SAY GOODBYE TO YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD BANK BRANCH: “As technology transforms banking, like it has so many other sectors, the consequence could be a dramatic decline in the industry’s outposts over the next decade, experts say…Former Barclays chief executive Antony Jenkins laid it out in particularly stark terms in a speech last fall: The global industry, under pressure to meet customer demands for automation and cheaper services, will slash employment and branches by 20 percent to 50 percent over the next decade, he estimated.”

But without low-wage local tellers, who will be there for the successors to Occupy Wall Street to harass?

HOW BIG IS THE NYPD’S IMPENDING CORRUPTION SCANDAL?

With five top cops recently demoted, and Police Commissioner Bill Bratton telling the New York Post that investigations by his Internal Affairs Bureau and the FBI are turning up evidence that stinks as foully as that uncovered by the 1970s Knapp Commission investigation into corrupt cops, but that he can’t talk about it while the probe continues, you can only imagine what’s about to hit the fan. All we need now is a brush with municipal bankruptcy and a president who responds by telling New York to drop dead, as the Daily News’s famous 1975 headline put it, and the recurring nightmare will be complete.

Fundamentally transformed.

SEATTLE MAN OF TOLERANCE AND DIVERSITY CONFESSES TO VANDALIZING CARS  WITH TRUMP BUMPER STICKERS: “KING 5 News in Seattle reports today that a man has admitted to vandalizing a car because of the ‘hate symbol’ displayed on it — a Donald Trump bumper sticker. However, Riley Siva pleaded not guilty this morning to a charge of malicious mischief, despite confessing to police at the scene of the crime.” The ponytailed Siva ‘told police he considered the Trump sticker on the bumper of a Ford Focus in Gig Harbor a hate symbol, and he was ‘improving the community’ by slashing the car’s tires and pouring yogurt into the sunroof, causing an estimated $5,000 in damage.”

Some things never change; in 2012, there were multiple reports of cars with Romney bumper stickers being keyed. In 2004, Glenn reported from the bullet-riddled Bush-Cheney headquarters, amidst reports of Bush-Cheney-adorned cars being keyed and causing road rage in leftists who espouse an ideology that preaches tolerance and diversity. Speaking of which, back then, a T-shirt manufacturer sold a Shirt with the image of a scratched-out Bush-Cheney 2004 bumper sticker and the words “A person of tolerance and diversity keyed my car.” Someone with a Café Press account should update the design for 2016.

TRANSPARENCY! Access to Merrick Garland File Barred at Library of Congress.

The executors of the papers of the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Brennan Jr. are blocking public access to the justice’s file on high court nominee Merrick Garland, who clerked for Brennan in 1977 and 1978.

The file, along with other documents relating to law clerks, case histories and correspondence, are part of the closed portion of Brennan’s extensive collection of papers at the Library of Congress, and will not be opened to the public until July 2017, the 20th anniversary of Brennan’s death.

Well, no problem. Just don’t consider him until then.

THE LEFT CLAIMS A SCALP IN ITS WAR ON BATHROOMS: ESPN Fires Curt Schilling for Opposition to Transgender Restrooms.

Further confirmation that ESPN is just MSNBC with better video.

CHANGE: Growing Number of Muslim Refugees Converting in Austria: “This Could Be My Death Sentence.” It’s only dangerous if they let in Muslims who don’t convert.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: University Of Texas Law School Reallocates Tenured And Adjunct Faculty, Suspends Supreme Court Clinic.

DISPATCHES FROM THE WORLD OF AGGRIEVEMENT POLITICS: Cherokee Chief: Jackson’s $20 Ouster a ‘Small but Meaningful Vindication.’

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Loneliness May Be Bad For Your Heart.

ACADEMICS AGAINST ACADEMIC FREEDOM: Members of the American Anthropological Association are in the process of voting on a resolution to boycott Israeli academic institutions. Richard A. Shweder of the University of Chicago says many of his colleagues are appalled:

They view the call to avoid contact with Israeli academic institutions as an outrageous violation of academic freedom norms, including the principle that participation in the world-wide academy is open to all regardless of nationality, race or creed. They believe the voting process itself is corrosive of academic values, that a professional scholarly association does not need a foreign policy for the Holy Land or anywhere else and should be committed to free thought and disciplined inquiry, not collective political action. When it comes to contestable political and social issues they do not cede authority to the AAA to make corporate declarations about what is right-minded and true. They prefer to speak for themselves, especially since the AAA is not a homogeneous political bloc. It is a disputatious community of scholars who differ in their causal analyses, assignments of blame, and proposed solutions to any political conflict. Collective political branding is viewed by many boycott opponents as an act of institutional violence committed against the intellectual autonomy of those members of the guild who disagree with the proposed party line. They believe that institutional neutrality on hot button social and political issues enables free thought.

Many opponents of the resolution experience its injunctions as distressingly reminiscent of the Nuremberg laws, when citizenship rights for Jews were degraded in Germany and there was a national boycott against shopping at Jewish stores. If the proposal to shun and stigmatize Israeli academic institutions becomes official policy they, like the Jews of Germany in the 1930s, will not feel at home in their own society. Some will resign from the AAA, pack up and leave. Some already have. Others will just resign themselves to melancholy reflection on the late great discipline of cultural anthropology, recalling how their profession first gave up on positive science and then exchanged its humanistic soul for the soft porn of partisan identity politics.

Read the whole thing. And consider  a couple of other questions: If the AAA votes for the boycott, can it still allow sponsorship at its events from companies that publish Israeli scholars — assuming any publishers still want to spend any money on a group that’s hostile to academic freedom? And should universities keep paying the AAA dues and convention expenses of their professors? Obviously professors are free to join any group they want, but there’s no reason for a university to subsidize professors’ political activism, especially when it involves a group that has abandoned the norms of scholarship.

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: The Bible Joins Fifty Shades of Grey on Library Association’s Most Challenged List.

WARNING: NOT EWOK-PROOF: Australian man builds life-size replica of an Imperial Scout Walker from Return of the Jedi.

FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS: But Seriously…How Dirty Is Your Yoga Mat?

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LIFE IS SO UNFAIR: Our DNA could be factor in age of losing virginity.

A study published this week in Nature Genetics suggests that being cool or uncool, morally liberal or conservative, or attractive or unattractive aren’t the only determining factors when we undergo that “passage to adulthood.” Based on data from 125,000 adults in the British Biobank, DNA could play a huge role, according to the researchers. There were 38 different genetic variants linked with the age of first sexual intercourse, and the researchers were able to discover similar links between one’s DNA and their age of puberty, as well as the age when they had their first child.

“This is hugely important as the timing of these events affects educational achievements as well as physical and mental health,” the U.K. researchers wrote in a press release.

While the researchers stressed that certain genes aren’t exactly surefire signs that one may lose their virginity at an early age or later in life than most others, they added that there are certain gene-based traits, such as impulsivity, that could influence sexual behaviors.

I can tell you from personal experience that losing one’s virginity isn’t necessarily a reliable marker for “passage to adulthood.”

WAR ON WOMEN: Life expectancy for white females in U.S. suffers rare decline.

Despite the positive influences of declines in heart disease and cancer and stroke, increases in other causes like suicide, chronic liver disease and unintentional poisonings were so large that they had a negative effect on life expectancy.

Fundamentally transformed.

NEWS YOU CAN USE ON 4/20 DAY: Explaining Marijuana to My Kids in the Mile High State.

STATION WAGONS ARE COOL: Review: 2017 Audi A4 Allroad.

CONFIRMED: HOLLYWOOD STILL OFFICIALLY OUT OF NEW IDEAS. ‘Three’s Company’ Movie in the Works at New Line.

COMPLAINT: Electric Torque Is No Replacement for a High-Revving Engine.

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And, 50% or more off on Mens’ Sleepwear and Loungewear.

YEAH, IT’S NOT LIKE ANYBODY SAW THIS ONE COMING: “White Privilege” Conference Condemned As Too White-Privileged. To be fair, talking about white privilege is Stuff White People Like, so that’s pretty much inevitable.

I CAN REMEMBER WHEN THE “GLORIOUS” THINGS THAT NASA DID INVOLVED, YOU KNOW, GOING TO OTHER PLANETS AND STUFF: NASA just called out climate change deniers on Facebook, and it was glorious.

THERE WAS SUPPOSED TO HAVE BEEN AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: A new theory for dinosaur extinction.

Scientists from the University of Reading and the University of Bristol claim that dinos had a longer goodbye than we’d thought. It’s possible that the group spent about 50 million years in decline before going extinct.

That isn’t to say that there wasn’t some massive eruption or collision that finally killed them. About three quarters of all the life on Earth went extinct in the same event, so we know that something big must have gone down (or, in the case of a volcanic eruption, come up). But it’s possible we can’t blame the demise of the dinos entirely on this one event.

After the last eight years, I have nothing but empathy for how the dinosaurs might have felt.

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Federal Park Ranger Mocks Founders, Constitution … While Leading Tour of Independence Hall!