LIFE IN DE BLASIO’S NEW YORK: Reports of subway assaults soar in the last year.

NOT ENOUGH BABIES BORN: Japan Has Aged Out of its Economic Miracle: Demography is destiny, and Japan’s population is getting too old for the country’s economic health.

USA TODAY: Making college more expensive: Democrats’ proposals do little to rein in costs. “A better idea would be to take a magnifying glass to exactly why college costs have skyrocketed at three times the overall inflation rate since 1980. As with health care, the answer involves what happens when bills are paid with other people’s money.”

Indeed.

RACE BAITING + ENTITLEMENT = VERY ANGRY PEOPLE: Vester Flanagan Threatened Coworkers, Played the Race Card for Years.

Vester Lee Flanagan claimed in a suicide note Wednesday that June’s massacre of black parishioners at a South Carolina church was “the tipping point” that sent him on the path to murdering two journalists on live television Wednesday.

But in court papers and interviews with The Daily Beast, former colleagues describe Flanagan as a problematic employee, who was repeatedly reprimanded for his harsh treatment of coworkers, and complained racism was behind harsh evaluations of his work.

“He just had a history of playing the race card,” former WTWC anchor Dave Leval told The Daily Beast. “I know he did that in Tallahassee a couple of times…”

. . . .

But no one could guess that two years after he was fired, Flanagan would shoot two other journalists at his former TV station. . . .

“Vester was an unhappy man,” Marks said, adding, “when he was hired here, he quickly gathered a reputation as someone who was difficult to work with. He was sort of looking out for people to say things that he could take offense to.”

Flanagan also filed an employment discrimination suit against a Tallahassee, Florida, station where he worked from 1999 to 2000. (That case was settled out of court.)

According to one news report, Flanagan said he and another black employee were called “monkeys” and claimed a supervisor once said, “blacks are lazy and do not take advantage of free money” for scholarships and other opportunities. . . .

“The fact that he kept his job was because he was an African-American gay man. That’s pretty hard to say no to,” Sextro told The Daily Beast.

We have all encountered angry, entitled individuals like this. They aren’t just toxic to work with; they’re potentially dangerous. We typically give them wide berth, just to avoid the hurling of hurtful “racism!” accusations and potential violence that simmers just below the surface. Individuals like this may get reprimanded or bounced around (for the sanity of coworkers) but they rarely get fired, for fear of lawsuits.  This television station was frankly brave to fire the guy.

On a broader level, Flanagan is a sad but ineluctable product of the progressive left’s incessant race-baiting and claims of minority entitlement. He is, essentially, the love child of Al Sharpton and President Obama (with Elizabeth Warren as the surrogate).

MEH. I WANT ANTIGRAVITY AND REACTIONLESS THRUSTERS. The Transforming Vertical-Takeoff Plane That’s Better Than a Flying Car.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: In Europe, Immigration Drama That Has Nothing To Do With Donald Trump.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 840. “Nothing quite says truth and transparency like doing Uncle Sam’s work under your dog’s name.”

LIFE IN THE OBAMA ERA: “The fact that he kept his job was because he was an African-American gay man. That’s pretty hard to say no to.”

And this remains evergreen, alas:

Worst president ever.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: More Ominous Statistics for Higher Ed Industry.

Barely a week goes by without the release of new statistics pointing to the utter unsustainability of America’s existing higher education model. Last week, we reported that, thanks rising default rates, Moody’s is considering downgrading securitized student debt—a $1.2 trillion (and growing) problem fueled in part by federal subsidies for overpriced graduate programs. This week, the National Association of College and University Business Officers released a report showing that despite ballooning sticker prices, private four-year colleges have stagnant revenue because they have been forced to boost “tuition discounts” (grants, aid, and scholarships) to keep enrollment up. Nonetheless, enrollment is barely growing. . . .

The data point to serious trouble on the horizon for non-elite colleges, which are being squeezed the most. While more students are willing to play the sticker price (or something close to it) for selective institutions, non-elite colleges are forced to compete for students by jacking up aid further and further, and losing revenue as a result. . . . Higher education professionals are clearly concerned about the rising discount rates mean for the future of the industry. If revenue and enrollment stay flat, lower-tier colleges will be squeezed harder and harder, and perhaps some will need to close their doors.

If only someone had warned them.

BICYCLE DESKS: BETTER THAN THE GYM? Well, that depends on what you mean by “better.” But we have a FitDesk and the Insta-Wife likes it.

AT AMAZON, fresh deals on bestselling products, updated every hour.

Also, coupons galore in Grocery & Gourmet Food.

Plus, Kindle Daily Deals.

And, Today’s Featured Digital Deal. The deals are brand new every day, so browse and save!

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: In Europe, Immigration Drama That Has Nothing To Do With Donald Trump.

ED MORRISSEY: If Clinton Loses Her Security Clearance, Could She Still Be President?

TANNED, RESTED, READY: Biden donors lying in wait.

Major fundraisers for Joe Biden’s past campaigns have not committed to Hillary Clinton, leaving the vice president’s allies convinced he can win the financial support necessary to challenge her.

Biden would face a financial giant in the Clinton campaign, which has won over many of President Obama’s fundraisers and already had a vast financial network.

But a number of big donors with ties to Biden have not thrown their support to the Democratic frontrunner.

And Clinton, who already faces an unexpectedly tough challenge from liberal Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), has seen doubts creep into her campaign as she has dealt with the controversy surrounding her use of a private email account as secretary of State.

“If VP Biden decides to run I will support him 100 percent,” New York attorney Richard J. Davis, a campaign bundler for Biden’s 2008 presidential campaign, told The Hill. Davis is a long-term Democratic supporter who served as assistant secretary of the Treasury Department during the Carter Administration.

The organization urging Biden to run for President – Draft Biden 2016 – would not comment specifically on its fundraising challenges.

I’m sure Hillary is thrilled.

HERBERT HOOVER TRUMP COULD EMERGE AS MONIKER OF DONALD THE PROTECTIONIST: “Here’s a historical fact that Donald Trump, and many voters attracted to him, may not know: The last American president who was a trade protectionist was Republican Herbert Hoover. Obviously that economic strategy didn’t turn out so well — either for the nation or the GOP,” Larry Kudlow and Steve Moore write at the New York Sun. “Does Trump aspire to be a 21st century Hoover with a modernized platform of the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariff that helped send the American and world economy into a decade-long depression and a collapse of the banking system?”

Besides we already have a Hoover in the White House; far left Harper’s magazine compared Obama to the 31st president back in 2009, forgetting that Hoover was a fellow “Progressive” whose government-expanding policies were the prototype for the Roosevelt Administration’s further bloat, which did little but tread water and uselessly dragged out the Depression.

STRAIGHT INTO NIHILISM: Jason L. Riley on “Gangsta Rap’s Grim Legacy for Comptons Everywhere:”

Twenty years ago, sharp social critics like Martha Bayles and Stanley Crouch took others to task for indulging or playing down this celebration of delinquency instead of denouncing it. “Too many irresponsible intellectuals—black and white—have submitted to the youth culture and the adolescent rebellion of pop music, bootlegging liberal arts rhetoric to defend Afro-fascist rap groups like Public Enemy on the one hand, while paternalistically defining the ‘gangster rap’ of doggerel chanters such as Ice Cube as expressive of the ‘real’ black community,” wrote Mr. Crouch.

But that type of criticism was in the minority and ultimately lost the day. Scholars like Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates Jr. would argue that gutter rap verse comes out of a black American tradition that enriches our language and culture. Cornel West, in his familiar mix of Marxism and gobbledygook, once described rap as “primarily the musical expression of the paradoxical cry of desperation and celebration of the black underclass and poor working class.” And Michael Eric Dyson credited rappers with “refining the art of oral communication.”

Today, gangsta rap is no longer edgy or even very controversial. It can only be described as mainstream. On a 2013 track, Jay Z, one of the country’s richest and most popular rappers, name-checked a convicted drug dealer and hit man who terrorized the Washington, D.C., area in the 1980s. Lil Wayne, who specializes in rapping about drug-dealing and gun violence, has more entries on the Billboard charts than Elvis. In 2010, President Obama told Rolling Stone magazine that both rappers were on his iPod.

Read the whole thing. Considering the Last Poets were rapping nearly a half century ago, shouldn’t this exhausted genre simply be tossed into the nostalgia bin anyhow?

SO HE’S BASICALLY A BLACK DYLANN ROOF: Manifesto purportedly sent by Virginia gunman cites ‘race war.’

A fax attributed to Vester Lee Flanagan claims the slayings were a response to the Charleston mass shooting.

An apparent suicide note received by ABC News on Wednesday morning and attributed to Virginia shooting suspect Flanagan, aka Bryce Williams, claims the killing of two reporters during an on-air interview was motivated by the Charleston church shooting and a desire to incite a “race war.”

ABC News says a man identifying himself as both Flanagan and Williams — Flanagan’s on-air name — first contacted it several weeks ago.

The man asked for a fax number, claiming he wanted to pitch the news channel a story.

A fax reportedly transmitted two hours after this morning’s shooting appears to contain “suicide notes” authored by a man named Bryce Williams.

“What sent me over the top was the church shooting,” the author says, referring to June’s mass shooting at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. “And my hollow point bullets have the victims’ initials on them.”

“As for [Charleston shooting suspect] Dylann Roof? You [censored]! You want a race war [censored]? BRING IT THEN YOU WHITE …[censored]!!!”

The author then claims “Jehovah” told him to act on his plans.

“Also, I was influenced by Seung–Hui Cho. That’s my boy right there,” the notes continue, referencing the gunman who killed 32 people at Virginia Tech in 2007. “He got NEARLY double the amount that [Columbine High School shooters] Eric Harris and Dylann Klebold got…just sayin’.”

The fax, entitled “Suicide Note for Friends and Family,” concludes with a list of grievances that include “racial discrimination” and “sexual harassment” in the workplace, and makes reference to the author’s homosexuality.

Will we see culture war unleashed against any organizations he might have supported? Of course not. That sort of thing only goes in one direction.

Plus:

Flanagan was also once reprimanded by WDBJ editors for wearing an Obama campaign sticker on his jacket while reporting from an election booth in 2012, saying it ‘demonstrated a basic lack of understanding of your role as an on-air journalist’ and was a clear breach of impartiality rules.

Will Obama apologize for the behavior of one of his followers?

SURE, IT WILL MEAN THE END OF CABLE NEWS, BUT THAT WOULD BE AN ADDITIONAL FEATURE, NOT A BUG: The ‘Some Asshole Initiative,’ revisited.

JENNIFER KABBANY: In Defense of Offensive Speech: Off-Campus Tomfoolery Should Not Be Regulated By Overzealous Administrators. Nope. None of their business. If administrators want to make it their business, students should make it their business to ensure that they regret it.

MY BROTHER-IN-LAW’S BAR, THE HALF-BARREL, made #22 on this list of best college bars. Well-deserved.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Faith Academy teacher accused of sex with student.

TROLL LEVEL: GRANDMASTER. “Snooty Californian Wine Train Liberals Horrified By Black Book Club,” writes Milo Yiannopoulos.

But considering the amount of racism in the left-dominated TV news industry, in Hollywood (just ask any leftwing movie critic), and in other leftwing enclaves such as Manhattan (just ask Ta-Nehisi Coates), Chicago (as Michelle Obama herself has noted), Washington, and particularly among Hillary Clinton and her supporters, perhaps it’s time for the left to take a good hard look in the mirror about its rampant structural racism.

I’m sure MSNBC, aka “Jim Crow TV,” will get right on this topic.

J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS: Vester Flanagan/Bryce Williams July road rage incident caught on video?

VOXERS GONNA VOX: “I ran the piece by some other editors and they weren’t comfortable running it; I think the concern is that people will misinterpret it as implying opposition to abortion rights and birth control, which, while I know it’s not your intent, is a real concern.”