FULL METAL PANTSUIT: CNN Skeptically Examines Hillary’s Tale of Trying to Join the Marines:

“We asked her campaign for just a few more details on this,” CNN’s Jeff Zeleny said. “It seems so unusual that a Yale-educated lawyer who worked on the anti- war campaigns of [Eugene] McCarthy and [George] McGovern, who had just moved to Arkansas, whose husband was about to become the attorney general of the state, would decide to want to join the Marines. But the campaign said they’re not going to add any more comment onto this.”

As Jim Geraghty adds, “But remember, she always was a Yankees fan, and she dodged the sniper fire in Tuzla, Bosnia in 1996.”

THERE’S A FLATULENCE JOKE HERE SOMEWHERE: Mars Losing Gas to Solar Wind.

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HOW A COLLEGE PRESIDENT SHOULD RESPOND: Here’s how Boston University’s John Silber responded to student protests in the 1970s, as spotted by Steve Hayward of Power Line:

Then they put up the shacks. I told the police, “Go ask them three questions: Do you have a title to the property? (They built them on our property, not theirs.) Do you have a building permit? We have to have building permits. Have you got a clearance with the historical commission, because this is a historical district? If the answer is no to those three questions, then you tell them, ‘We’ll give you about 15 minutes to remove your shanty. And if you don’t, you’ll be arrested.’ ” I said, “Now, none of them are going to remove their shanty, so you’re going to have to arrest them. But I want you to be very gentle, and I want you to take them to the paddy wagon singing, ‘It’s just a shanty in old shanty town.’ ” Because one point I want to get across to these students is, I do not take them seriously. This is not some very deeply felt, high moral cause on their part; this is showboating of a very insincere kind by most of these students, and I want them to understand that I see through their pretensions.

I love it — but I wonder how much pushback Silber received afterwards from the parents of that generation’s proto-cry-bullies? In her 2008 book The Death of the Grown-Up, Diana West, quoting Robert Bork in Slouching Towards Gomorrah, wrote that in the wake of the late-1960s era of protests, “the University of Chicago, which may be the one campus where administrators acted swiftly to expel students who had occupied a building, ‘parents took out newspaper advertisements protesting the draconian punishment visited upon their darlings, thus providing a clue to what had gone wrong with their children.’”

If we haven’t already, I wonder if we’ll see a similar response from today’s parents? After all, as Brendan O’Neill asked on Monday at Spiked, “The ‘Yale snowflakes’: who made these monsters?”

APPS TO IMPROVE YOUR ATHLETIC FORM:

Well-heeled athletes often employ a retinue of coaches and biomechanics consultants to regularly critique and fine-tune their form.

Most of us don’t have such resources and, in the past, generally relied on advice from training partners or spouses. More recently, many of us have turned to simple smartphone apps that provide recorded videos or animations showing us what the app’s developers consider to be good form for our sport, whether that sport happens to be tennis, golf, baseball, weight training, basketball, soccer, swimming, running or virtually any other activity.

But now a new generation of apps are going a step farther and providing a personalized assessment of form, together with suggestions for how to better it. These apps, with names like RunForm, BarSense, and Hudl Technique, generally require you to film yourself while you serve, squat, swing, throw, lift, run or otherwise work out.

You then upload that video to the app, and it allows you to view yourself in super slow motion, frame by frame, with accompanying commentary; overlay your swing or serve above that of a professional athlete performing the same move; or have the app use complicated geometry and algorithms to draw lines and circles across your body, assessing how you move, compared to an ideal version of that movement.

Interesting.

EVERGREEN:

A far cry from Obama in 2004.

I’VE NEVER TRUSTED TOR: Court Docs Show a University Helped FBI Bust Silk Road 2, Child Porn Suspects. “The institute that worked with the FBI is ‘almost certainly’ CMU, Nicholas Weaver, a senior researcher at the International Computer Science Institute at University of California, Berkeley told Motherboard in a phone interview.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Mizzou and Yale PC Hysteria Spreads to Other Campuses. Do you think this will result in more capital and prestige flowing toward higher education in coming years, or less?

THE FEDERALIST SOCIETY CONVENTION IS GOING ON RIGHT NOW. Find out more about what’s going on here.

FINDING THEM BEFORE THEY GET US: The Asteroid Hunters.

HOPE AND CHANGE: Mizzou protesters segregate by race, demanding a “black-only healing space.”  Nice.  Well played, race baiters, well played! There can be no healing when whitey’s around.

What’s next, separate but equal dorms and classes? Because, you know, we wouldn’t want there to be racial violence or anything.

The best thing about the Obama Administration has been all the post-racial healing.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Ed Morrissey: Yale, Mizzou and Others—Training a Generation of Proto-Fascists. “To paraphrase an old Monty Python routine, come and see the violence inherent in campus progressivism. Academia no longer values an open and robust exchange of ideas, a pursuit of truth, and adherence to actual tolerance. Actual commitment to learning would have prompted scrutiny of extraordinary claims and discussion of differing points of view. Instead, campuses have become overrun by proto-fascists who want submission to groupthink and are not afraid to call out for ‘some muscle’ to enforce it.”

America’s unprecedented investment in higher education hasn’t turned out very well. Expect a correction.

A RARE OUTBREAK OF SANITY: Military May Soon Be Able to Pack Heat on Base.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 917.

BERNIE SIEGAN AND LARRY TRIBE’S BELATED MEA CULPA. “Tribe gratuitously disparaged Siegan’s scholarship in a footnote to the 1988 second edition of his once-dominant (but now defunct) treatise, American Constitutional Law. Siegan, an incredibly kind and gentle soul, was wounded by Tribe’s remarks, and wrote Tribe a letter in 1991 objecting to them and asking him to reconsider. In a long response to Siegan (provided to me by Bernie’s devoted widow, Shelley Siegan), Tribe did something remarkable: he said he had reconsidered. He now agreed with Siegan on the doctrinal point at issue, and would make an appropriate revision to the forthcoming supplement to his treatise.”

PUSH BACK: ‘Grow up,’ tweets former Mizzou football star to students who slammed ‘hero’ professor.

NOT AS IMPORTANT AS A POOP SWASTIKA, THOUGH: The fuel for a nuclear bomb is in the hands of an unknown black marketeer from Russia, U.S. officials say.

JONATHAN RAUCH: A New Trigger Warning For College Kids:

Though I’m as strong an advocate as you’ll find of free speech and thick skins, I feel some sympathy for the Yale student whose meltdown in a university courtyard went viral and fueled a renewed national debate over political correctness. Watching that painful scene, I’ve concluded that universities should provide “trigger warnings” about upsetting content, as many student activists demand. But not many warnings. Just one, and not the one they have in mind. . . .

In 1978, when I was a freshman at Yale, I watched with very mixed feelings as a student melted down in my political philosophy class. The professor had challenged us to name a proposition that is entirely certain, and a classmate ventured the certainty that we all will die, because everyone had died in the past. Pushing back, he said, “But how do you know?” After all, no amount of knowledge about the past can give any completely certain knowledge about the future. And then my classmate, encountering for the first time the icy Humean logic that ended human epistemological innocence in 1748, began to cry. I didn’t cry, but I felt the shock in the room. This was no “little paradise.”

So it is only fair to warn students and their parents that higher education is not a Disney cruise. Tell them in advance so they can prepare. Not, however, with multiple trigger warnings festooning syllabi. One will suffice:

“Warning: Although this university values and encourages civil expression and respectful personal behavior, you may at any moment, and without further notice, encounter ideas, expressions and images that are mistaken, upsetting, dangerous, prejudiced, insulting or deeply offensive. We call this education.”

Display that trigger warning prominently on the college website. Put it in the course catalog and in the marketing brochures. Then ask students and their parents to grow up and deal with it. And watch as they rise to the challenge.

Sounds good to me.

YES: Do College Rankings Produce Clarity or Confusion? As one of Rumsfeld’s Rules has it, the things you measure get better. But often at the expense of more important things that you don’t.

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SOUTH PARK FINDS OUT WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU RUN THE POLICE OUT OF TOWN:

When Officer Barbrady accidentally shoots an unarmed 6-year-old Latino boy, the town of South Park rises up to get rid of the police, in the episode “Naughty Ninjas.” (“We’ve only had a Whole Foods for a month, and already, we don’t need cops. So cool.”)

In a montage set to “F*** the Police” by N.W.A., the white yuppies are shown dancing, holding glasses of wine and flipping the bird to the police. But when the South Park boys start dressing as ninjas to chase away the vagrants outside Kenny’s house when the police won’t, the townspeople think ISIS has taken over – and worse: the homeless people have started camping out outside Whole Foods!

Now the town suddenly realizes they need their police force back.

ISIS you say? Really, how bad could they be? Ms. Magazine tells me that they’re merely the equivalent of “Progressive” Obama-voting college administrators:

LIFE IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: EU flag burned as tens of thousands join Warsaw nationalist demo.

Demonstrators trampled and burned a European Union flag at one point, while a banner added to the anti-EU theme with the slogan “EU macht frei” (“Work makes you free” in German), a reference to the slogan over the gates at Auschwitz.

“Yesterday it was Moscow, today it’s Brussels which takes away our freedom,” chanted one group of protesters.
Other banners read “Great Catholic Poland” and “Stop Islamisation”.

Things are going just swimmingly.

TANKS FOR THE MEMORIES: Mizzou media maven Melissa Click’s CV is reviewed by John Hinderaker of Power Line in a post titled “The Fraudulence of Leftist Professors,” after which, John writes:

The astonishing thing is that Professor Click collects money from various sources to support her “research.” E.g.:

Women’s and Gender Studies Faculty Research and Creative Activities Grant, University of Missouri. Awarded to support research on readers’ reactions to the messages in the Fifty Shades of Grey book series. April 2013.

Richard Wallace Faculty Incentive Grant, University of Missouri. Awarded to support research on readers’ reactions to the messages in the Fifty Shades of Grey book series. April 2013.

From Fifty Shades of Grey to Thomas the Tank:

A&S Alumni Organization Faculty Incentive Grant, University of Missouri. Awarded to support initial research on the PBS children’s series Thomas the Tank Engine. February 2010.

If you put a gun to my head and made me read one or the other–Fifty Shades of Grey or Thomas the Tank Engine–I would go with Thomas. I do wonder, however, what the feminist angle on Thomas the Tank could possibly be.

Oh, that’s an easy one. Back in February a headline at — where else? — the London Guardian ran down the “Ten things feminism has ruined for me — Bras, bikes and Thomas the Tank Engine… Emer O’Toole mourns some of life’s simpler pleasures.” The previous year, someone else at the Guardian named Tracy Van Slyke wrote a piece titled “Thomas the Tank Engine had to shut the hell up to save children everywhere — Classism, sexism, anti-environmentalism bordering on racism: any parent who discovered these hidden lessons will be glad the show’s star just quit.” (The voice actor who played Thomas quit in a contract dispute; he was replaced by another actor):

And that’s not even to get started on the female trains. Well, actually it’s hard to get started on them, because they barely exist. Take a quick scan of the more than 100 trains and characters in the Thomas universe – it spans multiple books, toys and continents in addition to a TV show – and you can quickly count on two hands the number of lady trains that populate is Isle of Sodor. Emily – the only lady train to get name checked in the opening credits and the only one who regularly hangs out with the boy trains – is said to “know her stuff.” That’s the sole description of her personality. What does that even mean?

Last year, the British Labour shadow Transportation Secretary even called out Thomas for its lack of females, saying that the franchise setting a bad example for girl wannabe train engineers everywhere.

At first blush, Thomas and his friends seem rather placid and mild. And there are certainly a lot worse shows in terms of in-your-face violence, sexism, racism and classism. But looks can be deceiving: the constant bent of messages about friendship, work, class, gender and race sends my kid the absolute wrong message.

Witness the violence inherent in the HO* scale train system!

* And how dare the model railroad degrade sex-workers with these highly problematic initials!

GOOD: Professor who shoved student at Missouri now subject to student complaint, Title IX investigation. Although I sometimes think that conservative and libertarian students think that resort to such laws is beneath them, I would encourage them to apply a “sauce for the gander” approach here.