YES, THIS IS A SATIRE SITE: And yet…

THINK OF THE POSSIBILITIES FOR EVIL VILLAINS: to tamper with this. DARPA Has Made a Brain Implant That Boosts Your Memory.

PLAGUES OF LOCUSTS NEXT MONTH: Hawaii Raises Volcano Alert.

FARTHER PLEASE: This Plane Will Soar to the Edge of Space on Giant Air Currents.

IN CASE YOU WERE GETTING SLEEPY OR SOMETHING: Terror Fears As Iran Frees Al Qaeda Members.

OF COURSE IT DOES: Obama Deal Allows Iran To Pay Others To Build Its Nuclear Program.

HOPEFULLY, THIS WILL DISTRACT PEOPLE FROM THE FACT THAT WE’RE LOSING THE WAR: Obama nominates openly gay man to lead Army.

AT AMAZON, deals on Fall Training Clothing from Under Armour, Adidas, and more.

Plus, deals on select AirSoft products.

WELL, IF I RECALL CORRECTLY, THE CHARGES AGAINST GALILEO WERE BROUGHT AT THE BEHEST OF HIS RIVALS: Professors: Federal government should totally seek RICO charges against climate change skeptics.

You can behave like this and also claim the mantle of science. But not honestly.

WHEN DEMOCRATIC CONSTITUENCIES COLLIDE: Though it’s police unions that protect bad cops, Black Lives Matter activists and politician-supporters are oddly silent on the subject.

WHEN CATTY PUTDOWNS BACKFIRE: Two sponsors drop ‘The View’ after nurse jokes.

HOW HAVE OUR HEROES CHANGED? At Acculturated, Mark Tapson writes:

The model hero in ancient times was of the conquering, killing sort, a warrior earning renown by slaying piles of enemies on the battlefield. Think of Homer’s Achilles, whom Lindberg examines at length: a self-centered, petulant demigod, perhaps, but a warrior of superhuman caliber. Or Julius Caesar, a man so determined to be the greatest man in Rome that he would destroy the Republic in a civil war rather than rein in his ambition.

But over the centuries, the slaying hero gradually fell out of fashion, thanks in large measure to the horrors of World War I and Vietnam, not to mention the rise of the literary antihero such as The Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caulfield. Our ideal of the hero morphed instead into a courageous soul who is no less afraid of death but more focused on saving lives than taking them. Achilles’ modern counterpart acts not to kill and conquer, but to serve and save others. “From slaying to saving,” writes Lindberg, “from the highest, riskiest expression of self-regard to the highest, riskiest expression of generosity and the caring will.”

Lindberg uses the history of the Congressional Medal of Honor—the U.S. military’s highest decoration—to demonstrate this evolution of heroism. He reviewed the award from its creation during the Civil War to the present, and concluded that “the percentage of citations that include a saving narrative [as opposed to a killing narrative] has increased markedly” over time.

Whatever cultural changes that allowed the “saving narrative” to triumph over the “killing narrative,” the firemen of 9/11 (whom Tapson refers to at the start of his article) and the men who risk their lives to save others on the battlefield are all legitimate heroes and entirely deserving of society’s respect, despite the culture pushing an Audie Murphy-type such as Chris Kyle into the background.

Far worse is another changing cultural value, in which victims reflexively become not just replacements for heroes but “a new kind of aristocracy,” as Jonah Goldberg writes in his latest G-File:

(Whatever you think of Ahmed Mohamed and his clock, it is now obvious that the best thing that ever happened to him was getting wrongfully arrested. If he’d brought in a baking-soda volcano, or had been a blond kid named Smith, he would not be heading to the White House or getting the royal treatment from Facebook and Google).

The point is we live in an age where victimhood is the new currency, victims a new kind of aristocracy, and pity a cardinal virtue. Conservatives — who are by no means separate from, or immune to, this cultural shift — have at least been lamenting it for a very long time. What is interesting is that academia is finally catching up. Jonathan Haidt:

I just read the most extraordinary paper by two sociologists — Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning — explaining why concerns about microaggressions have erupted on many American college campuses in just the past few years. In brief: We’re beginning a second transition of moral cultures. The first major transition happened in the 18th and 19th centuries when most Western societies moved away from cultures of honor (where people must earn honor and must therefore avenge insults on their own) to cultures of dignity in which people are assumed to have dignity and don’t need to earn it. They foreswear violence, turn to courts or administrative bodies to respond to major transgressions, and for minor transgressions they either ignore them or attempt to resolve them by social means. There’s no more dueling.

Campbell and Manning describe how this culture of dignity is now giving way to a new culture of victimhood in which people are encouraged to respond to even the slightest unintentional offense, as in an honor culture. But they must not obtain redress on their own; they must appeal for help to powerful others or administrative bodies, to whom they must make the case that they have been victimized. It is the very presence of such administrative bodies, within a culture that is highly egalitarian and diverse (i.e., many college campuses) that gives rise to intense efforts to identify oneself as a fragile and aggrieved victim. This is why we have seen the recent explosion of concerns about microaggressions, combined with demands for trigger warnings and safe spaces, that Greg Lukianoff and I wrote about in The Coddling of the American Mind.

And as Ace recently noted, “Compare to Lukianoff’s and Haidt’s piece in the Atlantic suggesting that ‘microagression culture’ is an insidious, harmful form of cognitive therapy — as positive cognitive therapy would desensitize a hysteric so that the hysteric could behave normally, insidious cognitive therapy supersensitizes normal people into acting like hysterics…Lukianoff describes how he came to have this insight. He’d fallen prey to depression, and went through cognitive therapy to teach his brain to stop ‘catastrophizing’ and to unlearn other pernicious mental habits. It began to dawn on him that the Social Justice Warrior claque was using cognitive therapy to go the other direction, transforming the mentally well into the mentally unwell.”

This doesn’t bode well for the future of western civilization. (Or the lack thereof.)

RELATED: Reverse Engineering Ahmed Mohamed’s Clock… and Ourselves: “So I turned to eBay, searching for vintage alarm clocks. It only took a minute to locate Ahmed’s clock. See this eBay listing, up at the time of this writing. Amhed’s clock was invented, and built, by Micronta, a Radio Shack subsidiary. Catalog number 63 756.”

AT AMAZON, 40% off Fine Art.

ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS LIVING 30 TO A HOUSE IN NJ NEIGHBORHOOD CREATING FIRE HAZARD PROMPTS RESIDENT TO SELL HIS HOME:

Part of his frustration, he says, is that he’s paying $10K a year in property taxes and he’s done either way, and will be heading down south to Georgia.

New research has shown that New Jersey is one of 6 states where 60% of the nation’s Illegal immigrants live.

Bruen stated, “I want equality. I want to be treated equally like the illegal immigrations. I want the same rights as the illegal immigrants. Is that possible?”

If only New Jersey’s governor were running for the presidency, and was seeking a hot-button issue to gain some traction against the candidate who made illegal immigration his signature topic…

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: “Seven years after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns, D.C. has lost another gun case before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia — one that involves the very same plaintiff, Dick Heller.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Bar Exam Scores Drop To Their Lowest Point In Decades — Unprepared Students Can’t Handle A Harder Test.

THIS SEEMS LIKE DUBIOUS FINANCIAL ADVICE:If You Have Savings In Your 20s, You’re Doing Something Wrong.

I don’t have any savings, but I also don’t have any wants.

I don’t know about you, but I like to enjoy my life. I like to go out to eat, buy clothes I don’t “need” and spend money with friends on memorable nights out.

This goes back to a piece of advice a very successful friend gave me: “Don’t save money. Make more money,” he nonchalantly stated, pushing me into a taxi.

Unlike most things people tell me, this advice did not go in one ear and out the other; it stayed with me and changed the way I look at everything from my career to my savings.

I suppose that there are some 20-somethings who may need to relax and live a little. I don’t think there are all that many, compared with the number who need to handle their money more prudently.

OBAMA TO NOMINATE FIRST OPENLY GAY SERVICE SECRETARY: “The president will nominate Eric Fanning to take over as the next secretary of the Army, making him the first openly gay service secretary if he is confirmed by the Senate, the White House announced on Friday,” the Washington Examiner reports. “If approved, he would lead the service at a time where the Army is looking at cutting an additional 40,000 soldiers from its ranks under a tight budget environment as the country faces numerous threats from theaters all around the world.”

WOMEN ARE FLEEING HILLARY because they think she lied about her email server. Well, she did. And is. And will continue to.

HOUSE VOTES TO DEFUND PLANNED PARENTHOOD FOR ONE YEAR: It’s a nice gesture, but will likely remain just that — as Debra Heine writes at the PJ Tatler, “The president has vowed to veto both bills should they pass the Senate, at which point they will need to be passed by a two-thirds majority in Congress to become law.”

BIRTHERS, THEN AND NOW:  Video: Hillary, who started the “Obama is a Muslim” thing in 2008, appalled that Trump might think Obama is a Muslim.

In early 2011, right around the time that proselytizing atheist Time-Warner-CNN-HBO spokesman Bill Maher admitted on the air that he doesn’t think Obama is a Christian, Scott Johnson of Power Line quipped, “One of President Obama’s most prominent and least attractive qualities is his vanity. It almost disposes of the speculation that Obama is a Muslim. The man can’t be a Muslim; he worships himself.”

RELATED: Trump Being Criticized for ‘Not Responding’ to Birther Question.

OBAMA THROWS HILLARY UNDER THE BUS: “The central mission of Barack Obama’s White House in the waning days of his administration is to communicate to the public that none of this is his fault,” Noah Rothman writes at Commentary:

The aim was to identify reasonably secular moderate fighters in Syria, transfer them to third-party countries in the region, train them, equip them, and reintroduce them into the theater of operations. By August of this year and $500 million later, the Pentagon acknowledged that only 54 Syrian rebels had been prepared for combat. Less than a month later, almost all of them had been killed or captured. General Lloyd Austin told Congress this week that only “four or five” are continuing the fight against ISIS in Syria.

This self-evidently failed half-measure is a substantial embarrassment for this White House, and the administration’s insular and paranoid handlers cannot allow that. As is the wont of this pathologically defensive administration, they have gone about looking for blame-worthy figures outside the ever-shrinking circle of Obama loyalists. “The finger, it says, should be pointed not at Mr. Obama but at those who pressed him to attempt training Syrian rebels in the first place,” New York Times reporter Peter Baker revealed, “a group that, in addition to congressional Republicans, happened to include former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.”

The White House all but washed its hands of the training program after General Austin’s testimony.

“It is true that we have found this to be a difficult challenge,”[White House Press Secretary Josh] Earnest said. “But it is also true that many of our critics had proposed this specific option as essentially the cure-all for all of the policy challenges that we’re facing in Syria right now. That is not something that this administration ever believed, but it is something that our critics will have to answer for.”

Forget for the moment a craven and humiliating self-defense that rests on the notion that the president was led by the nose into executing this flawed strategy, and the inescapable conclusion inexplicably promoted by this White House that the commander-in-chief is simply too pliant and irresolute. The desperation of blaming not merely Republicans but the Democrats’ best hope for retaining the presidency and preserving Obama’s achievements in office, Hillary Clinton, is pusillanimous in the extreme.

Read the whole thing. And get ready for the most surreal final year of a president ever. Pass the popcorn — and at the rate Obama is going, perhaps the anti-radiation pills as well.

ONLINE SHOPPING OFFERS INSUFFICIENT OPPORTUNITIES FOR GRAFT: In an age of painless online shopping, why do we keep buying vehicles at dealerships?

OF COURSE SHE DOES: Hillary Clinton pushes campus sexual assault myths. If she told the truth, that rape on and off campus has been plummeting for over 20 years, her whole War On Women campaign would collapse.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: How Putin Outflanks Obama in Syria.

Once again, President Obama and his foreign policy team are stumped. Why is Vladimir Putin pouring troops and weaponry into Syria?. . .

Kerry and Obama are serially surprised because they cannot fathom the hard men in the Kremlin. . . .

Putin will offer Russia as a core member of a new anti-Islamic State coalition. Obama’s Potemkin war — with its phantom local troops (our $500 million training program has yielded five fighters so far) and flaccid air campaign — is flailing badly. What Putin is proposing is that Russia, Iran and Hezbollah spearhead the anti-jihadist fight.

Putin’s offer is clear: Stop fighting Assad, accept Russia as a major player, and acquiesce to a Russia-Iran-Hezbollah regional hegemony — and we will lead the drive against the Islamic State from in front.

And there is a bonus. The cleverest part of the Putin gambit is its unstated cure for Europe’s refugee crisis.

Wracked by guilt and fear, the Europeans have no idea what to do. Putin offers a way out: No war, no refugees. Stop the Syrian civil war and not only do they stop flooding into Europe, those already there go back home to Syria.

When America fails to lead, others will step in to fill the global vacuum.

RELATED: Russia moves fighter jets to Syria.