HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Everyone thinks the current state of higher education is awful. Who is to blame?

Is it possible for colleges to be swaddling students in political correctness while at the same time cruelly surrendering to neoliberal market forces? After all, Lukianoff and Haidt say explicitly that “vindictive protectiveness teaches students to think in a very different way. It prepares them poorly for professional life, which often demands intellectual engagement with people and ideas one might find uncongenial or wrong (emphasis added).” If that is true, then one of these accusations would have to be false.. . .

And here we arrive at a way to thread this needle of collective criticism. The one thing that Deresiewicz, Lukianoff, Haidt and McArdle all agree on, surprisingly enough, is that higher education should be a non-market institution. The point of college is not merely to cater to consumer demands, whether one defines the consumers as “college students” or “the firms that will eventually hire those college students.” A vital function of universities is to convert young people into thinkers who can critically analyze the very society that they are about to join. But when people are ponying up vast sums of money to attend these places, it becomes more difficult for college administrations to ignore the whims of their students.

Hint: If you want colleges to be “more independent,” an increase in external subsidies isn’t the way to do it.

ARKANSAS GOV. HUTCHINSON CUTS STATE CONTRACTS WITH PLANNED PARENTHOOD.

If it looks bad for Planned Parenthood now, just imagine how much more trouble they’d be in, if the MSM wasn’t working so hard to suppress the story.

SHOT: Democrats face a once-in-a-career decision on Iran.

CHASER: I’M WARNING DEMOCRATS HERE AND NOW: Putting Obama Over Country Is Treason.

WHO LOST IRAQ? BARACK OBAMA LOST IRAQ. “At one point Barack Obama and Joe Biden basked in the success of the surge that was authorized by George W. Bush and carried out by Gen. David Petraeus. They proclaimed Iraq one of the Obama administration’s greatest accomplishments, taking credit for a military and diplomatic effort that had nothing to do with them. And then that ideologically-obsessed dummy, Barack Obama, threw it all away.”

GOOD: House Judiciary Chairman Wants Answers About First Amendment from Public Colleges.

The Chairman of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee sent letters today to the presidents of 161 public colleges and universities across the country to ask them why their policies fail to protect the First Amendment rights of students and faculty.

The letters were sent by Representative Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) to leaders of institutions that received the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education’s (FIRE’s) lowest, “red light” rating in our annual report on campus speech codes. Colleges that receive this rating maintain at least one policy that clearly and substantially restricts protected speech.

The letters follow FIRE President and CEO Greg Lukianoff’s testimony before Congress earlier this summer. On June 2, Lukianoff testified in front of the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice about the state of free speech on America’s public college campuses.

Great. Next pressure them on sexual assault policies.

“PARDON HILLARY NOW:” Quote of the Day, Trolling Level: Master edition.

RELATED: And speaking of trolling, New York Observer columnist and former GOP speechwriter Lisa Schiffren charts ‘Hillary’s Path to Greatness.’

FREE SPEECH UPDATE: UNC Chapel Hill Apologizes After Campus Police Attempt to Remove Professor’s Sign.

BEHOLD, THE POWER OF THE NARRATIVE:

After their arrest, the affidavit states, the couple confessed that they were on their way to join the Islamic State. On Tuesday, a federal magistrate in Oxford, Miss., ordered them held without bail, citing their methodical planning. They each face up to 20 years in prison on the charge of attempting and conspiring to knowingly provide material support and resources to a foreign terrorist organization.

When Mr. Crews, the Dakhlallas’ neighbor, noticed unmarked police cars choking the block last weekend, he immediately guessed that “some idiot redneck did something to the mosque.”

“I certainly didn’t think somebody got arrested for wanting to join ISIS,” he said. “That just wasn’t on my radar.”

Well, that’s because people like the New York Times work to keep it off.

LOST MORAL COMPASS: Lord of the Rings actor warns world has ‘lost its moral compass completely’ and fears the end of ‘Western civilization’ due to ISIS threat in Middle East.

Lord of the Rings star John Rhys-Davies has spoken out about the ‘extraordinary silence in the West’ over the threat of Islamic extremism.

The actor, 71, also talked about the pressure of political correctness – claiming people were too afraid to speak out on the actions of other groups for fear of being seen judgmental.

Mr Rhys-Davies, who played the dwarf Gimli in the blockbuster trilogy, made his comments on The Adam Carolla Show, while promoting his new film Return To The Hiding Place, about the persecution of Jews in Holland during World War II.

The conversation quickly switched to modern-day atrocities, including the ISIS beheadings in the Middle East.

Rhys-Davies said: ‘Basically, Christianity in the Middle East and in Africa is being wiped out – I mean not just ideologically but physically.’

He warned of how ‘people are being enslaved and killed because they are Christians’ and claimed that Adolf Hitler’s book Mein Kampf is ‘a bestseller in the Middle East’.

He told his American interviewer: ‘Your country and my country (Wales) are doing nothing about it. We have lost our moral compass completely.’

Carolla suggested political correctness was the culprit, saying: ‘Why is it so evolved not to judge?This notion that we’ve evolved into a species that’s incapable of judging other groups and what they are doing, especially when it’s beheading people or setting people on fire or throwing acid in the face of schoolgirls… I like that kind of judging. That’s evolved!’

Rhys-Davies replied: ‘This is a unique age. We don’t want to be judgmental. Every other age that’s come before us has believed exactly the opposite. I mean, T.S. Eliot referred to “the common pursuit of true judgement”. Yes, that’s what it’s about. Getting our judgments right, getting them accurate.

He’s right, but our ruling class doesn’t like judgment, because they know how they’d be judged by those they rule if that were permitted.

LAWS ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: The government’s nonchalant response to Hillary’s security breaches. “[Petraeus] was tarred, feathered and ridden out of the CIA on a rail for sharing some information (his own notebook) with his biographer who was both in the military and had a top secret clearance. Yet, Petraeus did not have a secret server set up to house his classified and top secret information or digital satellite imagery; he destroyed nothing; and, there was no ‘leak.'”

Also: The government’s nonchalant response to Hillary’s security breaches, Part Two.

The Obama administration’s nonchalant response to Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of sensitive, classified, and even top secret information extends to its treatment of her lawyers. The Justice Department allowed emails and other sensitive information from Clinton’s server to remain in her lawyers’ hands even though they lack the requisite security clearances.

Now, finally, the Justice Department has taken possession of the thumb drive containing work emails that Clinton’s personal attorney David Kendall improperly held. Yet its nonchalance persists.

Ask yourself what the government would be doing in response to this security breach if the lawyer and the law firm in question weren’t well-connected and Democrat-leaning. A friend (formerly an attorney with a big firm) suggests that the government would be demanding the following, and more:

– Names of all Williams & Connolly personnel who had any role in the review of Clinton’s emails with a listing (by date and/or other identifier) of emails, and names of all persons with whom the reviewing personnel discussed the contents of those emails.

– All computers that any time contained on their hard drives any Clinton documents or material related thereto.

– All paper documents related to the review of Clinton’s documents, including all handwritten notes.

– All precautions Williams & Connolly took to ensure the confidentiality of documents turned over by Clinton and related documents.

Cheryl Mills is represented by another big, well-connected law firm — Paul, Weiss (where Secretary of the DHS Jeh Johnson was a partner). Mills provided its lawyers with emails that likely contain sensitive and perhaps classified (or even top secret) information. Paul, Weiss should also be subject to the procedures described above.

Read the whole thing.

WHY WOULD YOU ASSUME it’s a he?

MICHAEL SAM QUITS FOOTBALL TO FOCUS ON MENTAL HEALTH: This is the end result of the drafting a player to generate PR and press releases than because he can actually play football on a professional level.

YEAH, PRETTY MUCH: Whole Foods’ John Mackey: Why Intellectuals Hate Capitalism: They’re jealous, he says, they side with rulers, and they don’t understand how markets work.

UPDATE: Link fixed. Sorry!

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Narcotic Drugs Can Be Coaxed From Yeast.

THE GIANT PAPIER-MÂCHÉ PUPPET OF DEATH VERSUS TESLA: A little blue-on-blue protest action today; pictured standing outside of San Jose’s Santana Row today is the Giant Papier-Mâché Puppet of Death representing Carpenters’ Local 713 of nearby Hayward, which were protesting the Tesla showroom at Santana Row. Union reps wearing hardhats and safety vests were handing out the flyer illustrated below. The sense of proportion between the GIANT PAPIER-MÂCHÉ PUPPET OF DEATH versus the union complaint that Tesla “hurts workers, hurts families, hurts community,” is fascinating:

When I drove up, my first thought was that somebody was implying that Tesla was Death, perhaps for not being sufficiently environmentally pure or due to past reports of battery problems with the Tesla. Instead, apparently the message is that not unionizing (and the UAW has tried hard to assimilate Tesla) is tantamount to death — an interesting complaint given that Bernie Sanders is concurrently running around screaming that unemployment is over ten percent.  (And note that the Giant Papier-Mâché Puppet of Death and his graphic designers aren’t exclusive to Local 713.)

I couldn’t get a good shot of the puppet himself, lest I end up facing Death personally due to the high level of traffic on Stevens Creek Boulevard. But you can see him more clearly here on a Tesla owners’ blog, at a protest last month by the same union in front of Tesla’s Palo Alto HQ. And you can also see Mr. Death in the flyer’s clip art, driving a 1975-era Volkswagen Thing with a Tesla logo on it, which, given the origins of the Thing, and the origins of radical environmentalism in general, and the crony socialism that birthed Tesla, neatly if unintentionally ties together a half dozen chapters of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism:

RELATED: In any blue on blue action, determining who the real baddies are can often be ascertained by who’s using a skull as their symbol.

NASSIM TALEB: “The free-market system lets you notice the flaws and hides its benefits. All other systems hide the flaws and show the benefits.”

AT AMAZON, deals on Outdoor Toys & Games.

Plus, take 20% off on Outdoor Toys & Games.

BRING BACK DDT: Bedbugs: A Nightmare for the Hotel Industry. “Bedbugs are still a huge concern for the hospitality industry. The reason isn’t merely the bugs themselves, but how travelers choose their accommodations these days: online, guided by the reviews of their fellow travelers. And those online reviews can do real damage to a hotel if there is just the slightest hint of a bedbug infestation.”

THE REAL QUESTION, THOUGH, IS WHAT KIND OF SHIRTS THE SCIENTISTS WERE WEARING: Comet Where Spacecraft Landed Makes Closest Approach to Sun.

WASHINGTON POST: How Clinton’s team went from nonchalant to nervous over e-mail controversy.

The controversy over her private e-mail setup has moved into a new and, potentially, more serious phase. What had begun five months ago as a relatively narrow question about proper archiving of public records has become a bigger, more politically dangerous one: Whether the then-secretary of state and her close aides, in choosing to use a private e-mail system, disregarded common sense and may have put sensitive information at risk of falling into the wrong hands.

And the answer is yes, yes they did.

HILLARY’S IT FIRM WASN’T CLEARED BY DOD TO HANDLE CLASSIFIED MATERIALS. So why would the nation’s chief diplomat use an obscure firm in Denver that wasn’t certified by the Pentagon as being capable of protecting national security secrets? This story keeps getting more amazing by the minute. Richard Pollock of the Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group has the story.

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Researchers Create Robots Capable of Evolving.

THE PURPLE DECADES: Video: Jail time over the color of a playground set? As spotted by Ed Morrissey of Hot Air, who writes:

Occasionally, when I feel a bit overwhelmed by maintenance issues in my house, I think, “Wouldn’t it be nice to move into a condo and not have to shovel the walk, deal with landscaping or a leaky roof?” When those moments come, stories such as this from Kansas City’s KCTV News remind me that I prefer my politics national rather than hyperlocal. The Raintree Lake Property Owners Association has demanded that a homeowner take down a playground set erected for their two young daughters two years ago because the soft purple and white color scheme isn’t harmonious enough with the neighborhood — and their attorneys are threatening them with jail time if they don’t comply (via Fox News):

As Glenn would say: Tar. Feathers. Repeat the dosage until message received.

VIDEO: HAS THIS MAN CREATED THE ULTIMATE DEBATE MANUAL TO DECIMATE LIBERALS? Do we have to “decimate” them? I’d rather just win arguments with them or at least enable them to see something from a different perspective. Which is the goal of Arthur Brooks, author of The Conservative Heart, who recently sat down with Scott Ott of PJTV for video interview.

YEAH, BUT TO BE FAIR, THEY HAVE A LOT OF ASIAN GUYS WORKING UNDER THEM: Apple Wants to Be Diverse, But White Dudes Still Run Things.