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VIDEO: This 1953 Film Perfectly Explains How Mechanical Computers Worked Before We Had Microchips. Mathematics is the language of nature.

ROMNEY VS. TRUMP: Full speech here.

HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR BALANCE.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The Strange Case of the Campus Cry-bully.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1029.

MAYBE HE CAN ATTRACT DISAFFECTED SANDERS VOTERS AFTER HILLARY GETS THE NOMINATION: Donald Trump Wants To Make America More Like Denmark.

Well, actually, the package Trump offers — “save Social Security without cuts,” a vaguely pro-single-payer position on health care, plus temporarily banning Muslims and walling off Mexico — bears an eerie resemblance to the Danish government’s current policy mix.

His astonishing success selling it to the Republican base may portend ideological convergence between the U.S. right and Europe’s.

Like many American admirers of Scandinavian welfare states, Sanders lacks detailed knowledge of how those systems work, or an appreciation for certain cultural peculiarities that make cradle-to-grave welfarism politically sustainable there but not, so far, here. . . .

Denmark, tolerant and generous toward the Danes among its 5.6 million people, is deeply anxious about its 260,000 Muslims — so much so that a left-right parliamentary coalition recently authorized police to seize cash and valuables from refugees, ostensibly to help pay for their accommodation but also to deter them from coming at all.

You probably won’t hear Sanders urging imitation of that Danish policy at his next college-town rally, but Trump would surely approve of it.

Next: Trump pushes a proposal to make American abortion laws “more European.” Time to make popcorn.

Related: Tavis Smiley: Black America Could Get On The Trump Train. “Second, the number of everyday black voters who we assume will dismiss Trump because of his anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim attacks might well be inflated. . . . I have been taken by myriad conversations I’ve had with black folk who don’t find those comments by Trump necessarily or automatically disqualifying.”

VIRTUE-SIGNALING IS NOT A POLICY: The Moral Rot at the Heart of “Refugees Welcome.”

Chancellor Faymann may just be acting politically to defend a policy that polls well, rather than having had a moral epiphany. But his comment cuts to the heart of the moral and intellectual hypocrisy of the “Refugees Welcome” policy: the pro-refugee factions, which see themselves as humanitarian paragons, have nonetheless managed to devise a program which in reality boils down to “if you survive the trip here, you’re welcome to stay.” . . .

If you don’t want to use ships and ferries, then feel free to fly the refugees. A direct, one-way plane ticket from Istanbul to Berlin this Friday can be found for as little as $44. People smugglers, on the other hand, will charge between $800–$1300 (and up) for a seat on a rubber raft from Turkey to Greece. Then there’s the $335-435 charge to get between certain countries in the Balkans and southern Europe. And at each leg, there’s a chance of death—by drowning, by suffocating in a truck.

So if it’s true that “refugees welcome”, why not just let them fly? Because an increasingly restive German public would go ballistic—but also because even the supporters of Angela Merkel’s policies know that Germany does not have the means to house and feed, much less employ and integrate, the numbers that would then come. Yet until recently, speaking of restrictionism was taboo among the German and European elite; even now, movement toward embracing deterrence—toward sending real signals that the journey north won’t be worth it and so not to come—progresses only slowly and haltingly in Berlin and Brussels.

Right now, a series of do-gooder decisions have turned the journey from Syria and Africa to northern Europe into the Hunger Games. Is that really what moral policy looks like?

Virtue-signaling is never about real world consequences. And the more people virtue-signal, the less virtuous they tend to be.

WHEN LEFTIES OR DEMOCRATS DO SOMETHING AWFUL, THE PRESS SHIFTS THE FOCUS TO . . . HOW REPUBLICANS WILL CAPITALIZE ON IT. So the New York Times’ Vivian Yee’s take on the fake hate crime at Albany is this: “It was a turnabout tailor-made to delight conservative media outlets and to ignite social-media recriminations.”

Ann Althouse calls this “scurrilous” and comments: “Why invent delight in the minds of conservatives? That’s really a repackaging of what seems to be your own disappointment that a terrible racist attack didn’t happen! Shameful.”

To be a leftist today is to be sad whenever it turns out that a woman wasn’t raped, or a black person wasn’t lynched. Which is most of the time, it seems. . . .

THE TRUMP TIPPING POINT.

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WHAT DO COLLEGE PROFESSORS AND FEDERAL BUREAUCRATS HAVE IN COMMON? Neither of them can be fired (once the former get tenure and the latter survive their probationary first year), which means no accountability and endless horror stories. It’s so tedious and time-consuming to fire a federal worker, according to Katie Watson of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group, that managers almost never even try.

Former Sen. Tom Coburn told Watson that the impossibility of firing a fed is one of multiple “symptoms of a greater and bigger problem. You have an uncontrolled federal government that nobody can manage.” And when government is too big to manage, it’s time to start over. That’s why Coburn is pushing this.

YEP: “Sending Mitt Romney out to attack Trump seems to signal that the GOP has no grasp of the situation whatsoever.”

OH, THAT EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Head of Oberlin college defends decision to not sack professor who claimed Jews are behind 9/11 attacks on grounds of free speech.

Because, Oberlin.

Related: Reverse the Roles and You’ll Understand Anti-Semitism:

Imagine Israeli television using children to teach other children to kill Muslims. If that were the case, there would be international outrage of seismic proportions, emergency meetings of the United Nations, wholesale condemnation of everything Jewish, and a call for a UN force to patrol the streets of Jerusalem.

Read the whole thing.

OH, BUT THEY WILL: Detroit’s lesson — 2016 candidates can’t ignore $60 trillion debt: Face the dangers of making promises to retirees that you can’t keep. They’re not much good at anything else, but our ruling class excels at kicking the can down the road.

21st CENTURY QUESTIONS: How Safe Is the Nation’s Food Supply from Terrorists?

Let’s ask candidate Joe Biden in 2008:

Biden says he’s more worried about high fructose corn syrup than terrorism, and after the last eight years of his boss’s administration, I’m more than willing to take him at his word. Sleep tight, America.

JUST A REMINDER: My revolving-door surtax plan has bipartisan support.

THE INEVITABLE BLOWBACK: Tennessee Senate Committee Cuts All Funding For UT Diversity Office.

FIGHT THE POWER: Female student stands up to claims of ‘rape culture.’

It’s not brave to “speak out” on a topic that the media loves and will defend one on. It is brave to stand up for the truth despite what the media and activists claim is true.

That is the case of Toni Airaksinen, a Barnard College sophomore who penned an essay for the Columbia Spectator dismantling the claim that colleges across the country are fostering a “rape culture.”

Airaksinen spends her essay informing readers how a study purporting to show that one-in-five women will be sexually assaulted while in college is misleading. For starters, the study — from the Association of American Universities — uses a “ridiculously wide definition of sexual assault,” according to Airaksinen. This definition includes “everything from penetration to unwanted groping,” she writes.

Airaksinen writes that she, and arguably many of her friends, think “rape” when they hear sexual assault, or something “comparatively traumatizing.” She acknowledges that others, such as activists who parrot the one in five studies, view sexual assault as something that could include “unwanted touching or even street harassment.”

Airaksinen lays out a hypothetical situation where she is kissed without her consent. She writes that it would be “majorly uncomfortable,” but she would not consider it sexual assault. The AAU, however, most likely would.

She also notes that the primary reason the survey’s “victims” don’t report is because they didn’t view the incident as serious enough to report.

Alcohol is one of the biggest factors when considering whether a woman was able to consent, and Airaksinen notes that the AAU survey doesn’t address what percentage of students allegedly committing sexual assault had been drinking.

“I know that after tossing back a couple of glasses of wine, I would certainly be more willing to have sex. If I answered the survey truthfully, I would be considered a victim,” she wrote. “But if I’m the victim of assault because I had unwanted sex after topping off a bottle of wine, then what about the person whom I had sex with, who was probably drinking, too?”

Well, if that person is a male, then he’s always a perpetrator, never the victim, because of his gender. That’s what equality is all about!

BOOKWORM ROOM: Donald Trump, Open Primaries, and the Rise of the Xenophobic Democrat.

ACTUAL CBS TWEET: “Europeans are trying to wrap their heads around Trump’s popularity…with little success.”

Other than their version of the MSM completely failing them (which is always a possibility when dealing with old media), I don’t understand why not. The Europeans have long been fans of strong left-leaning men with gigantic egos and ambitions to match, See also: 1799, 1925, 1933, and most recently their swooning in 2008:

Earlier: Don’t Look Now, But The European Union Is Now Calling for… A Wall.

IS LEGAL SCHOLARSHIP IDEOLOGICALLY BIASED? YES. Well, when it’s by Democrats, anyway:

Professors who are Democrats (adjusted)—shown in the left panel—have an average article ideology of -2.67 with a 90% confidence interval of -3.13 to -2.21. Using a t-test, we can say that this is statistically different from zero (p-value < 0.00). Professors who are Republicans (adjusted)—shown in the right panel—have an average article ideology of 0.17 with a 90% confidence interval of -0.72 to 1.10. For these professors, we cannot reject the possibility that the true net ideology of their articles is zero (p-value = 0.72). In other words, our data suggest that Democrats in our sample do not write articles that are on balance neutral, but that Republicans in our sample may write articles that are on balance neutral. ... [I]f it is in fact the case that Republicans write less ideologically biased scholarship than Democrats do, then one would naturally ask why. The most plausible explanation is that if the dominant ethos in the top law schools is liberal or left-wing,51 then Republicans are likely to conceal their ideological views in their writings. Republican professors might fear that scholarship that appears conservative may be rejected by leftleaning law review editors, and disparaged or ignored by their colleagues, which will damage their chances for promotions, research money, and lateral appointments. This would explain why even nondonors tilt left. Republicans could suppress their ideological views by avoiding controversial topics, taking refuge in fields that have little ideological valence, focusing on empirical or analytical work, or simply writing things that they don’t believe.

This is sad. But there’s worse news, about constitutional law: “The data presented in Table 4 suggest that constitutional rights scholars are less ideologically diverse than other legal scholars. Among constitutional rights scholars, 77% are net Democratic donors, and 4% are net Republican donors. In the rest of the sample, 40% are net Democratic donors, and 20% are net Republican donors.”

OOPS: Sanders’ Carriage Turns Into Energy-Efficient Pumpkin. Sanders was always just there to give the college kids something to do that would keep them from straying off the Dem plantation. And he’s always known it, which is why he’s pulled his punches against Hillary.

ANDREW KLAVAN: Get On Board the Trump Train? No Way! “If Trump is the Republican nominee, principled conservatives may have to leave the party.”

Related: “Former RNC Chairman Mel Martinez says he wishes Joe Biden was running so he could vote for him vs Trump in general.”