UNEXPECTEDLY: LePen Leads First Presidential Poll After Paris Killings. And note this:

Europe’s far-Right will gain a lot of strength after the Paris attacks—and for that, you can largely blame the centrists.
Not surprisingly, figures like Marine Le Pen are making hay. Just after the attacks, Le Pen called for the “immediate halt” of the admission of refugees. Hungarian President Viktor Orban crowed that he was right all along. But in doing this, the far-Right is essentially doing what it’s always done. And what gives it oxygen is also the same thing as ever: The centrists declare any discussion of immigration (other than “it’s wonderful!”) off-limits, and so drive concerned voters to where they otherwise would not go.

Even in the wake of Paris, Euro-centrists couldn’t seem to stop preening, impugning their own citizenry, and generally insisting that all must go on as before. Less than a day after the attacks, EU President Jean-Claude Juncker declared that, “there is no need for an overall review of the European policy on refugees.” And while President Hollande has taken an admirably tough line on foreign policy and European matters, on November 18 he declared that France would increase its refugee intake over the next two years, to 30,000, in a speech whose upshot was that “France should remain as it is. Our duty is to carry on our lives.” Everything can go on the same as before, at the very least.

There may be both strategic and humanitarian arguments in favor of continuing to admit refugees, but the rhetorical tone on display from several of Europe’s highest-profile centrists, before and after the attacks, has seemed almost designed to alienate concerned citizens.

Hope is not a plan, and virtue-signalling is not a policy. American political elites have enabled the rise of Trump in much the same fashion.

NEITHER I NOR MY FAMILY ARE ANYWHERE NEAR THIS: And please note that despite being reported as Active Shooter Situation Near Planned Parenthood it’s noted later on that no one knows if PP is the target, or it just happened in the area.  I find it amusing they say Obama was briefed.  Really?  On a shooting in a Western town?  Why?  So he can make sure the crisis doesn’t go to waste?

TO BE FAIR, IT’S A CITY NOT KNOWN FOR QUALITY GOVERNANCE: Los Angeles Just Proposed the Worst Use of License Plate Reader Data in History.

HOW MANY MILES A WEEK SHOULD YOU RUN? Surprisingly few.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Why Living “Presently” Could Ruin Your Entire Life. “Living for the moment is the reason people leave marriages, lose control over their health, and why America is trillions of dollars in debt.”

MARK RIPPETOE: Women In Ground Combat: A Strength Coach’s Opinion.

FLASHBACK: The Obama-Hillary Mideast Debacles.

SKYNET SMILES: Robots Learning To Disobey Humans.

DOES AMERICA NEED A COUNCIL OF ELDERS?

It is an ominous feature of our American times that the three branches of government that operate out of Washington — the Supreme Court, Congress and the presidency — have all three shown critical weakness or incompetence recently and have historically low approval ratings. The aspirants to the Oval Office in 2016 don’t offer much chance of renewal. Late in life, the great Amb. George Kennan declared that America needed a “council of elders” to contain the excesses of democracy. The governors, perhaps meeting in a selective and representative regional council, like a board of trustees at a university or a board of directors of a corporation, might offer America saving grace at a time of dangerous crossing.

Hmm. Our big problem today isn’t the “excesses of democracy,” but rather the excesses of a corrupt and incompetent political class. Can a “council of elders” save us from that?

HEH: Google deems Bernie Sanders’ economic plan a ‘phishing scam.’

Democratic presidential hopeful Bernard Sanders’ economic plan triggered Gmail’s “phishing scam” antenna, with the mail system saying the senator’s liberal campaign promises — including lower prescription drug prices and free college for all — sound like frauds.

“Be careful with this message. It contains content that’s typically used to steal personal information,” Gmail said in a bright red warning box that appeared at the top of a message sent by Mr. Sanders’ campaign Friday, laying out his “Agenda for Working Families.”

“This message could be a scam,” Gmail says in its page explaining why it flagged the message as a “phishing scam.” Phishing is a specific type of spam email that scammers use to try to entice users to disclose bank accounts or other sensitive information. . . .

Ira Winkler, president of Secure Mentem and a cybersecurity specialist, said the campaign likely triggered Gmail’s filters because it included phrases that spammers use to try to sell prescription drugs and by offering things free of charge — in this case, the promise to pay for education at public colleges and universities.

Those bots may be onto something. People who promise you lots of free stuff are usually running some kind of scam.

WHY ARE UNIVERSITIES SUCH HOTBEDS OF RACISM AND ELIMINATIONIST RHETORIC? U. Colorado Prof Declares Whiteness a Disease.

GOOD: Breaking: Supreme Court Blocks Racially Discriminatory Hawaii Election.

REVERSING AGING NO LONGER LOOKS LIKE A PIPE DREAM: Systemic attenuation of the TGF-β pathway by a single drug simultaneously rejuvenates hippocampal neurogenesis and myogenesis in the same old mammal.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Female teacher jailed for 10 years for sexually violating boy. “The starting point for Reriti’s punishment should be 14-15 years in jail, the prosecutor said. He suggested Reriti’s gender shouldn’t mean she should escape the sort of punishment a male teacher found guilty of child sex offences would face.”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 932.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Ivy League Presidents Try Appeasement.

With their campuses rocked by social justice protests, anxious Ivy League presidents are trying to appease campus radicals with huge payouts to left-wing identity programs. Peter Salovey, the president of Yale, apologized to protesters (“we failed you”) and wrote a campus-wide letter promising to create a new “university center” for the study of “race ethnicity, and other aspects of social identity.” He also pledged to double the budget for the African American, Native American, Asian American, and Hispanic cultural centers, and to devote new resources to “educating our community about race, ethnicity, diversity, and inclusion.”

Not to be outdone, Brown University President Christina Paxson has answered protests by unveiling a $100 million program for creating “a just and inclusive campus community.” Among the budget items: “expand mentoring resources for students of color, LGBTQ+ students, and first generation college students”; create “workshops” to “foster greater awareness and sensitivity on issues of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender identity and expression”; and “promote university-wide research and academic programming on Power, Privilege, Identity and Structural Racism.”

There is no doubt that there is still racism, sexism, and homophobia on college campuses, just as there is everywhere else in our society. But the idea that it can be stamped out with still more diversity training, still more cultural centers, and still more identity studies programs is a fantasy. American college campuses are already saturated with these programs (which, it goes without saying, inflate the budgets of colleges whose degree programs are already too expensive). If bigotry is still as widespread at Brown and Yale as the protesters claim, then perhaps the universities ought to try a different approach. After all, the available evidence suggests that diversity education programs are counterproductive, and segregated academic and residential programs may well exacerbate racial isolation and misunderstanding.

If a cabal of Evil Conservatives set out to destroy academia from within, what, exactly, would it be doing differently?

CAMPUS ADMINISTRATORS ARE REAPING WHAT THEY HAVE SOWN, writes Victor Davis Hanson:

Current student anger eerily fits the pattern of most left-wing unrest, from the cycles of the French Revolution to the campus riots of the 1960s.

First, protests gradually grow more extreme. Venom is directed at fellow leftists who are deemed insufficiently radical.

In revolutionary France, wild-eyed Jacobins soon guillotined reformist Girondins, who were considered passé. During the Russian Revolution, extremist Bolsheviks marginalized liberal Mensheviks. In the 1960s, many members of the SDS and Black Panthers hated liberals who disapproved of their violence.

A group called the Black Justice League wants the name of liberal but bigoted President Woodrow Wilson removed from Princeton University. Liberals are aghast that the century-old memory of their progressive hero might vanish from the Princeton campus.

Don’t these wild-eyed “snowflake fascists” know that the memory hole is a weapon to be used only against Republicans?  And as VDH asks, will FDR be tossed down it next?

Read the whole thing.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. IF WE’RE SERIOUS ABOUT FREE SPEECH, WE SHOULD SAY ‘JE SUIS DIEUDONNÉ.’ He’s a putz, but he should be refuted, not jailed.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Some good news, for a change.

SPENGLER: Top 10 Reasons to Vote for Ted Cruz.

There’s a lot I like about Ted Cruz, but I’m not sure if I can vote a candidate so heavily tatted up.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: UMass president aims to fire Dartmouth chief.

University of Massachusetts president Martin T. Meehan has moved to dismiss the chancellor of the Dartmouth campus, Divina Grossman, by the end of the academic year amid concerns about the campus’s performance, according to two officials with direct knowledge of the situation.

Under Grossman’s 3½-year tenure, enrollment has fallen and private fund-raising has plummeted, even as debt mounts.

In addition, the campus has cycled through three chief financial officers and as many provosts and fund-raising directors.

Obviously, they need to hire a new VP For Diversity.

OUR SOCIETY IS NOT AT ITS BEST PRESENTLY, THOUGH THE SOCIETY AS A WHOLE IS BETTER THAN ITS POLITICAL/INTELLECTUAL CLASS: ‘Self and Soul’: Mark Edmundson’s biting critique of modern complacency.

Americans have become, Edmundson says, wholly pragmatic and small-minded, always on the lookout for the main chance and conditioned to be greedy for the gaudy trash supplied by our consumerist overlords. We move restlessly from want to want, never discovering any lasting satisfaction. As for living heroic or noble lives, our video games and movies do that for us. Meanwhile, Edmundson adds, “the profound stories about heroes and saints are passing from our minds.” Our days have no purpose. Instead of aspiring to grandeur, we surrender to pettiness and accommodation. . . .

It needn’t be this way. Edmundson devotes the first half of “Self and Soul” to several ancient exemplars of courage, compassion and contemplation, to those who, rejecting a safe and secure passage through life, consecrated themselves to some greater task. Achilles, for instance, knows he will die young, but his name and glory will last forever. In battle at Troy, he becomes fully himself. Alexander Pope summed up this warrior ethos in just three lines about another legendary fighter:

Now on the field Ulysses stands alone,

The Greeks all fled, the Trojans pouring on;

But stands collected in himself and whole

Today, Edmundson says, any commitment to military virtues is disdained “by middle-class men and women whose central aspiration is to endure and who seek not honor but respect, not ascendancy but stable existence.”

Now, one hardly expects an English teacher — a professor at the University of Virginia, no less — to celebrate the martial spirit. But Edmundson does, even going so far as to contrast Achilles with Hector, who is not just Troy’s greatest champion but also a loving son, father and husband. Nonetheless, he notes, Hector’s sheer humanity ultimately makes him a lesser soldier. Families call to us to be careful out there, to remember our children. The true warrior thinks only of honor and his code of valor.

The martial virtues are real, and are indeed forgotten today, though I am sadly near-certain that we will be recalling them more fully in the not-so-distant future. But a society that holds up the martial virtues as special exemplars is often a society in which other sectors are distinctly short on virtue of their own.

The book is Self and Soul: A Defense of Ideals. Without taking anything away from Edmundson (to paraphrase Arthur Leff, when non-ironic odes to martial virtue emanate from the academy these days, attention must be paid) here are some related thoughts of mine on martial virtues.