OH, THAT DEATH OF THE GROWN-UP: I’m living like a college student at 44:

Increasingly, New Yorkers are turning to slick, luxurious communal-living setups. In the dormlike buildings, adults well out of college share kitchens, living rooms and bathrooms, and everything from toilet paper to coffee to a cleaning service is included in the rent.

“All the little stuff that you would have to go out for and plan and think about, you don’t have to think about,” says James Jackson, 27, a Web developer who lives in a new communal building in South Williamsburg, Brooklyn, operated by the co-living company Common.

Common’s Williamsburg property is its third and largest. It operates two oth er buildings in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and has space for 100 residents across the three properties. Since launching in October the company has received 6,000 tenant applications.

Once accepted — Common doesn’t perform a credit check but requires some sort of financial information as well as an interview — residents can show up empty-handed. Bedrooms are fully furnished, and even sheets and towels are part of the deal. Rent starts at $1,800 per room and includes all utilities and Wi-Fi.

The setup is similar at the new WeLive, an extension of co-working giant WeWork. It opened on Wall St. in May and will eventually be able to accommodate 600 residents.

Related: “The ‘struggle’ is not real: From tiny houses to my own lunch, poverty chic commodifies working-class life,” an author in Salon whines about her fellow leftists’ aesthetics and linguistic virtue signalling:

The term “struggle meal” seems to me to be related to the phrase-turned-hashtag, “The Struggle Is Real.” For anyone unfamiliar, Urban Dictionary defines “the struggle is real” as “a (generally) ironic saying often used in place of the saying, ‘first world problems.’ With irony, it has a comical effect of dramatizing a non-critical, yet undesirable situation.” Popular iterations of this phrase often relay the “struggle” as running out of shampoo before running out of conditioner, or of having to deny oneself a donut because swimsuit season is approaching. With rampant social problems like inaccessible health care, childhood hunger, and homelessness (just to name a few) existing in the developed world, it’s apparent that there is not enough irony to make the incongruence between the phrase and people’s real struggles to survive funny.

A cursory search for the phrase online reveals not only its ubiquity, but its fundamental ties to affluence and financial stability. There are any number of internet memes and items available for sale, such as coffee mugs, iPhone cases, and hand-lettered art pieces to be displayed in people’s home offices that indicate for whom the “struggle” is real. These items belie, of course, the reality that roughly twenty percent of Americans — nearly 60 million people — lack access to the internet and that another 45 million Americans live below the poverty line. The “real struggle,” as explained by this phrase, is one confined to aesthetics and whimsy, not survival.

It’s the linguistic equivalent of the ways mainstream society appropriates and commodifies working class aesthetics, like Mason jars, sweatbands, beards, thrift store clothing, and the like. This troubling trend even spills over into housing, with affluent folks trying on small, mobile houses from the Tiny House Movement as “proof”’ of how enlightened they are, having pared down their possessions to live more simply and happily. The crucial difference in these cases is that those who appropriate the items intrinsic to working class life and survival do so out of choice, rather than necessity.

As accessories, these items symbolize a part of the fend-for-yourself culture — of any race, ethnicity, or region — that has become strangely popular in mainstream society. Using or wearing these working class accessories lends the wearer a kind of can-do credibility that doesn’t come with white collar office attire — a rustic cachet without any of the hassles and struggles that comes with the lifestyle. Likewise, the people who use this language typically appear perfectly self-reliant (yet they are the ones who enjoy class, race, and, in the case of men, gender) privilege that is incongruent with the self-reliance working class people have to utilize in order to survive.

Congratulations – you just stumbled into the gist of Tom Wolfe’s “Funky Chic” article, written way back in 1970. As Wolfe noted, “Anti-fashion! Terrific. Right away anti-fashion itself became the most raving fashion imaginable . . . also known as Funky Chic. Everybody had sworn off fashion, but somehow nobody moved to Cincinnati to work among the poor. Instead, everyone stayed put and imported the poor to the fashion pages.”

Permanently, it seems. But then, the real meaning of “Progressivism” has been to freeze-dry attitudes among its believers for well over a century.

(Classical reference in headline.)

EVERYTHING SEEMINGLY IS SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL: AP morphed into Salon so slowly, I hardly even noticed.

(Actually, I did back in 2008 – the above headline is via the AP from June of that year, when everything was most assuredly not spinning out of control.)

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE:

If only someone had seen this coming. But this statement appearing on the cover of a magazine that caters to the Volvo/NPR demographic is still a major indicator.

VOX BUTTERFIELD: America has 4.4 percent of the world’s population but nearly half of its civilian-owned guns.

As someone noted in response that headline, it sounds like a good start – as John Nolte tweets, why does Vox think that’s a bad thing?

(Classical reference in headline.)

WHEN A CULTURE UNMANS ITSELF: David Solway on living in a world run by beta males and their lady friends.

ANITA MONCRIEF IS MAKING A MOVIE: The Children of Alinsky (Phase 1).

WASHINGTON’S HOLLOW MEN: Victor Davis Hanson fillets American elites.

…our modern American elite is a bit different. Residence, either in the Boston–Washington, D.C., or the San Francisco–Los Angeles corridor, often is a requisite. Celebrity and public exposure count — e.g., access to traditional television outlets (as opposed to hoi polloi Internet blogging). So does education — again, most often a coastal-corridor thing: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Berkeley, Stanford, etc. Net worth, whether made or inherited, helps. But lots of billionaires, especially Midwestern sorts, are not part of the elite, in that their money does not necessarily translate into much political or cultural influence — or influence of the right sort. (Exceptions are Chicago traders who bundle millions for Hillary.) Especially influential are the revolving-door multimillionaires, especially from big banks and Wall Street — the Tim Geithners, Jack Lews, Hank Paulsons, and Robert Rubins, but also the lesser flunkies of the Freddie/Fannie Clintonite crowd, a Franklin Raines (raking in $90 million) or a Jamie Gorelick ($26 million), all of whom came into the White House and its bureaucracies to get rich, but who always seem shocked when the public does not like their incestuous trails of bailouts, relief plans, favorable regulations, etc. Creepy too are the satellite grifters like “investment banker” Rahm Emanuel — who somehow, between the White House and the House of Representatives, made off with $16 million for his financial “expertise” — or Chelsea Clinton, who made her fortune ($15 million?) largely by being a “consultant” for a Wall Street investment group (her fluff job at NBC News was small potatoes in comparison). The locus classicus, of course, is the Clinton power marriage itself, which invested nearly 40 years of public service in what proved to be a gargantuan pay-for-play payoff, when they parlayed Hillary’s political trajectories into a personal fortune of well over $100 million. Give them credit: From the early days, when they would write off as IRS deductions gifts of their used underwear, they ended up 30 years later getting paid $10,000 to $60,000 a minute for their Wall Street riffs. The nexus between Big Government, Big Money, Big Influence, and Big Media is sometimes empowered by familial journalistic continuity (e.g., John Dickerson, son of Nancy Dickerson) or a second generation of fashion/glitz and media (Gloria Vanderbilt and Anderson Cooper), but again is increasingly expressed in the corridor “power couple,” the sorts who receive sycophantic adulation in New York and Washington monthly magazines.

Read the whole thing. Note Mr. Hanson mentions John Dickerson. Dickerson recently provided us with a small but documented example of how crooked elites attempt to manipulate media perception– a “nexus operation” combining the Big Media and Big Influence Mr. Hanson so brilliantly damns. When Dickerson interviewed Hillary on Face the Nation (May 8) he employed Hillary’s fake-description “inquiry” to describe the FBI’s criminal investigation. Yes, a privileged, leftish Washington media elite rhetorically colluding with a preferred political elite.

MAYBE PEOPLE ARE JUST NOTICING THINGS NOW: Trust in Government Is Collapsing Around the World.

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AH, A RECURRING QUESTION: WHY DO SO MANY PEOPLE DISTRUST AND DISLIKE HILLARY CLINTON?

DISPATCHES FROM THE MOST TRANSPARENT ADMINISTRATION IN HISTORY: Huma Abedin admits that Clinton burned daily schedules.

ASHE SCHOW: What’s Next For College Snowflakes?

This past school year, colleges and universities saw some of the most embarrassing displays of student and faculty behavior ever witnessed in modern history.

Bolstered by a grievance culture that promotes victimhood, campus protesters demanded “safe spaces” from ideas they disagreed with and “trigger warnings” on readings that might make them uncomfortable. They accused those whose comments might seem slightly insensitive of committing “microaggressions.”

They commanded their college administrations to change the names of buildings by judging past actions by today’s standards. They protested speakers who they found controversial and they labeled as “hate speech” anything they found objectionable.

It was a year of humiliation for institutions of higher education, which found administrators giving in to the absurd and petty demands of the students they were supposed to be preparing for life as adults. . . .

What’s next?

“I think it’s going to get much worse,” Dershowitz said of the campus protests, adding that campus administrators “don’t have the courage to stand up to spoiled student brats.”

Video of Ashe Schow at the link.

CLINTON LEAD CUT IN HALF.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Amidst 26% Enrollment Decline, West Virginia Law School Accelerates Faculty And Staff Downsizing With Buyouts.

MORE LIES: Newly-Discovered Withheld Emails Highlight Hillary’s Unaccountability, Possible Perjury.

‘IT’S A YUGE PARTY!’ KENNEDY FAMILY TAKES A SHOT AT THE DONALD WITH A TRUMP-THEMED PIÑATA OVER FOURTH OF JULY WEEKEND AT THEIR CAPE COD COMPOUND.

You’d think an ultra-PC family who had lost two prominent sons to shots in the head might have chosen a slightly different theme, but then, Ted always did enjoy hearing a good Mary Jo Kopechne joke.

CULTURED HICKS:

Amanpour asks one of her guests, either Daniel Hannan or the UK foreign minister, can’t remember which, what is wrong with the Leave people. Don’t they like their strong economy? It has not occurred to the stateless, rootless, global-citizen Amanpour that people might prefer their own customs and sovereignty to getting rich. Having no loyalty to any particular place, Amanpouristas find the love of one’s people, land, and traditions simply bizarre. So they denounce it as racist. I don’t believe this is cynical. I think they honestly believe it. And here is why it’s tribalism: they see anyone outside the tribe as barbarian. The fact that they see themselves as sophisticated and advanced instead of mere partisans of a different tribe, with their own prejudices and limitations, is what makes them so hard to take. Technocratic liberalism is their religion, and its god is a jealous god.

Read the whole thing.

HILLARY: I FOUND OUT ABOUT TARMAC SUMMIT “IN THE NEWS” AND “HINDSIGHT’S 20-20.”

So she wants us to believe that her husband met with the attorney general investigating her in a private plane and he didn’t bother to tell her about? And as one of Legal Insurrection’s co-bloggers writes, “Hindsight is 20/20?  A former president, a presidential candidate, and the attorney general of the United States didn’t see the impropriety of this ‘chance meeting’ before the fact?  Really?”

As Clarice Feldman writes at the American Thinker, “Maybe It’s Time to Stop ‘Thinking about Tomorrow.’”

TRUMP’S WOULD BE NO ORDINARY DEFEAT, Holman Jenkins writes in the Wall Street Journal. Well, it wouldn’t be an ordinary defeat for a Republican, at least:

Mr. Trump has learned the value of audacity. He might well decide to cover his retreat and preserve his amour propre with a flurry of lawsuits and conspiracy theories about a “rigged” election.

He’s already begun putting narrative flesh on these bones. He speaks of “crooked Hillary” and increasingly of the Clinton Global Initiative, Bill Clinton’s philanthropy, and what he calls the Clintons’ “politics of personal profit and theft.” In his trade speeches, he portrays the Clintons as members of a nefarious global elite that has enriched itself while foisting impoverishing trade deals on the U.S. middle class.

He perhaps will throw in a few suggestions that foreign governments hold hidden leverage over Hillary because of her hacked, illegal email server. He’ll mention Bill Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich.

Republicans can also expect to be a target of his accusations. He doesn’t need to be plausible, just tell a story that justifies his own stance that he didn’t lose, the other side cheated, “Washington elites” conspired against him, etc.

So in other words, if Trump loses, he’ll act exactly like the left did after November of 2000. And the same media that treated Bush as “selected not elected” will tut-tut his divisiveness as some new strange alien behavior without realizing they created the precedent for it.

ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS, EXCEPT EUROPA: NASA’s Juno space probe arrives at giant planet.

“Welcome to Jupiter!” flashed on screens at mission control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California. The Juno team cheered and hugged.

“This is phenomenal,” said Geoff Yoder, acting administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

The probe had to conduct a tricky maneuver to slow down enough to allow it to be pulled into orbit: It fired its main engine for 35 minutes, effectively hitting the brakes to slow the spacecraft by about 1,212 miles per hour (542 meters per second).

“NASA did it again,” said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator.

“We’re there, we’re in orbit. We conquered Jupiter.”

Not taking any unnecessary risks, in the photo at the link the entire NASA team is wearing identical gray tennis shirts.

LIVING ON TUZLA TIME: Recalling Hillary Clinton’s claim of ‘landing under sniper fire’ in Bosnia:

According to Sinbad [in 2008], who provided entertainment on the trip along with the singer Sheryl Crow, the “scariest” part was deciding where to eat. As he told Mary Ann Akers of The Post, “I think the only ‘red-phone’ moment was: ‘Do we eat here or at the next place.’” Sinbad questioned the premise behind the Clinton version of events. “What kind of president would say ‘Hey man, I can’t go ’cause I might get shot so I’m going to send my wife. Oh, and take a guitar player and a comedian with you.”

As always, reality invariably catches up to satire: Hillary’s successor as Secretary of State under President Obama was accompanied by a guitar playing James Taylor when he visited Paris’ city hall in the wake of ISIS’ massacre of the Charlie Hebdo offices.

CHANGE? Immigration reformers eye Gang of 8 revival.

GANGSTER GOVERNMENT: Huma Abedin admits that Clinton burned daily schedules.

Hillary Clinton’s closest aide revealed in a deposition last week that her boss destroyed at least some of her schedules as secretary of state — a revelation that could complicate matters for the presumptive Democratic nominee, who, along with the State Department she ran, is facing numerous lawsuits seeking those public records.

Huma Abedin was deposed in connection with a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit into Clinton’s emails — but her admission could be relevant to another lawsuit seeking Clinton’s schedules.

“If there was a schedule that was created that was her Secretary of State daily schedule, and a copy of that was then put in the burn bag, that . . . that certainly happened on . . . on more than one occasion,” Abedin told lawyers representing Judicial Watch, the conservative organization behind the emails lawsuit.

Abedin made the surprising admission in response to a question about document destruction at the Department of State. A lawyer for Judicial Watch asked: “And during your tenure at the State Department, were you aware of your obligation not to delete federal records or destroy federal records?” . . .

A former State Department official told The Post it was unprecedented for a diplomat to destroy a schedule like this.

“I spent eight years at the State Department and watched as four US ambassadors and two secretaries of state shared their daily schedules with a variety of State Department employees and US officials,” said Richard Grenell, former diplomat and US spokesman at the United Nations.

“I’ve never seen anyone put their schedule in the burn bag — because every one of them had a state.gov email address and therefore their daily schedules became public records, as required by law.”

Laws are for the little people.

EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN. Cosmo: Global Warming Causing Shark Attacks!

Shades of the summer of 2001.

GOVERNMENT HITS THE WALL, Dan Henninger writes in the Wall Street Journal:

The Obama presidency has been an American version of the European Commission from which the Brits fled. Except that U.S. courts still review, rather than rubber-stamp, the Obama Commission’s executive orders ranging across labor, the environment, the internet, financial institutions and universities.

Had U.S. courts not pushed back against many of the Obama government’s rules and “guidance” directives, the famous “pen-and-phone” authority, this presidency would have come close to putting the states in the same relation to Washington as that between the once-sovereign states of Europe and Brussels.

If Woodrow Wilson was the American godfather of this transformation, Hillary Clinton is its handmaiden. She knows the drill. With four more years of an Obama-Clinton presidency and possibly Democratic control of Congress, the 100-year-old progressive goal of making the 50 American states obey one set of administrative specialists who reside in a single city will be close to complete.

So yes, whether to vote in November for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump is an interesting proposition. As has been noted, Brexit was a big surprise.

Only to those too snooty to not be paying attention; as Kurt Schlichter writes, “You Owe Them Nothing – Not Respect, Not Loyalty, Not Obedience.”