THE IPHONE OF RETIREMENT PLANS? It’s sleazy, it’s totally illegal, and yet it could become the future of retirement.

OREGON: Another mass shooting in a gun-free zone.

As I wrote several years ago, now, People don’t stop killers. People with guns do.

Prediction: The press will talk about this endlessly for the rest of the week so as not to have to talk about Hillary’s email scandals and Obama’s Mideast debacle.

AT AMAZON, deals on Hand & Power Tools.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: The Unilateral War On College Men: An assistant secretary of education thinks she can rewrite rape law by writing a letter. (Bumped).

UPLOAD YOUR MIND: Computer algorithm created to encode human memories.

Researchers in the US have developed an implant to help a disabled brain encode memories, giving new hope to Alzheimer’s sufferers and wounded soldiers who cannot remember the recent past.

The prosthetic, developed at the University of Southern California and Wake Forest Baptist Medical Centre in a decade-long collaboration, includes a small array of electrodes implanted into the brain.

The key to the research is a computer algorithm that mimics the electrical signalling used by the brain to translate short-term into permanent memories.

This is amazing, though it also offers opportunities for mischief.

AGREED: If it’s not “serious enough to report,” it’s not sexual assault.

UNEXPECTEDLY:  Vermont — The Land of Bernie — Is Seeing a Mass Exodus of College Aged Students Because There Are No Jobs.

But there are plenty of ways to kill the pain: “Heroin epidemic hits Vermont community hard,” CBS reported last month.

David Brooks, call your office — it just might be time to update that “Latte Town” thesis.

PUTIN’S MIDDLE EAST: “It’s been more than two years since Longtime Sharp VodkaPundit Readers™ were first warned of the Russo-Iranian Axis that would come to dominate the Middle East — and now here it is in action,” Steve Green writes:

Anyone who can read a map — this definition would seem to exclude most senior members of Professor Ditherton Wiggleroom’s administration — isn’t at all surprised by Russia’s airstrikes. Senator John McCain “said he could ‘absolutely confirm’ that members of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), who had been funded and trained by the CIA, were among those targeted.” The Syrian rebels, our supposed allies, hold the areas closest to Damascus and the coastal regions still held by forces loyal to Assad. The ISIS-held areas mostly lie far to the east, closer to Iraq.

So of course Russo-Iranian forces are concentrating on defeating the rebels, who pose the most immediate threat to Assad. And yet Obama negotiated in good faith with Putin on Monday, with some sort of expectation that Putin would attack our enemies rather than his own.

Naiveté. Idiocy. Madness. As though anybody in the Middle East cares about Kerry’s “concerns” while Moscow and Tehran are actually taking strong action.

Read the whole thing.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Freshman residency rules sometimes force students to pay prohibitive costs. “Room and board at private four-year universities costs an average of $9,678, an expense that has gone up 47 percent in the past decade, according to the College Board. At public four-year colleges, the average price is $9,130 and has increased 58 percent in the past 10 years. In a nine-month academic year, that works out to $1,014.44 a month for what is in many cases a shared room and communal dining, well above the median asking rent of $803 a month recorded by the Census Bureau.” Yep. It’s just another way to gouge people.

PROGRESSIVES’ CAUSE DU JOUR: HATING ISRAEL: The Progressive Left and Israel’s Right to Exist

A small incident during Bernie Sanders’ recent talk at the University of Chicago reveals how the progressive left has turned against Israel. The venue was the largest on campus, and it was packed with enthusiastic supporters. During a Q&A, one student said that he and his friends liked Bernie’s progressive politics but didn’t much like his views on the Middle East. Bernie’s response, and the crowd’s, are worth pondering.

First of all, Bernie said, Israel has a right to exist. It was supposed to be an applause line, but it fell flat. There was only a smattering. That changed when he said he strongly favored a Palestinian state. For that, the applause was loud and sustained.

It’s only a small incident, but it captures a movement that has been developing for years at elite universities and is now spreading to cultural and media institutions. Their views are surely encouraged by President Obama’s diffidence toward the Jewish state. But he is less a leader than an accurate weather gauge. The left loves Israel about as much as it loves fracking, the Keystone pipeline, Goldman Sachs, voter IDs, Clarence Thomas, and deer hunting.

Actually, progressives would probably prefer to go deer hunting with Clarence Thomas than admit that Israel is a democratic ally whose existence is, in large part, the product of a Holocaust that killed an estimated six million Jews and rendered hundreds of thousands more refugees.  Indeed, it is not unusual to still hear “history deniers” disclaim that the Holocaust even happened, or believe it is greatly exaggerated.

Jewish “victimhood” after the Holocaust is irrelevant to the progressives, who only acknowledge the “victimhood” of Arabs. The covert anti-Semitism is patent, but progressives will never admit it, lest they lose the political support of American Jews.

Haters gonna hate, I know, but progressives lack self-awareness of their hatred, and instead project it onto others with whom they disagree.

ED MORRISSEY: Democrats Begin the Long, Tortuous Retreat from Obamacare.

GALLERY: 12 Beautiful Women Who Had a Huge Influence on the Stones’ Music.

BUY A GUN: Victor Davis Hanson: The Mob Is Coming For You.

FOR THE WORSE. Washington Post: How Bernie Sanders would transform the nation.

If he becomes president, Sanders would spend an enormous amount of money: $3.27 trillion. At the very, very least. But he is not just a big-spending liberal. And his agenda is not just about money.

It’s also about control.

With lefties, it’s always about control. Nice to see the WaPo admit that here, even if the piece is probably designed to help Hillary.

THE PAINTED WORD: Modern Art, Simplified.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Anton Chekhov on the Eight Qualities of Cultured People.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 875.

WHEN “MAINSTREAM” POLITICIANS FAIL, VOTERS LOOK ELSEWHERE: After moving left for most of its history, is French politics now turning to the far Right?

A crisis long brewing in French politics is coming to a head in the run-up to the 2017 presidential elections. For decades, France’s political elites have failed to solve the country’s major problems—most notably its anemic economic growth, high and chronic unemployment, the regulation of immigration, and the integration of immigrants. Both the Right and the Left, in their current forms, are showing signs of exhaustion. The French, who since the Revolution have trusted politics to give sense to their lives as citizens, no longer do.

The sole beneficiary of this situation is the Front National (FN), a populist Far Right party that is now entrenched in French political life. The party’s rise is both a symptom of France’s worsening problems as well as the result of the party’s exploitation of a rightward shift in attitudes over the past 25 years, by focusing on law and order, immigration, and the debate over French identity. After moving toward the left for most of its history, is French politics now turning to the far Right?

When the Insta-Wife and I honeymooned in Paris, there were Le Pen billboards reading Passionement Francaise. Even more than back then, the sense is that France’s leaders, far from being passionately French, care more about Europe than they do about France. This may turn out not to play as well in France as they had hoped. Voters understand that a country will fare poorly with a governing class that doesn’t particularly love the country it governs. Governing classes, on the other hand, are too sophisticated for such a view — and, anyway, patriotism might limit their options.

VIDEO: MARK RIPPETOE VISITS ROUGH CREEK LODGE IN ANTICIPATION OF BULLETS & BOURBON IN DECEMBER:

Additionally, we’d like to welcome the event’s newest sponsors, Ricochet.com and Rolling Thunder Cigars.

Join Mark, Glenn, Roger L. Simon, Stephen Green, Ed Morrissey, Dana Loesch and Kevin D. Williamson December 3rd through the 6th at Rough Creek Lodge in the Dallas area for Bullets & Bourbon; details here.

(Bumped from last night.)

HILLARY CLINTON’S PROBLEM: The Camera Doesn’t Lie.

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OUR POLITICAL/JOURNALISTIC CLASS: MORE INCESTUOUS THAN THE HAPSBURGS. Press Ignoring Blatant Conflicts of Interest Exposed in CBS Benghazi Coverage. “This one’s a joint effort involving Hillary Clinton, Sidney Blumenthal, a recently deceased former CIA operative named Tyler Drumheller who worked with Blumenthal — and CBS News. . . . Hemingway presented evidence that Drumheller influenced CBS’s coverage of the Benghazi, Libya attack which killed U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others, coverage which “just so happened” to protect the Obama administration and Mrs. Clinton and discredited a story a year later presented by 60 Minutes’ Lara Logan.”

OBAMA’S TALK AND PUTIN’S BLITZ: Claudia Rosett presents A Russian Middle East Coup in Three Acts.

GREAT CLINTON EMAIL MOMENTS: ’60 Minutes assures me that they raised a number of questions and concerns we planted with them.’