VIDEO: HOW CONTROL ROOMS IN MOVIES AND TV HAVE CHANGED WITH THE TIMES.

Your iPhone has more processing power than the computers depicted in these early Hollywood control rooms from films such as The Andromeda Strain and THX-1138.

HEH: Petition Calls For Feminist, Migrant Activist and Actress Emma Watson To Spend A Week In A Migrant Camp. “In order to show how safe current migration is to Europe, particularly regarding the cause of feminism… Emma Watson should spend a week’s holiday in a Calais migrant camp, without guards of course, to show how safe, and how pro feminism these migrants are.”

FINALLY, THE CONCLUSIVE ANSWER REVEALED: Which Makes for a Better Roleplaying Game: Tabletop RPGs, or Computer RPGs?

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Parents’ Cell Phone Use Can Lead to Depression, Anxiety in Children.

DIGNITY, ALWAYS DIGNITY. Sundance: Farting Corpse Movie Prompts Walk-Outs.

To boldly go where Terrance and Phillip have gone innumerable times before!

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 989.

QUICK, WHO SAID THIS? “IT’S FRIDAY, JAN. 22, 2016, AND WE’RE WRITING THIS as yet another alarmist-MSM-declared Storm of the Century hits the Northeast. Seriously, folks: It’s Winter and when it get cold enough, any precipitation takes the form of snow. But before we go any further, since we’re on the subject of white stuff, a quick thought on another manifestation evoked by this photo forwarded by George Lawlor:”

Sorry, but you have to go to The Daily Gouge blog site to see the photo, which is hilarious. The Daily Gouge is the creation of Thom McKee, former Navy F-14 pilot, commercial developer par-excellence and upstate New York humorist responsible for the infamous story of the three-legged pig. I promise, you will thank me for telling you about this guy, especially after he explains the pig.

A WIN FOR SANITY AT OBERLIN:

The president of Oberlin College—a famously leftwing school that recently made headlines for student protests against “cultural appropriation” of ethnic food in dining halls—has issued one of the most forceful rebukes of campus activist intimidation of any academic authority figure to date. Whereas many college presidents have made their best efforts to appease social justice protesters (mostly by promising to spend more money on the protesters’ preferred campus programs), President Marvin Krislov of Oberlin responded to a list of demands—which included firing specific faculty members, granting tenure to others, creating segregated “safe spaces” for black students, and paying student activists for their efforts—by firmly declining to negotiate. . . .

The students concluded their list of demands by saying, “these demands are not suggestions” and threatened “immediate action” if they were not heeded. So who knows what, if anything, they will have in store for the Oberlin administration in the coming semester. But it’s also clear that campus activists regard capitulation as a sign of weakness, not solidarity—just ask President Christina Paxson of Brown. So whatever response the activists are planning would probably have been just as bad, if not worse, had Krislov tried to placate them by promising a new campus diversity center or convened a committee to make courses less, as the activists put it, “westernized.”

At the same time, for critics of modern university political culture, it’s hard not to feel at least a modicum of appreciation for the activists’ willingness to attack certain academic orthodoxies. As Ross Douthat (no supporter of campus Jacobinism) has written, academic administrations have “long relied on rote appeals to the activists’ own left-wing pieties to cloak its utter lack of higher purpose.” The Oberlin activists seemed to sense this: In their list of demands, they criticize the College for using “the limited number of Black and Brown students to color its brochures” and suggest that its ideals of “equity, inclusion, and diversity,” as recited by campus administrators, are meaningless. On that front, they are not entirely wrong: The academy’s worship of diversity is in many ways a hollow exercise, a type of collective virtue signaling motivated more by a desire to boost rankings and market itself than by any comprehensive idea of justice.

True enough. That said, if I were a university president, I’d announce a policy of expelling anyone who used violence against persons or property. I very much doubt if many of the students at these elite and semi-elite schools, who went through years of college-application hell to get there, would be willing to risk it.

EPA AWARDS HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS IN GRANTS IT CAN’T SHOW IMPROVE AIR QUALITY: Diesel emissions, for example, are particularly harmful to air quality, so EPA awarded multiple grants between 2009 and 2014 aimed at reducing such emissions. And $532 million later, an EPA spokesman – who understandably insisted on not being named – conceded to the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Ethan Barton that “we cannot definitively establish cause and effect on one project’s impact on a city’s air quality.” The DCNF IG analysis is based on a database of more than 100,000 EPA grants compiled by Open The Books. BTW, if you aren’t familiar with Open The Books, you should be because those guys are doing incredible work bringing government spending at all levels out in the open.

SNOWMAGEDDON! Milk, Bread, and Eggs: The Trinity of Winter-Storm Panic-Shopping: Why do people reliably stock up on the same things before they get snowed in? “This holy trinity of winter-storm preparedness is not some quirk of the nation’s capital—bread, milk, and eggs are popular panic-buys everywhere from Knoxville to New England.”

All my friends seemed to be stocking up on booze.

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DONALD TRUMP AT THE #SHOTSHOW: DON’T GIVE FEDERAL LANDS TO THE STATES TO MANAGE?

HELLO MUDDAH, HELLO FADDUH — HERE I AM AT CAMP AR-RAQQAH: ISIS Advises Kids How to Tell Parents They’re Running Off to Jihad.

THE LYING LIARS WHO ENFORCE OUR TAX LAWS: The dog keeps eating IRS hard drives.

PUNCHING BACK TWICE AS HARD: Ashe Schow: Fired Professor Sues, Citing Freedom Of Speech.

Louisiana State University professor Teresa Buchanan was fired for … well, we don’t know exactly.

She never received the specific allegations against her, but was informed she had somehow violated the university’s sexual harassment policy, even though no students actually alleged that she had sexually harassed them.

Buchanan, who taught a prekindergarten-3rd grade teacher certification program at LSU, allegedly used profanity or sexual humor in her class. Some of the students in that class, who are all adults supposedly being prepared for the real world, couldn’t handle her teaching style, and complained.

LSU’s broad definition of sexual harassment, which includes “unwelcome verbal, visual or physical behavior of a sexual nature” doesn’t limit such allegations to those that severely affect a student’s learning. Sexual harassment need only “unreasonably” interfere with a student’s education. Even that doesn’t seem to be the case with Buchanan, who may have been guilty of offending some students, but not making education a living hell for them.

She probably flunked the wrong person. Or gave them a B-minus, which is practically as bad. And note the shady and unaccountable influece of the Obama Department of Education here.

EVIL KOCH BROTHERS SEND TIMID PROGRESSIVE JOURNALIST DIVING FOR THE FAINTING COUCH. Jonah Goldberg spots Jane Mayer of the New Yorker, a “Progressive” obsessed with diversity and multiculturalism, condemning the Koch Brothers for not similarly worshiping at the altar of government:

How, then, are the Kochs members of the radical Right? They are pro-gay marriage. They favor liberal immigration policies. They are passionate non-interventionists when it comes to foreign policy. They are against the drug war and are spending a bundle on dismantling so-called “mass-incarceration” policies. They’ve never seized a national park at gunpoint.

* * * * * * * * ­

Liberals are constantly talking about how we need an “honest conversation” about race or guns or this or that. But what they invariably mean is, they want everyone who disagrees to shut up. (That’s why they hate Fox News, too.)

The best working definition of “right wing” today has almost nothing to do with the ideological content of what right-wingers say or do. A right-winger is someone who disagrees with the liberal narrative, has the temerity to say so, and dares to actually try to change the conversation.

Read the whole thing.

THE INSURGENCY HAS ONLY JUST BEGUN — WE ABSORB VILIFICATION AND RIDICULE AS FUEL…

NATE SILVER: You Know, This Trump Fellow May Just Pull It Off:

But the reason I’ve been especially skeptical about Trump for most of the election cycle isn’t listed above. Nor is it because I expected Trump to spontaneously combust in national polls. Instead, I was skeptical because I assumed that influential Republicans would do almost anything they could to prevent him from being nominated. . . .

Even if the GOP is mostly in disarray, my assumption was that it would muster whatever strength it had to try to stop Trump.

But so far, the party isn’t doing much to stop Trump. Instead, it’s making such an effort against Cruz.

As Limbaugh says, they hate Trump, but they fear Cruz.

I’VE LOOKED AT TRUMP FROM BOTH SIDES NOW:

● Roger Simon: National Review’s Jihad Against Trump –Will this lead to Trump v. Sanders?

● Andrew Klavan: Trumpians Get Had –The great crusader against the establishment is establishment through and through.

BARACK BIPOLAR OBAMA, THEN AND NOW.

Shot:

Obama had always had a high estimation of his ability to cast and run his operation. When David Plouffe, his campaign manager, first interviewed for a job with him in 2006, the senator gave him a warning: “I think I could probably do every job on the campaign better than the people I’ll hire to do it,” he said. “It’s hard to give up control when that’s all I’ve known.” Obama said nearly the same thing to Patrick Gaspard, whom he hired to be the campaign’s political director. “I think I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters,” Obama told him. “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.”

—“Obama: I Can Do Every Job Better Than Those I Hire to Do It,” Jim Geraghty, April 24, 2012.

Chaser:  “Fifty Times Obama Reminded Us His Job Isn’t Easy,” Washington Free Beacon video supercut, Thursday.

NOT THE FIRST COURT TO HOLD THIS: Second Amendment may preclude lifetime ban on gun possession by people who have been committed to a mental institution long ago.

I actually discuss this and related doctrines in my forthcoming Georgetown piece, which I guess I should put online soon.

DRIP…DRIP…DRIP…

FEARLESS LEADER UNVEILS EPIC MONTAGE OF FILM AND MUSIC TO UNITE HAPPY CITIZENS OF PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC! Video: Bernie for Glorious Leader!

THE HORROR: We Ate KFC’s ‘Nashville Hot Chicken’ And We’ve Never Felt More Betrayed.