INTERVIEW: KEN HITE, AUTHOR OF THE DRACULA DOSSIER RPG. Audio at link.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: 5 Places You Can Drive a Tank Right Now.

THIS IS JUST PATHETIC: The Times Backs Off on Temple Trutherism. “The correction is right as far as history is concerned, but as to the Times article it is thoroughly dishonest.”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 884.

LEFT AND LEFTER: Study: Democrats Moving Left Faster Than Republicans Moving Right.

At least since the 2010 midterms, it’s been a liberal talking point that Republican extremism is to blame for political polarization and gridlock. In the old days, the argument goes, Republicans were a moderate party, but over the past generation the GOP has been gradually taken over by its far-right wing. Before the last GOP debate, for example, the Center for American Progress launched a “Right of Reagan” campaign to supposedly show “how the extremism of today’s Republican presidential candidates sets them apart from their conservative idol.”

But as the debates over issues like the $15 minimum wage, healthcare, and universal preschool have already shown, the Democrats have moved to the left at least as quickly as the Republicans have moved to the right. After all, Hillary Clinton has to renounce a good chunk of her husband’s positions to be competitive in the 2016 primary.

Now, a paper on polarization and inequality released in August by political scientists from Princeton, Georgetown, and the University of Oregon (and highlighted this week in a Washington Post article) provides some empirical evidence that Democratic Party’s leftward drift is more pronounced than the GOP’s rightward drift, at least at the state level.

This should come as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention.

TURKEY: Explosions At Peace Rally Leave More than 80 Dead.

UH OH: Clinton’s support slides ahead of first Democratic debate.

GOOD: An Iranian General Is Killed in Syria.

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‘THE MARTIAN’ VS ENVIRONMENTAL DEFEATISM: “The message of this story is clear: There is nothing man can’t achieve if he is willing to ‘science the s*** out of it,’” Andrew Klavan writes:

Compare this to the ceaseless carping demands of modern environmentalism:  ”Don’t move! Don’t dig! Don’t explore! Don’t go! Don’t build! We’ll all die! Stuff will run out! People will be exploited! Air will turn solid! Heat will kill! Cold will freeze! Huddle in! Return to the earth! Go small! Die stupid!”

It’s nonsense. Our resources won’t run out because our only true resource is the bottomless human imagination and its infinite cleverness. Oil was just goo till we turned it to energy. We’ll do the same with sea water and atoms and shoelaces and whatever else we need until we reach new planets with new stuff to make into energy and go on from there.

So thanks, environmentalists! Now shut up and buzz off while we make use of the earth and explore the universe.

If only real-life NASA took the same advice – back in March, Charles Bolden, its administrator, was heard muttering to Ted Cruz, “We can’t go anywhere if the Kennedy Space Center goes underwater and we don’t know it — and that’s understanding our environment.”

Wow, I thought NASA had better telemetry systems than that. But it is true, I suppose — you never know when you’re going to go sleep one night and wake up the next morning to find that Cape Canaveral and Merritt Island have suddenly gone missing. Perhaps Bolden should sell that story to Ridley Scott?

WELL, THAT’S BECAUSE THEY SHOULDN’T: Another op-ed suggests colleges shouldn’t handle campus sexual assault.

It seems at least once a week an opinion piece is published urging legislators, the media and anyone who will listen to stop giving in to the idea that campus sexual assault is at crisis levels and that the only way to fix the problem is to create pseudo-courts that eviscerate due process rights.

The most recent example comes from the Courier-Journal, the main newspaper in Louisville, Ky., and is written by attorney and blogger Bridget Bush. Bush argues that these campus kangaroo courts are not the right venue for accusations of sexual assault (a felony).

“Sexual assault, when it really occurs, is a crime. It should be investigated by professional law enforcement, not campus police. It should be prosecuted by actual prosecutors — not college administrators,” Bush wrote. “Expulsion from college is not a sufficient punishment for rape: jail is. To the contrary, merely expelling a true perpetrator just sets him free to rape non-students.”

Bush included a story about a friend’s daughter, who was (wrongly) accused of sexual assault. These cases almost always involve a woman accusing a man, but in this case, a woman accused another woman.

The woman’s parents hired an attorney, as every student who is accused of sexual assault in college should do. (Sadly, many students can’t afford to do this, and are at a disadvantage while the accuser has an entire school administration office in her defense free of charge.) The attorney was not allowed to represent her during the campus hearing. She was allowed only to accompany her client as an “adviser” but not make objections or cross-examine the accuser or witnesses.

The accused woman was lucky in that witnesses came forward to dispute the claims from the accuser, and she was found not responsible. Her college degree was not disrupted (though the degrees of many male accused students who are found not responsible are disrupted) and she graduated on time. Perhaps because the accused student was a woman, and this entire “epidemic” is predicated on the “war on women” narrative that women are victims while men are perpetrated, she received leniency.

Perhaps.

IT’S A RED QUEEN’S RACE TO THE BOTTOM:

● Shot: “Has Gop Hit Rock Bottom? No, It Could Actually Get A Lot Worse,” Byron York writes in the Washington Examiner.

● Chaser: “Divided, They’ll Fall: The Democrats could be coming apart,” Fred Siegel argues in City Journal.

As Mike Judge’s Idiocracy increasingly seems like a documentary, and our elites on both sides of the aisle seem equally pathetic when compared with their past counterparts, perhaps both stories are true to some extent. Especially considering that “We have the worst political class in American history,” as Glenn has noted on numerous occasions in recent years.

MORE SPELUNKING IN THE MEMORY HOLE: Friday A/V Club: What the Gun Debate Looked Like in 1967: Black Panthers, hunters, and “nuts with guns.”

In some ways, the gun debates of the 1960s looked a lot like the gun debates of today: The people pushing new rules argued that the arms trade was underregulated, stressed that they didn’t want to interfere with hunters, and complained about the National Rifle Association (though the NRA was more amenable to new gun laws in those days than now). In other ways, the debates were rather different: Some of the loudest voices defending the Second Amendment belonged to the Black Panther Party and its supporters on the radical left, and that in turn prompted some conservatives to back certain sorts of gun control.

Both the similarities and the differences are on display in this 1967 footage from the San Francisco TV station KRON, in which a Bay Area official fulminates on all of the above subjects. The immediate context for the interview was the Panthers’ armed march on the California State Assembly in Sacramento. Unable to arraign the marchers on any other charges, the authorites charged them with conspiring to forcibly enter the legislature, a legal maneuver that meets the interviewee’s approval.

Read the whole thing.

AIRLINE TYCOON RICHARD BRANSON JOINS AL GORE TO CUT YOUR CARBON FOOTPRINT.

Gaia can’t be doing all that badly, can she? After all, Branson hasn’t voluntarily grounded his fleet of airliners, and Al Gore effectively declared “Mission Accomplished” for the radical environmentalism movement when he sold his TV network to the Biggest of Big Oil, the nation of Qatar.

But perhaps to be on the safe side, you can help Branson reduce his own carbon footprint by choosing a different airline when flying.

THE NEW YORK TIMES REJECTS YOUR REALITY AND SUBSTITUTES ITS OWN: The Times Declares History is Bunk:

The title of the article says it all: “Historical Certainty Proves Elusive at Jerusalem’s Holiest Place.” The conceit of the piece by Rick Gladstone, one of the Times’ foreign editors, is that it is impossible to determine whether the enclosed plateau above the Western Wall is really where either of the biblical Holy Temples stood before their destruction, the first by the Babylonians and the second by the Romans.

* * * * * * * *

By treating lies denying the historical ties of Jews to Jerusalem as being deserving of a fair hearing, the Times is calling into question more than claims about who gets to pray on the Temple Mount. The reason why Palestinians say such things isn’t because they have a solid historical case, but because their goal is to treat Jews and Judaism as alien to the place where the Jewish history began. The stakes here are not about archeology but about the right of Israel to exist. The Times has a long history of journalism malpractice with regard to Israel and Jewish issues dating back to the Holocaust. But Gladstone’s atrocious effort to treat history as bunk is an act of intellectual dishonesty that will rank it beside the worst articles ever published by the newspaper.

But it does lend credence to this claim by Michael Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to the US:

[Oren] called the New York Times editorial-page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, after the paper published an op-ed by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in which Abbas startlingly claimed the Arabs had accepted the UN Partition Plan of 1947. The conversation went thus:

“When I write for the Times, fact checkers examine every word I write,” I began. “Did anybody check that Abbas has his facts exactly backward?”

“That’s your opinion,” Rosenthal replied.

“I’m an historian, Andy, and there are opinions and there are facts. That the Arabs rejected partition and the Jews accepted it is an irrefutable fact.”

“In your view.”

“Tell me, on June 6, 1944, did Allied forces land or did they not land on Normandy Beach?”

Rosenthal…replied, “Some might say so.”

To place the Times’ doublethink into context, Liel Leibovitz of Tablet magazine writes, “The New York Times’ Goes Truther on the Temple Mount.” “Was the White House ever in Washington, D.C.? Can we ever really know for sure? Not unless we dig under the existing structure and find indisputable archaeological evidence of the original structure, which British general Robert Ross is said—by some sources—to have torched in August, 1814,” adding, “If you find everything about the previous paragraph patently ridiculous, you are clearly not a reporter or an editor for The New York Times.“

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KURT SCHLICHTER: Here’s What’s Behind Our Obsession With Zombies: In a time when Americans are figuratively at each other’s throats, our monsters are our fellow citizens. “What is out of control, or what seems like it is out of control, is our society itself. A pervasive unease in America is deepening. It is a sense that our society has become unstable, that the normalcy we took for granted is gone and perhaps not coming back. There is a sense that at the other end of the tunnel we have walked down is chaos. We are at the point where millions look at Donald Trump as the solution to our problems, not a symptom. It’s that bad.”

Fundamentally transformed. But what does it say that the basic values of zombie flicks are conservative?

UNIVERSITIES HAVE NO BUSINESS PUNISHING ANYONE FOR SPEECH, “OFFENSIVE” OR OTHERWISE: UCLA Is Investigating a Fraternity’s Offensive ‘Kanye Western’ Theme Party. It Shouldn’t.

Slash their administrative budget. Oh, who am I kidding? This is California, where the main point of state universities is to employ lefty drones.

THE INSTA-DAUGHTER’S TAKE ON THIS NYT PIECE: “Decidedly misogynistic.”

WELL, YOU COULD TRY RESIGNING THE PRESIDENCY, FOR A START: What Are 10 Ways That I Can Stop Feeling Like a Failure?

IT’S THE PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE OF CARS: Why The 1951 Hoffman Is The Worst Car Ever.

AMY ALKON: WHAT IF SOME YOGA-DOER WANTED TO CREATE A “SAFE SPACE” FOR WHITE PEOPLE? “Previously: ‘The State of Washington is suing a small flower shop after the owner declined to provide flowers for a homosexual wedding — based on her religious beliefs.’”

POINTS AND FIGURES: Hillary And The HFT Tax.