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MORTON DOWNEY, JR. COMES TO CNN IN AUGUST: That’s the headline atop the press release the network’s PR people spammed me with this morning announcing that the former cable news channel turned all-documentaries-all-the-time outlet (except when plane crashes and race riots occur) has acquired the viewing rights for the documentary on the infamous chain-smoking late ‘80s shock TV pioneer. Downey, who died of lung cancer in 2001, was among the first to give Al Sharpton a national outlet during Sharpton’s initial velour track suit, medallion and pompadour phase — which isn’t all that surprising, considering Downey was apparently a Democrat himself before his transformation into a cartoon conservative. (See also: Trump, Donald.)

But still, after screwing around with Piers Morgan and Fareed Zakaria, I don’t think I can be faulted for seeing the above headline and thinking, “Finally, CNN has hired a host who can deliver the goods.”

Although in reality, this video shock jock who was handed his pink slip yesterday is probably already emailing his C.V. to CNN.

I’M GLAD I WENT TO COLLEGE WHEN I DID: We had a lot more fun. Heather Wilhelm explains “The Sexual Train Wreck Behind ‘Yes Means Yes'”:

On Tuesday, in that spirit, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a sweeping “yes means yes” bill into law, expanding the state’s sexual consent rules to include private colleges and universities. Both Nancy Pelosi and Lady Gaga love the concept—Ms. Gaga even co-authored a “yes means yes” op-ed with Cuomo—so you probably already know that it, just like passing bills you haven’t read and wearing dresses made entirely out of raw meat, is a really good idea.

“The so-called ‘yes means yes’ standard,” Reuters reports, “defines sexual consent between people as an affirmative, conscious, and voluntary understanding to engage in sexual activity.” Anything that falls outside of the nebulous concept of “consent”—a gratuitous touch on the elbow, perhaps, as opposed to the formally agreed-upon nudge of the right lower kneecap—could be labeled sexual assault. . . .

“Yes means yes” policies, at their heart, imply that it is normal, healthy, and a good idea to have sex with complete strangers. (Controversial point from yours truly: Unless you are a fictional member of a fictional band, it is generally not.) But they also imply that it is normal and healthy to have sex with people you don’t trust. Why else would you have to draw up a sex contract? Why else would you need Andrew Cuomo to write your sexual rules for you? Despite years of “feminist” marketing, that’s not empowered in any way. It’s just creepy, and also kind of insane.

The ideology behind “yes means yes” is strange in another way: It implies, through its list of rules, prescriptions, and penalties, that sex is a clinical experience; that it is perfunctory, mechanical, and best overseen by bureaucrats.

This liberal/progressive vision of sex is simply bizarre. It reveals a male-female (or male-male, or female-female, or transgender-male, or whatever– you get the drift) relationship that is barren of feelings, of intimacy, or even basic friendship. It is a mirror into the liberal/progressive mindset that trusts no one and sees trauma, offense, and microaggressions lurking around every corner.

Indeed, it makes one wonder if those who are ardently pushing these “yes means yes” bills weren’t, themselves, the victim of childhood sexual abuse, since they seem so traumatized by sex, and present a means of “fixing” a problem that, frankly, most people don’t find problematic at all. Do these individuals just need therapy, to work out their hostility? If not, why are they trying to transform one of life’s simplest pleasures into something so clinical? It is truly bizarre, and appears to reflect the adage, “The inmates are running the asylum.”

VIDEO: The Bitcoin Blockchain Explained. Caveat: I think that every code gets broken eventually.

38 WAYS COLLEGE STUDENTS ENJOY ‘LEFT-WING PRIVILEGE’ ON CAMPUS: In Time magazine of all places; here’s a quick sample:

1. I can, if I wish, arrange to be in the company of people of my political persuasion most of the time.

2. I can spend my entire college career taking only classes with professors who think exactly as I do.

3. I can take classes and earn degrees in departments that are designed to line up exactly with my worldview.

4. I can be sure that an overwhelming majority of the material I am assigned to read for class will confirm what I already believe.

5. My professors will assume that I already think just like them, and use examples and anecdotes that testify to our philosophical uniformity.

Read the whole thing. As David Horowitz once said, “you can’t get a good education if you’re only hearing one side of the story.”

AT VIRGINIA TECH, “Diversity” and “Inclusion” Litmus Tests for Tenure.

BACKUP YOUR BRAIN: The Mind-Swap in ‘Self/less’ Isn’t Completely Crazy.

READER BOOK PLUG: From John Braddock, A Spy’s Guide To Thinking.

FASTER, PLEASE: Stem Cell Exosomes used to Induce Damaged Mouse Hearts to Repair Themselves.

HOW ART BECAME IRRELEVANT: In the new issue of Commentary, Michael J. Lewis explores how modern art largely drained passion and life out of the art world, particularly in the postwar era:

After World War II and the introduction of the atom bomb, it seemed pointless to try to preserve the confused traditions of a civilization that had brought the world to the ledge of oblivion. Instead, the artists came to believe they had to dispense with the entire accumulated storehouse of artistic memory and the history of the benighted West in order to begin anew.

The 1950s painter Barnett Newman summarized this line of thought pretentiously but accurately:

We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been the devices of western European painting. Instead of making “cathedrals” out of Christ, man, or “life,” we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings.

To which James Lileks responds:

Which is the difference between adults and adolescents. The primary feeling, of course, would be anger (at war, at hypocrisy, at whatever faults in Western Civ consumed the artist at the moment) and sentimental longing, a forward-facing nostalgia, for the Utopia that would result from burning down the accumulated storehouse. (After it had been looted, of course, and the more interesting pieces put up on their mantles.)

How did the atom bomb make the artists think it was pointless to preserve the traditions? Because their use would do away with things, I suppose, but the end result was a culture pre-exhausted for your convenience, one that had assumed the end was nigh and spent its time making grotesque faces in the mirror. It would have been just as potent a response — more so — if they had embraced the positive history of Western Civ and exalted its possibilities, but they were a joyless lot, and the joyless feel judged in the presence of beauty.

Read the whole thing.

IT’S NOT FUNNY, AND YOU MUST AGREE: Robert George explains the latest progressive/liberal/totalitarian temper tantrum over humor they don’t like by comedian Amy Schumer:

The UK Guardian went after the native New Yorker’s “blind spot on race” last month, citing standup jokes like, “Nothing works 100 percent of the time, except Mexicans,” and “I used to date Hispanic guys, but now I prefer consensual.”

It reached a fever pitch Tuesday. In The Washington Post, Stacey Patton and David Leonard called Schumer a racist on par with Donald Trump. They closed with this haymaker:

“While black families are burying their dead, churches are burning, black women church pastors are receiving death threats and the KKK is planning rallies in South Carolina, Schumer is ‘playing’ with race. While Latinos are being deported in record numbers, while ‘80 percent of Central American girls and women crossing Mexico en route to the United States are raped,’ while children are languishing in camps in the Southwest, Schumer has got jokes, and only white America is laughing.”

Isn’t that just a bit . . . dramatic?

Why yes, yet it is dramatic. But this objection is coming from the same delicate snowflakes who incessantly search for  “micro” aggressions, require explicit consent before kissing, and need “safe spaces” to complain that everyone else is a bigoted hater.  As I noted yesterday, this is not authoritarianism, it’s totalitarianism, and they won’t be happy with just stopping practices they deem offensive. No, they want you to agree with them.  As George Orwell put it in 1984,“We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.” 

SCREW UP YOUR DATING LIFE with these two weird tricks.

PJ PARENTING ROUNDTABLE: HOW DO YOU EXPLAIN PICTURES OF DECEASED FAMILY MEMBERS TO KIDS? Pictures? Growing in a staunchly Catholic family, I remember attending numerous open-casket viewings starting at a very young age. I guess we were made of sterner stuff back then.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 791.

THE YOUNGER GENERATION:

Sometimes I despair for the kids these days, I really do.

I didn’t expect to feel this way at the tender age of 42. I was supposed to find them puzzling, with their Snapchatting and their Venmo and never looking up from their phones. I was supposed to think they were having too much sex or doing too many drugs and not listening to their wiser elders, gosh darn it. I was supposed to grouse that young people are always getting themselves into trouble.

Instead I’m worried that they aren’t getting themselves into enough trouble. They seem so fragile. They can’t read Ovid without a trigger warning and a pair of latex gloves, or go off to college without calling their parents to check in. Did no one ever take them aside and explain that college is for abandoning your parents, leaving them to worry about what you are doing with their money while you forget to call them for a month at a time ? There is something truly terrifying about a generation of younger people that craves more adult intervention into their lives. Yet, that’s what everyone from teachers to employers reports: a rising number of kids who seek to be tethered to their parents, and don’t seem to know what to do unless Mom or Dad is hovering nearby.

I know, I know. People have been worrying about The Kids These Days since time immemorial. And yet, older people I talk to — ones old enough to remember seeing the low-speed, low-stakes train wreck that was my own generation hurtling through college and into the workforce — confirm my impression that This Time Really Is Different. The upper stratum of the Trophy Kids really are going into college expecting to live in a sort of Nerf universe where nothing ever really hurts, and there’s always an adult to pick them up and put them back on track. And they’re coming out into the workforce expecting the same sort of personal concierge service from a world that, as I was myself dismayed to find 20 years ago, really doesn’t have time to care how they feel.

I fear that we’re heading for a spell of bad luck that will turn all that around.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Clinton Aide Helped Outside Employer Get High-Profile Clinton Speech. “Hillary Clinton’s top aide at the State Department who simultaneously worked for New York University helped arrange Clinton’s high-profile speech at the school in 2009, according to internal State Department emails released last week. Clinton aide Cheryl Mills was working as both State Department chief of staff and as NYU general counsel from January to May 2009, the Washington Free Beacon first reported last month. Mills helped the school bring Clinton as its May 13, 2009, commencement speaker and was involved in her speech-drafting process, emails indicate.” First Huma’s double-dipping, now this?

ROGER SIMON: Are Carly and The Donald the best candidates?

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WHAT’S REALLY BEHIND BERNIE SANDERS’ BOOM? “He can’t win and he will never be a VP pick, but he is relevant,” Ron Radosh writes:

The only real question is this: will Hillary do something to make her candidacy vulnerable, at which point Elizabeth Warren might decide to enter the race herself, forcing Sanders to withdraw and throw his support to her? Or could Joe Biden, for the moment standing in the wings, enter the race and take away from Hillary the moderate voters among Democrats she now has supporting her?

But could Sanders and Donald Trump finally come together to form a bipartisan populist Pangaea presidential bid? Imagine the possibilities!

https://twitter.com/BuzzFeedAndrew/status/618895309209407488

https://twitter.com/AdamBaldwin/status/616424478583558144

Good and hard, as Mencken would say.

DAVID GELERNTER: COLLEGE STUDENTS ‘ARE SO IGNORANT THAT IT’S HARD TO ACCEPT HOW IGNORANT THEY ARE,’ Gelernter tells Bill Kristol while discussing his recent book America Lite. The video of the interview is online at YouTube; the transcript is here. Kristol asks Gelernter “Why is America ‘Lite’? Was it ever heavy? I mean, haven’t people been complaining about America-Lite for 200 years?”

GELERNTER: I guess they have, they’re never ever any shortage of complaints. And it’s true. It’s something one really has to keep in mind that any generation looking back is likely to be wistful and nostalgic on how great it used to be. Of course, we’ve made progress in a million ways. How about dentistry? An obvious example. We’re so much wealthier in the middle class; we take this for granted, but I think of my parents’ generation, the middle class has made enormous progress.

But America-Lite. I’m a teacher of college students. I’m lucky to be at one of the best colleges in the world, at Yale. Our students are as smart as any in the world. They work very hard to get here. They are eager, they’re likable. My generation is getting a chip on its shoulder, we always thought we knew everything about every topic, our professors were morons, and we were the ones who were building the world.

My students today are much less obnoxious. Much more likable than I and my friends used to be, but they are so ignorant that it’s hard to accept how ignorant they are. You tell yourself stories; it’s very hard to grasp that the person you’re talking to, who is bright, articulate, advisable, interested, and doesn’t know who Beethoven is. Had no view looking back at the history of the 20th century – just sees a fog. A blank. Has the vaguest idea of who Winston Churchill was or why he mattered. And maybe has no image of Teddy Roosevelt, let’s say, at all. I mean, these are people who – We have failed.

Which may partially help to explain the recent observations from the New York Times’ John Tierney while guest-blogging at Instapundit last week and the Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis that conservatives and leftists are speaking nearly completely different languages these days, making debate near impossible.

REPUBLICAN LEGISLATURE TAKES DOWN DEMOCRATIC SYMBOL: South Carolina House votes to remove Confederate flag from statehouse grounds.

THESE REALLY ARE THE CRAZY YEARS: Fox’s Megyn Kelly, Brit Hume discuss college sex contracts.

Fox News host Megyn Kelly again discussed the issue of campus sexual assault on her program Tuesday, noting how activists are now passing out “consent contracts” to college students.

Kelly began the segment by reporting that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed into law the notorious “yes means yes” policies for all colleges and universities (even private ones) in the state.

Kelly then brought on Fox News senior correspondent Brit Hume to discuss the consent contracts, which were reported on by the Washington Examiner earlier in the day.

“Everyone wants to diminish sexual assault on college campuses,” Kelly said. “But it has gotten to the point of ridiculousness. Where now, they want verbal consent every step of the way — so it’s like, you start the kissing and then it progresses and there should still be a ‘yes’ and a ‘yes’ and a ‘yes’ and a ‘yes’ and a ‘yes.’ ”

Hume suggested such “new plans” for sex are being written by people “who have never had any sex.”

“It was the culmination of the deregulation of sex,” Hume said. “Now what we’re seeing is that, those people don’t particularly like some of the results of that — or what they see as the results of that — and they’re trying to re-regulate it, and that’s where we are.”

Related: “I suddenly realized what’s happening. This is a stand-in for a wedding ceremony.”

Made in mockery of marriage, as Sauron made the orcs in mockery of the elves.

THE 8 STAGES OF SCAM: “RIP: The great cholesterol scam (1955 – 2015)…The cholesterol scam bears a strong relationship to the anthropogenic global warming scam.”

In both cases, as G.K. Chesterton once observed, “Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.”