HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Columbia Student Claims To Be Traumatized By Reading About White People.

THE PROBLEM IS, THE RESEARCH WAS POLITICIZED CRAP: Dems push to end ban on gun violence research.

Dozens of House Democrats are pushing to end the federal ban on gun violence research.

In a Friday letter to Reps. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) and Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), the Democrats urged the two senior appropriators to remove the decades-old prohibition as part of a year-end government spending package.

Led by Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.), the Democrats said the so-called “Dickey amendment” — a long-standing provision that has effectively blocked federal research on gun violence — leaves lawmakers in the dark when it comes to crafting policies aimed at tackling the problem.

“We dedicate $240 million a year on traffic safety research, more than $233 million a year on food safety, and $331 million a year on the effects of tobacco, but almost nothing on firearms that kill 33,000 Americans annually,” the lawmakers wrote.

“The result is a lack of fundamental research on gun violence, gun safety, and what public policy measures will effectively stem the tide of gun deaths.”

The public health community shouldn’t have forfeited trust by lying and cheating. Here’s a piece by Don Kates on that.

WHERE’S GUY MONTAG WHEN YOU NEED HIM? Columbia Student in Anguish Because She Has to Read Books by White People:

White privilege. It’s everywhere, I tell you. You can’t escape its smothering influence — even at one of the finest (and most expensive) schools in the land.

Take the case of this poor, wilting flower. Nissy Aya is now in her fifth year of undergraduate study at Columbia University. She was supposed to graduate last year with the rest of her class, but finds herself — totally not her fault — on track to graduate next year.

Ms. Aya says that she has experienced much angst and anguish while taking Columbia’s Core courses, studying the greatest, the most powerful, the most tolerant civilization in the history of the human race — Western civilization. It seems that Ms. Aya has feelings of inadequacy when reading all these books by dead white males.

Daily Caller:

Aya attributed some of her academic troubles to the trauma of having to take Columbia’s current Core Curriculum, which requires students to take a series of six classes with a focus on the culture and history of Western, European civilization. Aya says this focus on the West was highly mentally stressful for her.

“It’s traumatizing to sit in Core classes,” she said. “We are looking at history through the lens of these powerful, white men. I have no power or agency as a black woman, so where do I fit in?”

As Rod Dreher adds, “Hey Nissy Aya, maybe the problem is you — and maybe some grown-up at the university needs to tell you that:”

If a white kid were studying jazz at Juilliard, would he get away with blaming identity trauma for failing his classes, saying that he had to listen to too many black jazz composers? Could a black student studying classical music at the same institution get away with claiming trauma because all the composers were Dead White European Males? Come on.

The college professor who tipped me off to this Columbia story said:

Our patrimony is under assault. At some point someone just has to tell these kids the truth: some civilizations are better than others. But that has nothing to do with you. You are not inexorably linked to your ancestors. You can appropriate all the good insights anywhere you find them. To deny yourself goodness, truth, and beauty wherever it is, you wind up diminishing your own dignity, treating yourself as if you were no more than your color or your genes.

One dead white author who anticipated this moment was Ray Bradbury. In his excellent article in the New York Observer on Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 in the era of “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” titled “The Real Reason We Need to Stop Trying to Protect Everyone’s Feelings,” Ryan Holiday wrote:

I see no need to pile on to college students as being particularly responsible for the “coddling of the American mind.” (Great piece, read it. [It’s co-written by Jonathan Haidt and fellow Insta-co-blogger Greg Lukianoff –Ed.]) Though I do find it ironic that we require kids to read this book in high school and just a few years (or months) later, they’re leading the charge on exactly the kind of well-intentioned censorship Bradbury was talking about. I don’t mean to say that these examples come close to the kind of overt censorship that every reasonable person dreads. But I do mean to say that they come from the same place—and very alarmingly—ultimately end together in a much worse place.

In the 50th anniversary edition, Bradbury includes a short afterword where he gives his thoughts on current culture. Almost as if he is speaking directly about the events above, he wrote: “There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running around with lit matches.”

But destroying — or rejecting — knowledge, lest one’s “safe space” become violated by doubleplusungood crimethink means that the person holding the match has self-immolated long before the paper catches fire.

I feel very badly for Nissy Aya and her self-destructive cri de coeur, but regarding the state of college students in general and the professors who coddle them, Kurt Schlichter has the right idea: “Let’s All Laugh As Liberalism Commits Ritual Suicide On Campus.”

NO CONFIDENCE: Disapproval of Obama’s handling of terrorism reaches 54%, highest of his presidency. So far.

ANDREW McCARTHY: Obama and the ISIS ‘Recruitment Tool’ Canard:

The Republican moderates are well-meaning but foolish. Lacking confidence or competence to explain the different interpretations of Islam, they fear that if they concede the nexus between Islamic doctrine and jihadism, they will be perceived as “at war with Islam.” So they relentlessly pretend that the “true” Islam is irenic: a noble quest for justice and tolerance. Because these Republicans are more politically progressive than conservative, they delude themselves into believing their soaring words will someday alter reality: If they say “religion of peace” and “moderate” enough times, Islam will actually become a moderate religion of peace, its sharia seamlessly compatible with our Constitution and Western principles – regardless of what Islamic doctrine actually says.

The Left, to the contrary, is neither well-meaning nor foolish. It will not admit the nexus between Islamic scripture and jihadist terror for two shrewd reasons.

Read the whole thing.

STRANGE NEW RESPECT:

Shot: New DNC ad: Why can’t these Republicans be respectful of radical Islam, like George Bush was?

—Headline by Allahpundit of Hot Air last night.

Chaser:

When Reagan was president, he was compared unfavorably to Eisenhower.When Bush was president, he was compared unfavorably to Reagan.

Know this: When a Republican takes office in 2013, he will be compared unfavorably to Bush, who will be held out as a “conservative who at least had some heart and some sense of compassion” and the current Republican President will be, as each Republican President is called in turn, the worst President in all of history.

—Ace of Spades, August 4th, 2010. Many more examples of this inexorable trend — the left discovering Strange New Respect for Gerald Ford, Reagan, George H.W. Bush and even Richard Nixon rounded up here.

(And for a more jaw-clenching trip down memory lane, 24 examples of George W. Bush and the GOP being smeared as Nazis, by such otherwise disparate lefties as Al Gore, John Glenn, Harry Reid to Hunter S. Thompson, Kurt Vonnegut, Linda Ronstadt, and Janeane Garofalo during his term in office.)

BUT GUN PERMITS HAVE GUN COOTIES: House Republicans Introduce Bill to Ensure TSA Accepts Gun Permits as IDs.

THE  REAL JV TEAM IS IN WASHINGTON DC: Refugees and the Jihadist Fifth Column.

LIKE A BAD RESTAURANT AFTER A MASS POISONING: DNC looks to rebrand to stem losses during Obama administration.

AT THIS POINT, WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE: Hillary Clinton’s plan to fight ISIS is like Obama’s — only more so.

NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN: The tiny pill fueling Syria’s war and turning fighters into superhuman soldiers.

REAL FEMINISTS COMPETING WITH THE ONION: Feminists Want to Ban Negotiation – Because it “Disempowers” Women.

SORRY TO DESTROY MALE DREAMS, BUT NOT EVEN AFTER DRINKS: Sorry “Science”—Not All Women Are Lesbians.

OIKOPHOBIA III, ENTER THE MEDIA: The Media’s Snob Problem: Trump’s Gold Palace and Carson’s Jesus Painting.

SON OF OIKOPHOBIA: Team Obama’s ridiculous Paris remarks highlight its lame mindset on ISIS.

IT CAME FROM OIKOPHOBIA:Dartmouth’s apology to its students’ … attackers.

PARIS: So I expect everything to get far stupider from here on out.

IT’S LIKE OBAMA HAS SOME SORT OF RELIGIOUS TEST GOING OR SOMETHING: While DC debates religion, refugees, Iraqi Christians feel Uncle Sam’s boot.

AT AMAZON, $30 off the Fire HD10 Tablet.

Plus, fresh deals in Office Products.

MARK RIPPETOE: Pajama Boy Redux: The Male in Modern Society. “The route from Beowulf to Pajama Boy has been a very long downhill slide.”

SMART DIPLOMACY^TM UPDATE: Obama & Kerry: Such a Fine Line Between Clever & Stupid.

Let’s put it bluntly: Kerry tells us that certain acts of mass terror are not as bad as others if the terrorists have a “legitimacy” or a “rationale” understandable to your average progressive elite moron, one that said moron “could attach to.” You find encapsulated here the self-loathing that progressives feel for Western society, a loathing so deep that they are willing to “attach” themselves to those who would kill us in cold blood as long as the killers had an understandable reason, of course. This is the same sort of “cool detached intellectualist logic” at work, say, when Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland, Stalin conducted his murderous purges, Castro and Che ran their firing squads 24/7, as Chavez/Maduro dismantle democracy in Venezuela, or as thugs take over universities in the name of “tolerance” and “black lives” etcetera, etcetera . . .

For the progressive the victims at Charlie Hebdo, of course, had committed the crime of treating Islam to almost the same level of mockery to which they subject Christianity, Judaism, Israel, and conservative politicians. They violated the Molotov-Von Ribbentrop Pact that exists between Islam and progressivism. It was too bad they had to die, but it was understandable.

Ouch. Plus: “Unfortunately for Western civilization, the Obama misadministration is not a fictional mockumentary. This is real. The disaster is real. The blood being spilled by Muslim crazies is real.”

IF WE’RE DISCUSSING ACCENTS, this video on Appalachian English is also well worth your time.

But I have yet to see a video on the Southern New Jersey accent. It doesn’t sound like Tony Soprano (he’s supposed to be from North Jersey), and it doesn’t sound like Sylvester Stallone’s Philadelphia-based Rocky (“Yo, Adrienne!”), but I always recognize it when I go back east to visit family.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Mediaite: DNC Ad Attacking Republicans for Saying ‘Radical Islam’ Is Laughably Stupid. “I’ve seen my share of nasty, bizarre, and over-the-top political ads. But this may be the first that I can honestly say is just plain stupid. To begin with, the ad is horribly tone-deaf. . . . The inference the DNC appears to making here is astonishing. To even allude to the fact that radical Islam exists is now ‘equating Islam, all Muslims, with terrorists’? Even the most politically correct among us would roll their eyes at that notion.”

So, basically, this is the Democrats’ new message:

FAUX “HATE” AT HARVARD LAW: Heather Mac Donald wisely suggests, “Don’t Bet on the Harvard Law School Hate Crime.”

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER, I GUESS, BUT BETTER NEVER LATE: Yale Expresses Support for Faculty at Center of Halloween Email Controversy. Yale’s President Peter Salovey should have done this right away, and should have demanded better behavior from Yale students.

I don’t know if he’s said or done anything about the students who spat on attendees at a free speech conference.