#REFUGEESWELCOME: Crowd CHEERS as German migrant hostel is burned out – and even try to stop firefighters battling the blaze. “The latest incident comes just days after protesters in Clausnitz – also in Saxony – blocked a bus taking migrants to accommodation in the town. The protesters [are reported] to have chanted the slogan , ‘We are the people’, which was used in 1989 during the peaceful uprising which led to the fall of the Berlin Wall.”

TAKING THE LONG VIEW: Why Charles Koch’s awesome Bernie Sanders op-ed matters in future elections.

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Also, Warehouse Deals on groceries.

HMM: “Donald Trump is Jeb Bartlet.”

ROGER KIMBALL ON PRIMARY 2016: The Pause that Refreshes.

Read the whole thing.

EUROPE FLASHBACK: How the Feminists’ “War against Boys” Paved the Way for Islam.

FRONTIERS IN OFFICIAL INSANITY: Video: Ride-along with UK Anti-Knife Crime Task Force. “The UK has a gang violence problem. Yet they fetishize the tools which the attackers use to kill and maim. They focus their policies on the tools and obfuscate the nature of the problem.”

GOOD: After Pro-Palestine Talk, Harvard Donor Stops Sponsoring Events.

I VERY MUCH DOUBT THAT THIS WILL BE MY NEXT CAR: A Maserati SUV.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Ivy League crybullies vs. survivor of a Soviet labor camp; guess who needs ’emotional support’? “So there you have it; a group of Ivy League crybullies worn out from the emotional toll of protesting Natan Sharansky, a former dissident and survivor of years of confinement, including solitary confinement, in harsh Soviet prison camps. Is there a better indication of the decline of American higher-ed culture than a bunch of Ivy Leaguers at risk of emotional breakdown due to the presence of one of the great, stoic heroes of the Cold War on their campus?”

I wonder — does social-justice activism lead to mental and emotional problems, or is it a symptom? I’m thinking the latter.

BUYING TIME: Marco Rubio Needs a Breakthrough Very Soon.

CLINTON FLASHBACK: State Dept. Says It Warned About bin Laden in 1996. “State Department analysts warned the Clinton administration in July 1996 that Osama bin Laden’s move to Afghanistan would give him an even more dangerous haven as he sought to expand radical Islam ‘well beyond the Middle East,’ but the government chose not to deter the move, newly declassified documents show.”

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NEWS YOU CAN USE: Zika Virus Rumors and Theories That You Should Doubt.

WE NEED SENSIBLE NATIONAL FIREARMS-PROTECTION LAWS TO PREVENT THIS SORT OF THING: New Jersey manages to arrest a corrections officer for carrying a gun. As I’ve suggested elsewhere, we need federal civil rights legislation setting the maximum penalty states can assess against someone who is legally entitled to possess a gun under federal law at the level of a modest fine.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: 15 Ways to Make Your Home a “Hard Target” to Prevent a Home Invasion.

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: DNA nanotechnology provides new ways to arrange nanoparticles into crystal lattices.

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: “How can I survive in the Bay Area with $400k family income?”

The brutal, complete answer: don’t procreate. Sure, you may be the smart, thoughtful sort of person that humanity absolutely needs in its gene pool, but Silicon Valley doesn’t want you in its gene pool: you don’t make enough to own a house in a top school district. It’s sending you a clear economic signal. So, you have two options.

The first is to leave Silicon Valley. It’s expensive, exclusive, obsessed with power and success with no concern for how they are achieved, and an utterly terrible place to raise children– unless you want your kids to be the sort who bawl when you give them, as a 16th birthday present, a car that’s “only” $35,000, because the doors “open like this instead of this”. Unless you have no hope of getting a comparable income (say, $250,000 or up, considering cost of living) in Boulder, Chicago, Austin, Seattle, Boston, or New York… (ok, New York probably requires more than $300k to raise a family) I don’t know why you would stay there. The Bay Area’s fine when you’re 22 and need to establish yourself, because the benefits of being in Corporate HQ if you work at, say, Google or Apple, are pretty massive. If you haven’t made fuck-you money (so you can say “fuck you” to all the insufferable people in Silicon Valley, and even if they have more power and wealth than you, it doesn’t matter because you have enough) by child-raising age, I don’t know why you’re still there. It’s not a mark of failure to leave Silicon Valley. (Hey, I know plenty of really smart people and, statistically, most of them will never get anywhere close to $400,000.) It’s a mark of good judgment. San Francisco is just OK, and the rest of the Valley is an overrated, unattractive suburban tract. Sure, the Bay Area has an incredible 3-hour-drive radius… Napa Valley, Big Sur, Yosemite… but, let’s be honest, it takes a vacation to really enjoy a place like that and, if you lived elsewhere, the money saved on not paying Bay Area housing costs would easily cover airfare and hotels, anywhere you want to go.

And note this: “The economic signal that our society sends is that it doesn’t need or want more children.” Well, that’s certainly the signal that the Bay Area sends. It’s not a coincidence that for years, San Francisco has had the lowest percentage of children of any major US city.

“Unexpectedly,” as Bloomberg News might say, though not by anyone who’s perused the (NSFW!) back catalog of the Bay Area blogger known as Zombie.

LIFE IN A DEEP BLUE “SANCTUARY CITY:” Tech Exec “Outraged” At Having To See “Homeless Riff-Raff”, Warns Of Revolution.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1018.

ABOUT TIME: GOP Senators Push Back on Campus PC.

A growing number of GOP lawmakers are expressing alarm about the Department of Education’s actions, cheered by the campus left, to curtail free speech and due process for college students. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the DOE is fielding tough questions from Kansas Sen. James Lankford about its order that colleges adopt a “preponderance of the evidence” standard in adjudicating sexual assault, and about its expansion of the definition of sexual harassment to include what many experts say is constitutionally protected speech. . . .

Lankford and Alexander aren’t even the two most well-known GOP lawmakers to clash with the Obama Administration on campus civil liberties: In 2013, Sen. John McCain sent a letter to Eric Holder arguing that the Administration’s “suggested disciplinary procedures are direct hindrances to students’ and teachers’ First Amendment rights,” and questioning whether it had the authority to impose them. (The Administration later backed off from the regulations at issue in that particular case).
We are glad to see that Congress is asserting is oversight powers in this way: Under President Obama, the heavily ideological Office for Civil Rights in Education has effectively gone rogue, unilaterally forcing hundreds of colleges to rewrite their rules of conduct while mostly avoiding accountability.

Still, Congress needs to do more. So far, the fierce debate over campus civil liberties has been handled almost entirely by the executive (which has almost always sided with the campus left) and the courts (which are modestly pushing back, at least at the state level). Congress must take a larger role in resolving these questions, and in particular, clarifying its expectations of both campuses and administrative agencies. While this may be a polarizing issue, its likely that at least some Democratic lawmakers would be unwilling to support the more radical initiatives of the Department of Education bureaucrats. After all, President Obama has himself spoken up for campus free speech, and even Sen. Bernie Sanders has suggested that progressives are approaching the sexual assault issue the wrong way.

Also, the GOP could do worse than to attack the “war on women” schtick by pointing out the very real war on college men.

FLY THE FRIENDLY SKIES OF NORTH KOREA! Five Things to Look Out for When You Fly With Air Koryo, the World’s Worst Airline.

Speaking of socialist mass transportation, the photo of the “famous ‘mystery-meat’ burger” Air Koryo serves looks a lot like the microwaved burger I used to get on Northeast Corridor Amtrak jaunts in the ‘80s and early ‘90s. Just looking at it brings back the memories of its soggy consistency and lack of flavor.

SNOPES IS NOW SAYING THAT YESTERDAY’S “ENGLISH ONLY” CHANTS FROM BERNIE SUPPORTERS actually never happened. If that’s true, though, it means that America Ferrera and Dolores Huerta would have pretty much had to lie. It’s hard to see how this could be a mistake.

CHANGE: Harvard Law Professors: The Law Is Ripe For Disruption.

All is proceeding as Ben Barton has foreseen.