VICTOR DAVIS HANSON PROFFERS LESSONS FROM THE HIGHWAY OF DEATH:

A half-century ago, when the state population was about 18 million — not nearly 40 million as it is today — the 99 used to be a high-speed, four-lane marvel. It was a crown jewel in California’s cutting-edge freeway system.

Not now.

The 99 was recently ranked by ValuePenguin (a private consumer research organization) as the deadliest major highway in the nation. Locals who live along its 400-plus miles often go to bed after seeing lurid TV news reports of nocturnal multi-car accidents. Then they wake up to Central Valley radio accounts of morning carnage on the 99.

* * * * * * * *

All societies in decline fixate on impossible postmodern dreams as a way of disguising their inability to address premodern problems.

Ensuring that California’s freeways were all six lanes, well-lit and safe would have been a gargantuan but practical task that could have been completed long ago and would have saved thousands of lives (though it would have required the admission that the mundane modern automobile was here to stay). Instead, cool bureaucrats and hip politicians preferred to blow money on visions of grandiose space-age rail.

Indeed – as Joel Kotkin noted in the Orange County Register in May, Jerry Brown wants to put California’s drivers on a “road diet” in an effort to force “high speed rail” into reality:

The newest outrage comes from the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research in the form of a proposed “road diet.” This would essentially halt attempts to expand or improve our roads, even when improvements have been approved by voters. This strategy can only make life worse for most Californians, since nearly 85 percent of us use a car to get to work. This in a state that already has among the worst-maintained roads in the country, with two-thirds of them in poor or mediocre condition.

The OPR move reflects the increasingly self-righteous extremism animating the former Jesuit’s underlings. Ironically, the governor’s proposals to impose this road diet rest partly on expanding the California Environmental Quality Act, which Brown, in a more insightful moment, described as a “vampire” that needs a “stake through the heart.” Now, instead, the inquisitors seize on vague legislative language and push it to what the Southern California Leadership Council has dubbed “an undesirable and unmanageable extreme.”

I’d insert a reminder not to immanentize the eschaton here, but it would obviously fall on deaf ears as far as Jerry Brown and millions of other coastal socialist elites are concerned.

BROWNSHIRT MEDIA: ESQUIRE TRIES TO SHAME CELEBRITIES INTO MAKING POLITICAL DECLARATIONS.

Because if there’s one thing today’s pop culture lacks, it’s in-your-face-politics and public shaming for doubleplus ungood crimethink. (Or as Twitchy notes, “Why are celebs staying silent about politics? Esquire editor answers own question by naming and shaming.”)

This Jay Nordlinger piece on the shrinking number of media and cultural zones free of politics was written in 2009 – before the NFL changed its initials this year to SJW. Esquire wants to accelerate the speed at which the rest of the entertainment world is politicized exponentially.

RIGHT AFTER STONEWALL. THAT WAS BAD TIMING. HIV Arrived In The United States In 1971, Long Before The So-Called “Patient Zero.”

Although Mr. Shilts did not accuse Mr. Dugas of starting the American epidemic, he demonized him as a deliberate spreader of the virus who ignored a doctor’s demand that he stop having unprotected sex, and coldbloodedly told some sex partners that he had “gay cancer” and now they might get it.

Back in 1984, the term Patient Zero was not normally used to describe an outbreak’s first case, said Dr. Jaffe, a co-author of the new Nature paper. “I don’t remember who first used it,” he said. “But after Randy Shilts did, we started saying it ourselves.”

Later, he said, when reporters asked if Mr. Dugas had brought AIDS to North America, “We said no, that he wasn’t the first. But I think they went with it anyway. The idea of Patient Zero was very attractive. Letter O would not be a story.”

Richard A. McKay, a Cambridge historian and another co-author of the Nature paper, has long fought for Mr. Dugas’s reputation, saying his friends in Vancouver’s gay community had painted a sympathetic portrait of him for Mr. Shilts, who ignored it.

Journalism.

DEAR KURT: I Can’t Believe Someone With Such A Terrible Record On Women Is Running For President.

Never go “Dear Kurt” unless you’re willing to endure the hilarious truth.

CRASHING BY DESIGN: Obamacare Premiums Skyrocket as Insurers Flee the Program.

(Headline by the legendary songwriting team of Townshend, Cloward, and Piven.)

RISE OF THE MACHINES: In the Harvard Business Review, my colleague Maurice Stucke and Oxford’s Ariel Ezrachi: How Pricing Bots Could Form Cartels and Make Things More Expensive.

THERE WAS ONE? The Final Collapse of Obama’s Syrian Policy.

LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: How Facial Recognition Software Is Changing the Porn Industry.

RON RADOSH: The Truth About the Late Tom Hayden—Whitewashed by the MSM.

WOW: You need to watch MSNBC go after ‘sleazy’ ‘Clinton, Inc.’ and their cronies.

Related: Brutal new Clinton emails about Teneo remind us of Huma Abedin circa 2010.

WE ALL DO: Clinton faces new challenges on ObamaCare.

Both parties agree that ObamaCare has problems. Premiums are rising sharply, and the pool of enrollees is smaller and sicker than expected.
But the agreement mostly ends there. Republicans say the law should be repealed, a position echoed by their presidential nominee, Donald Trump.

Should Clinton win the White House, as polls indicate, most if not all of her ideas for changing ObamaCare would have virtually no chance of passing Congress, so long as Republicans control the House and/or Senate.

Clinton is calling for adding a public insurance option to increase competition with private carriers, but Republicans and some Democrats fiercely oppose that idea.

This idea that the public option would “increase competition” is a ruse. Introducing a government insurer legally entitled to sell at a loss would instead have the effect of driving private insurers out of the market — which of course is the point of the ruse.

IT’S REAL, AND IT ISN’T SPECTACULAR: Megyn Kelly’s Feminist Bias.

Read the whole thing, although I’m not certain Newt Gingrich came off as any better than Kelly in their heated exchange.

VIA WIKILEAKS: What Top Democrats Really Thought About Hillary’s Private Server: “F*****g Insane.” I find these emails slightly comforting, as they suggest that people around Hillary aren’t all crazy. But then I remember that their concerns didn’t actually stop her.

Related: Hillary Discovers That She’s Not As Smart As Henry Kissinger.

DAVID SOLWAY IS RAPIDLY LOSING FAITH IN THE ELECTORATE.

Read the whole thing. After watching the numerous acts of anti-GOP vandalism and riots this year, I can’t say I blame him. What’s your take?

FLASHBACK: GOOD GUY WITH A GUN STOPS BAD GUY WITH A KNIFE. And his wife was a hero, too:

Laura Creed, meanwhile, was rendering first aid not only to the mortally wounded George Heath, but Sheenah Savoy, a pregnant waitress Heath, a father of two, died helping to save.

“My initial reaction was I need a land line to call 911. Then nurse mode kicked in and I wasn’t going anywhere without this guy,” an emotional Laura Creed said at a press conference this morning with her hero husband and George Heath’s widow Rosemary Heath.

“We’ve talked about when something happens, he helps and I run. But I wasn’t going anywhere without him,” Laura Creed said, holding James’ hand.

It’s a heartwarming story, though it would have been better if the crazy guy hadn’t been let out.

GANGSTER GOVERNMENT: Documents Illuminate AGs Politicized Climate Campaign Against Exxon.

The court cited public records obtained by myself and the Energy & Environment Legal Institute (E&E Legal) from one of Healey’s coalition partners. Since then, we have obtained many more records, affirming the court’s “concern” that this coalition is pursuing a political, not a legal agenda.

These records detail a public-private partnership with environmentalist pressure group lobbyists and contingency-fee lawyers looking to surmount the failure of the climate agenda through the proper democratic process.

Since E&E Legal began extracting and publicizing these records, Schneiderman and Healey’s erstwhile AG partners have all fled. One email shows the Delaware AG leaving the coalition in response to being informed of freedom of information requests. It seems that these AGs are aware of that details of their scheming will not play well.

Read the whole thing.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: What we’re not talking about in this election: Government Corruption, ObamaCare’s Implosion, The Ballooning National Debt. And that’s because, as Jim Treacher notes, “Modern journalism is all about deciding which facts the public shouldn’t know because they might reflect badly on Democrats.”

YOU DON’T SAY: Clinton Took More Conciliatory Tone With Health Care Industry in Paid Speeches.

“I know how critical the role that you play is,” Clinton told the Advanced Medical Technology Association, a medical device trade group, in a 2014 speech. She avoided a direct question about a 2.3 percent tax on medical devices that was intended to fund the Affordable Care Act but was suspended until the end of 2017 after intense industry lobbying.

That appearance, for which Clinton was paid $225,000, was one of 15 paid speeches she gave to health care industry audiences, drawing a total of $3.5 million in fees. Overall, between the end of her tenure as secretary of state in February 2013 and the start of her 2016 White House bid, Clinton was paid about $21.6 million in speaking fees, according to her federal financial disclosure forms.

The health care speeches, largely overshadowed by the political storm over Clinton’s paid presentations to big banks, provide another example of an industry with much at stake during the next administration adding to the personal wealth of the woman who is now the Democratic presidential nominee.

ObamaCare has cost American consumers untold billions, but it’s been a financial boon for influence peddlers like the Clintons.

ROGER SIMON: Term Limits for the Media?

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1267.

YES. Is Modern Feminism Incompatible With Science?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Colleges Enlist Growing Army of Title IX Enforcers.

Earlier this year, the Harvard Law School professors Jacob Gersen and Jeannie Suk coined the term “bureaucratic sex creep” to describe the steady expansion of official regulation surrounding sexual conduct and discussion, especially on college campuses. New bureaucracies are constructed to enforce rules against sexual misconduct, but by making a growing range of ordinary conduct accountable to regulators, they end up eroding protected personal liberties as well.
An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (un-self-consciously entitled “Resident Assistants Find Themselves on the Front Lines of Title IX Enforcement”) provides a perfect example of the phenomenon Gersen and Suk described. Not content with enlarging their ranks of diversity bureaucrats and Title IX officers, colleges are enlisting student resident assistants (typically, senior students who live in lower-class dorms) as “mandatory reporters” of possible Title IX violations, including “harassing remarks” they might hear.

“At the forefront of a university’s compliance is typically the Title IX coordinator,” the Chronicle reports earnestly. “But coordinators can’t monitor an entire campus on their own, so they often rely on mandatory reporters to bring possible offenses to their attention.”

The resident assistants are instructed to not be selective about what information they report to the authorities. They are to pass along to superiors anything they see or hear that could potentially run afoul of the growing web of sexual harassment rules and regulations: “RAs should be ‘funnels of information’,” a Title IX bureaucrat told the Chronicle. “Don’t try to sift and sort. Is this Title IX? Is this not Title IX?’ Let the Title IX administrator do that.”

As Gersen and Suk note, colleges are defining “Title IX violation,” increasingly broadly so that it sometimes includes consensual sexual contact or protected speech and discussion. And RA’s are now required to report student sexual remarks and behavior even if they don’t have a strong reason to believe it constitutes a violation. As a result, campus administrators will increasingly be privy to information about which underclassmen are sleeping with one another and which students made salacious remarks in their dorm rooms.

And so the sex bureaucracy continues to expand in American academia. It’s possible that the new embedded dorm-room “eyes and ears” will lead to more students being punished for genuine misconduct. But at what cost? Stalin’s police state helped him apprehend criminals more easily than America’s liberal system, too. This is not good training for life in a free society.

To be fair, that’s not what they’re trying to train students for. And if you want to see how a simple provision was distorted to produce this Stalinesque nightmare, read Robert Shibley’s Twisting Title IX.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Big Oil Companies Reap Windfall From Ethanol Rules.

Companies including Chevron Corp., Royal Dutch Shell PLC, and BP PLC could reap a total of more than $1 billion this year by selling the renewable fuel credits associated with the ethanol program, according to an analysis commissioned by CVR Energy, a refinery operator controlled by billionaire Carl Icahn, a vocal critic of the rules.

For other companies, especially smaller refiners, the rules have had the opposite effect, forcing them to spend hundreds of millions to buy credits to comply.

It’s almost as though ethanol mandates were more about influencing Iowa voters and getting into bed with Big Oil than about protecting the environment.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Sheriff Clarke: Gun Control Was Meant to Keep Arms Away from Black People.