. to host military bases there, to ward off an ever-aggressive Vladimir Putin.

NEAL STEPHENSON ON being inspired by Frank J. Fleming. “The moon’s been up there for a long time. I think we’re all a little tired of it, and it was time to make some changes.”

Plus: “You learn that gravity is your friend when you have a baby.”

TX LEGISLATURE APPROVES OPEN CARRY:  The bill was passed by overwhelming Republican majorities in the state house and senate.  The bill, sponsored by Rep. Larry Phillips (R-Sherman) will allow licensed owners to carry openly in a hip or shoulder holster.  It now heads to Governor Greg Abbott.

SALON: BERNIE SANDERS’ RAPE APOLOGIA JUST A CRITIQUE OF “HETERONORMATIVITY”:  Of course it is.  Katie McDonough at Salon offers this weak defense of Sanders’ odd 1972 fictional piece called “Man and Woman,” in which Sanders says,  “A woman enjoys intercourse with her man — as she fantasizes being raped by 3 men simultaneously.”

These ex post “you just don’t get it” excuses for liberal/progressive actions are so tiring–reminds me of that Goldsmiths, University of London “diversity officer,” Mustafa Bahar, whose racist, sexist anti-white male comments were excused by a Slate writer as “ironic misandry.”

WELL, YES: Feminist claims that bad consensual sex equals rape victimize women just as surely as the McMartin trials victimized children.