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FORMER REUTERS MEDIA EDITOR FOUND GUILTY OF HELPING ANONYMOUS HACK INTO LA TIMES WEBSITE.

Talk about rooting for injuries. But then, one man’s Web hacker is another man’s freedom fighter bound and determined to keep rockin’ even when facing 25 years of funemployment behind bars. Or something like that.

HMM. MY MONEY’S ON OPTION #2. Russia’s Syria intervention may force choice on Obama: Act or yield.

CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE — THEN SEND THAT CHECK TO THE IRS!

A political humorist named Mark Dice took a camera to the streets of San Diego and decided to interview Hillary Clinton supporters, acting as if he was one of them.

He told them that Clinton planned on instituting a “white privilege” tax.

In other words, she planned on taking money from each and every Caucasian and distributing it among the other races.

Guess what? They not only bought it, they agreed with it.

Unexpectedly.

WHEN NOT HAVING ENOUGH ACTUAL RAPES IS PROBLEMATIC: Sex assault activists upset reality doesn’t conform to their beliefs.

Activists on at least two college campuses are upset that their universities aren’t showing the “epidemic” levels of sexual assault the activists believe exist.

At the University of Albany, the director of the school’s Advocacy Center for Sexual Assault, Carol Stenger, bemoaned the idea of schools wanting zero reports of sexual assault. Shouldn’t schools want zero reports? At least if it means there weren’t any sexual assaults? Well, that’s not what Stenger wants.

“But how could we have a zero? There are 17,000 students here. We know the national statistics. It’s happening everywhere,” Stenger said. “If we increase that reporting, that means more people are getting assistance. And assistance is the fastest way to healing.”

On one level I can see Stenger’s point: More reports could mean more people feel comfortable coming forward.

And there weren’t zero reports at Albany in the previous school year. There weren’t the thousands of reports that Stenger seems to want in order to fall in line with debunked national statistics (the claim that 1 in 5 women will be sexually assaulted while in college), either.

In the past year, Albany had 28 reports of sexual assault, twice as many as it had before Stenger opened her advocacy center. To get the number in line with the national statistics Stenger mentions that there would need to be more than 1,700 reports (population of 17,280, about half being women, and a fifth of them allegedly being sexually assaulted). Oh, and all 1,700 of those reports would have to be true.

For the record, those 28 reports don’t break down to what alarmist national statistics say they should.

“Nine of them were from students who asked the university not to take action. Six resulted in disciplinary proceedings that led to two student expulsions and one persona non grata order against a nonstudent,” the Times Union reported. “Six were from third parties (when reached, the alleged victims either denied any violence occurred or declined to speak). Four involved assailants whose identities were unknown. Three were outside the university’s jurisdiction.”

What’s missing here is police involvement in what are, last time I checked, still crimes.

Remember, this is all about shaming men and empowering campus activists and educrats. It has nothing to do with actually protecting students:

A more alarming issue going on at Albany beyond the school’s desire for more reports is that the person responsible for carrying out an allegedly fair adjudication process, Title IX coordinator Chantelle Cleary, is also an advocate for accusers.

“Her duties include compliance, prevention and education around sexual assault, but her biggest task is investigating reports of assault and completing reports that help the university make a finding of responsibility,” wrote the Times Union. (Emphasis added.)

So, her job is to find students responsible? Not find the truth? Even the Education Department thinks that’s a conflict of interest. She’s supposed to investigate, not advocate. If this is the way she operates, then accused students at Albany should immediately hire a lawyer, because they probably aren’t getting a fair investigation or hearing.

That’s my advice to any accused student at any school. But doesn’t a pervasive system of male-targeting and denials of due process constitute a hostile educational environment based on sex? I think that it does.

TO BE FAIR, IT’S JUST MEANT TO BE A CAMPAIGN TALKING POINT: Obama administration has doubts that key Hillary gun proposal can work.

Current law requires those who are “engaged in the business” of selling firearms to get a federal firearms license — and to conduct background checks on buyers. Private sellers don’t need to conduct such checks. Gun control advocates have argued that administrative rules defining what that phrase means are too vague, allowing many private sellers who are actually selling guns as a quasi-business to do so without running checks on buyers. They argue that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms could tighten this up with a rule that narrows the definition of who is “engaged in the business.”

The Obama administration looked at this idea, officials tell me, studying whether “engaged in the business” could be defined with, say, a threshold number of guns sold — say, 50 or 100 per year. If this were done, those who identify as private sellers (and sell without background checks) but sell that many guns could no longer do so without getting a license and performing background checks.

But the idea quickly presented complications. One former administration official involved in these discussions tells me that some officials worried it would present new and unforeseen enforcement problems. One senior administration official says some worried internally that defining a commercial seller through a hard sales threshold — as opposed to, say, leaving it to the discretion of law enforcement to determine who is a commercial seller — could be subject to legal challenge and could end up sweeping in people selling guns who clearly were not engaged in it as a long term business. This could create untold logistical — not to say political — difficulties.

“It was very clear that it was way more complicated than the other stuff being looked at,” the senior administration official tells me.

It’s less complicated if you don’t really care about the results.

REASON TV: How to Create a Gun-Free America in 5 Easy Steps.

BEAN-COUNTING IN AN INFERNO — New York’s mostly male FDNY begins a “diversity” initiative, Matthew Hennessey warns at City Journal:

If diversity training is a dead end, why is Mayor de Blasio insisting upon it? Because, like most progressives, his idea of social justice involves the “fundamental transformation” of society—and that project must necessarily begin in the city agencies that are within his sphere of control. There are limits to what a mayor can do, even one with a lapdog city council cheering him on. This mayor thinks tilting policy in favor of certain personnel is the fastest route to fundamental transformation.

How else to explain the decision earlier this year to allow 33-year-old Rebecca Wax to graduate from the Fire Academy despite having failed the Functional Skills Test five times? The FST was designed to mimic the conditions of an actual fire. Probationary firefighters are required to complete a grueling six-floor obstacle course while hauling 50 pounds of gear and breathing through an oxygen tank. Wax succeeded in completing the course on her sixth try but took nearly four minutes longer to do so than is typically permitted. Nevertheless, she was allowed to graduate and was assigned to Engine 259 in Sunnyside, Queens. FDNY commissioner Daniel Nigro admitted at a city council hearing in December that the department had lowered the fitness bar to allow more women to pass the test.

Read the whole thing.

CAN WE SUE THEM FOR THE DAMAGE THEIR TERRIBLE ADVICE — DELIVERED WITH TOTAL CONFIDENCE, AND SOMETIMES LEGAL SANCTIONS — HAS DONE? Got Incompetence? The Federal Gov’t Has Misled Public About Milk For Decades.

If you look up “whole milk” in the government’s official Dietary Guidelines, it states pretty definitively that people should only drink skim or 1% milk. “If you currently drink whole milk,” it says, “gradually switch to lower fat versions.”

This is the same advice the government has been issuing for many years. And it’s wrong.

Research published in recent years shows that people “might have been better off had they stuck with whole milk,” according to a front-page story in the Washington Post on Wednesday. “People who consumed more milk fat had lower incidence of heart disease.”

The story goes on to note that the government’s push for Americans to eat a high-carb diet “provokes a number of heart disease risk factors.”

As the Harvard School of Public Health’s Walter Willett put it, the “campaign to reduce fat in the diet has had some pretty disastrous consequences.”

The Post goes on to note that this “has raised questions about the scientific foundations of the government’s diet advice.”

It should.

Based on flimsy evidence, the USDA first started urging people to eat low-fat diets in 1977. As evidence grew that this advice was misguided — at best — it steadfastly refused to change course.

Who am I kidding? The government isn’t accountable. That’s for the little people.

THIS ISN’T THE 21st CENTURY I WAS ONCE PROMISED: Necessity in a progressive-run city? Vox’s Matt Yglesias maps out San Francisco sidewalk obstacles: “A comprehensive map of human poop on San Francisco sidewalks.”

But then, as even the San Francisco Chronicle was recently forced to admit, “People come here thinking of this as the center of innovation and entrepreneurship, and they see a street scene that looks like something out of a Third World country.”

WELL, AFTER ALL, OBAMA’S NO BLACKER THAN THE OCC SHOOTER, WHO’S WHITE: Rupert Murdoch: Carson could be ‘a real black president.’ And, joking aside, it’s fair to say that Obama, with his white parents and tony Hawaii prep-school background, never had the connection with authentic black experience that, say, Ben Carson or Clarence Thomas had.

THAT’S THE CHICAGO (AND CALIFORNIA) WAY: Mark Steyn and Sean Hannity discuss, ‘The more illegal immigrants you have in your state, the greater the votes you have in the Electoral College’ (video).

A HILLARY DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF CANNOT STAND! Hillary Clinton: I Totally Oppose The Trans-Pacific Trade Agreement I Negotiated In 2012, even though “In her 2014 memoir, Hillary Clinton listed the negotiation of TPP as one of her key accomplishments as Sec. of State.”  As Twitchy asks, “Did TPP flip-flopper Hillary even READ her book before sending it to GOP candidates?”

The Washington Free Beacon video supercut rounds up 24 Times Hillary Clinton Championed the Trans-Pacific Partnership While Secretary of State:

Jack Tapper of CNN notes that the number is nearly double: “45 times Secretary Clinton pushed the trade bill she now opposes.”

And don’t get her started on NAFTA, either, which further demonstrates the paradox of Hillary’s campaign. It’s entirely based on the good time nostalgia of the 1990s, even though she has repudiated seemingly every aspect of her husband’s post-Reagan centrism that helped to create it, as part of her increasingly quixotic efforts to lock down her party’s radical socialist base.

Speaking of which, at Hot Air, Allahpundit writes, “the Hillarybot has decided that it’s in her interest to move left to protect herself against Sanders. Bad idea. Because not only will she irritate centrist Dems and Obama-worshipping liberals by crossing him on this, but hardly a single Sanders voter will reconsider her based on this position given how transparently politically calculated it is. As Gabe Malor says, ‘Clinton will get a 5 point bump from this. In the ‘not honest or trustworthy’ polls.’ In fact, if you were searching for a reason to watch next week’s debate, now you’ve got one: It should be high comedy watching Sanders feed Hillary tons of sh*t for her sudden pandering reversal on TPP. Can’t wait.”

Related: Plenty of room on Hillary’s server for a little Journolist-style action as well.

‘INTERRUPTING WHITENESS’: NATIONAL EDUCATION CONFERENCE TO BLAME WHITE TEACHERS AND STUDENTS FOR SCHOOL WOES: Obama wanted “a national conversation on race.” This conference is what he meant: “interrupting whiteness” in American schools, “challenging white supremacy,” and eliminating the “white privilege” of Caucasian students.

Plus the real buried lede — it’s the long awaited return of the legendary Zombie to blogging.

WHY IS ESQUIRE’S CHARLES PIERCE so hostile to minority men’s genitalia? “Sexualized violence… it’s funny because…? Exactly why is it funny to you Charles?” Take the survey at the link. Is Charles threatened by minority males’ sexuality?

THE JAYVEE SOUNDS MORE THAN READY TO TURN PRO: ISIS executes three Assyrian Christians, threatens more executions.

NONSENSE! SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS: Clinton ‘SNL’ Cameo Could Entitle Challengers to Free Air Time.

PRECIOUS SNOWFLAKES ARE MELTING OUT THERE: Notable & Quotable: Fragility on Campus.

UNEXPECTEDLY: Once the Biggest Buyer, China Starts Dumping U.S. Government Debt.

BECAUSE THEY’RE HUMANS, NOT AUTOMATONS? Why bans on roughhousing are bad for kids.

THE BEATINGS WILL CONTINUE TILL MORALE IMPROVES: How New York politicians make Florida look great.

NO MATTER HOW MUCH THE SOCIALISTS PRAISE IT, ENVY IS STILL NOT A VIRTUE: Gwenyth Paltrow’s latest gripe: Iron Man out-earns his girlfriend.

WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG: Should We Try to Stop Our Biological Clocks?

GIRL PRIVILEGE: Michelle Obama’s misguided girl power agenda.

EXPAND, LITTLE PROBE, EXPAND: FBI probe of Clinton e-mail expands to second data company.