I HAD BEEN ASSURED JOHN KERRY HAD NEGOTIATED A CEASEFIRE: Syria opposition to go to peace talks, says Assad escalating war.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN Don’t underrate how far we’ve come. But beware of politicians who will screw up further progress out of greed.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1037.

WILL ANYONE ASK OBAMA ABOUT THE CAMPUS BULLYING HE HAS ENCOURAGED AMONG HIS FOLLOWERS? Protesters Bully Pro-Life Students, Grab Their Flyers, Retreat to Safe Space: UC-Davis Women’s Center creates safe space for hecklers. “But if anyone needed a safe space, it was probably the pro-life students. After all, pro-choice demonstrators grabbed their materials and threw them on the ground. This interaction was caught on video, and generated widespread applause. A campus security officer talked to the aggressor, but did not discipline her.”

This Obama culture of encouraging his fans to “get in their face” and “punch back twice as hard” doesn’t get much media commentary. Then they wonder why Trump supporters think it’s okay to shove people around.

A LOUSY POLITICAL CLASS BEGETS LOUSY POLITICS, WHICH BEGETS LOUSY SITUATIONS: An Avoidable Catastrophe: How Europe’s infectious institutionalization of irresponsibility is perpetuating the migrant crisis.

Europe’s migration crisis has mostly been covered from the “human interest” perspective, with the perverse proliferation of tragic images and emotive narratives amplified by social media. This collective content stream has made it seem primarily a humanitarian crisis. But that is false.

Instead, what we are seeing is the unending monetization of human misery, a phenomenon as complete as it is cynical. By necessity, it has been complemented by an infectious institutionalization of irresponsibility–something that has not failed to affect geopolitics. This is why the ramifications of the migration crisis are so serious for Europe, America, and many other countries.

Countless reports have shown ways in which migration is monetized. Everyone gets something: the human trafficking networks that provide transport; the criminal networks that sell forged (and real) travel documents; the governments and humanitarian NGOs that receive handsome donations from both public and private funds; the media that attract huge audiences (and advertising revenue) by publishing images of human despair; the clever villager who sells a bottle of water for fifty cents extra.

Another money-generating scheme—and one that has been particularly associated with the Islamic State–is antiquities smuggling. Slovenian police recently discovered three small figurines dating from 3000 BCE in a migrant camp. They had been smuggled in from the Middle East on the “Balkan route” from Greece into Macedonia, Serbia, and Croatia. While there are no reliable figures for the amount or value of cultural treasures exported via illegal migration, one thing is clear: the end destination. Such valuable antiquities inevitably reach the private collections of wealthy people, most often Europeans and Americans.

When virtue-signaling is elevated to a top priority, it’s a safe bet that actual virtue is considerably more scarce.

21 REASONS TO NEVER EVER STEP INSIDE A WHOLE FOODS AGAIN: “I need to read the numbers on the barcode aloud to you. I don’t want any lasers touching my food.”

Found via “Cloud People And Ground People,” which Sarah linked to in the wee small hours, and is equally worth your time. (Though a much more sobering read.)

TODAY’S TOP ISSUES: We Need to Stop Calling Breast-Feeding Natural. “Martucci and Barnhill also point out that to describe breast-feeding as natural is to make a number of assumptions about gender roles and family life. Are two gay dads raising their child unnaturally if they formula-feed?”

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN Don’t underrate how far we’ve come. Plus, a warning:

Things aren’t perfect today, of course, and there are still plenty of things to worry about. But it’s worth noting just how far we’ve come. It’s also worth noting that most of these advancements are the result of free enterprise and open markets, and worth remembering that politicians, for their own selfish purposes, might stop this progress at any time. Free markets are great, but they don’t offer the opportunities for graft and personal aggrandizement that un-free markets do. And to politicians, that’s a bug, not a feature.

Consider yourself warned.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Governor Cuomo wants to stop funding one-third of CUNY four-year colleges’ budget. Where will the money come from? Stupid red-state Republican yahoos, slashing money for . . . wait, what?

Related: More on the University of Wisconsin’s new tenure rules.

All is proceeding as I have foretold.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Our unfounded obsession with safety is costing us our freedom.

(Via Maggie’s Farm, which dubs it “The Safety-Industrial Complex” at work.)

#NEWYORKVALUES: Gotham embraces insanity; poised to abandon 25 years of successful public policy.

WHY ARE LEFTIST INSTITUTIONS SUCH CESSPITS OF SEXUAL PREDATION? UC-Berkeley Law School Dean Resigns After Being Sued For Sexual Harassment.

THE COLLEGE THAT WANTS TO BAN ‘HISTORY:’ “Students at Western Washington University have reached a turning point in their campus’s hxstory. (For one thing, they’re now spelling it with an X—more on that later.),” Reason’s Robby Soave writes at the Daily Beast:

At the heart of this effort lies a bizarrely totalitarian ideology: Student-activists think they have all the answers—everything is settled, and people who dissent are not merely wrong, but actually guilty of something approaching a crime. If they persist in this wrongness, they are perpetuating violence, activists will claim.

The list of demands ends with a lengthy denunciation of WWU’s marginalization of “hxstorically oppressed students.” The misspelling is intentional: “hxstory,” I presume, was judged to be more PC than “history,” which is gendered, triggering, and perhaps violent. It’s easy for me to laugh at these clumsy attempts to make language obey the dictates of political correctness—but I laugh from a position of relative safety, since I am not a WWU professor.

On the other hand, if a member of campus were to insist on the proper spelling of the word, would he or she (or xe) have to answer to the Committee for Social Transformation?

Of course, Western Washington University banning history is on top of most colleges replacing traditional history courses with what Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey dubbed “Black Armband History,” where it’s nothing but grievances all the way down. But it sounds like Western Washington University has left that behind as it enters into “Starting From Zero” territory, as Tom Wolfe would say. At some point, the great relearning Wolfe promised will begin – and the longer it’s delayed, the more painful it’s going to be.

ROGER SIMON: Trump, Israel, and Islam.

THE NEW WASPs, as spotted by Kevin D. Williamson:

It is strange, and more than a little perverse, that this part of California is one of the nation’s great hotbeds of progressive anti-capitalism, and that is remains in thrall to the superstition that a society in which markets are allowed to operate freely and capital is permitted (and encouraged!) to find its best use must also be a society that is cruel, callous, indifferent to the poor and the vulnerable, selfish, and vulgar. The good people of the San Francisco area live smack dab in the middle of what must surely be the world’s greatest living example that the truth is exactly the opposite.

Read the whole thing.

BUT OF COURSE: Four Out of Five of Obama’s Supreme Court Finalists Are Obama Donors.

GOOD FOR LAMAR: Senator grills acting education secretary over agency overreach.

Did the Education Department overstep its authority when it threatened to withhold funding from schools by changing the law regarding campus sexual assault?

This was the question Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., attempted to get to the bottom of during an Appropriations Subcommittee hearing. During the hearing, Alexander grilled the department’s acting secretary, Dr. John B. King, about a non-legally binding document issued by the department that has actually carried the force of law.

Alexander kept asking King if the department’s “Dear Colleague” letters carried the force of law, to which King kept replying that they did not, and that the documents were merely his department’s “interpretation of the law and regulations, which are binding.”

Except, as Alexander went on to point out, colleges and universities are treating the “Dear Colleague” letters as the law for fear of what the department would do if they did not comply. Currently, schools face federal investigations and a loss of federal funding if they do not comply with the alleged “guidance” documents.

“In 2011, the Department put out a guidance and basically said ‘equitable resolution cannot mean either clear and convincing evidence or preponderance of the evidence, it’s got to mean preponderance of the evidence,'” Alexander said. “So that would mean to me that the U.S. Department of Education could today initiate an action and say to a school: ‘You’re violating Title IX if you use the standard of clear and convincing evidence.’ Is that correct?”

King reiterated that his department made clear that the guidance does not have the force of law.

“We do believe that equitable resolution means preponderance of the evidence—” King began to say before Alexander interrupted.

“Well who gave you the right to believe that?” Alexander said.

Give ’em hell, Lamar — though I believe that the universities were happy to roll over in a way that they wouldn’t have if this had been a GOP administration using similar reasoning to make them do something their internal constituencies opposed, instead of a Dem administration pressuring them to do something internal constituencies supported.

REPORT: ILLINOIS HAD A BANNER YEAR FOR CORRUPTION IN 2015. “We are so lucky Barack Obama doesn’t know anything about Illinois corruption!”

The country’s in the very best of hands.™

FALLACIES DO NOT CEASE TO BE FALLACIES BECAUSE THEY BECOME FASHIONS, as G.K. Chesterton said: “Now that the Oregon legislature has hiked the minimum wage, effective this July, colleges and universities in the state have a decision to make: hire fewer student employees, cut the school’s budget, or raise tuition.”

Too bad they no longer study Chesterton or Kipling there, as the Gods of the Copybook Headings wouldn’t be at all surprised at this “unexpected” development. (aka “Bad Luck,” as Heinlein would say. I doubt he’s read much there either, at least in class.) As Richard Samuelson notes on Twitter, “If students didn’t expect $15 minimum wage to hurt jobs, University should fire entire econ dept.”

Hey, the New York Times has a Nobel-winning economist (and former Enron consultant) on staff, and Bloomberg was started by a former general partner at one of Wall Street’s biggest bond trading houses, and since January of 2009, they’ve been constantly surprised by “unexpectedly” bad economic news; why should their junior wannabe counterparts in college be any different?

MICHAEL BARONE: Why did Michigan blacks vote differently from Southern blacks?

ROLL CALL: Bernie Sanders’ Superdelegate Chutzpah.

Bernie Sanders and his legions are furious about the possibility that superdelegates could help Hillary Clinton win the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. There’s a word for that: chutzpah.

For several decades, Sanders chose to set himself apart from the Democratic Party. He held himself up as a paragon of non-partisan virtue and has charged that leading members of the Democratic Party, including Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, are essentially corrupt, inept or both.

Now that the Democratic Party’s nomination rules favor his rival, Clinton, the #Bern crowd is angrily denouncing the way Democrats select their nominee. The vast majority of the 4,700-plus delegates to the Democratic convention are pledged to support the choice of primary and caucus voters in their state or district. But there’s a set of 714 “superdelegates”— elected Democrats, party officials and party elders — who vote for the candidate of their own choice at the convention. In at least one case, a Clinton-backing superdelegate has reported receiving harassing messages from Sanders supporters.

While Sanders and his official campaign have been careful to walk a fine line on the question of superdelegates — after all, his very narrow path to the nomination would likely require him to flip a substantial number of them to get a majority of the overall delegate pool — his allies are attacking the system. And he’s done nothing to contradict them.

Obama was able to flip the superdelegates because he was black, and there was a lot of enthusiasm for electing the first black president. What does Bernie bring to the table that will compare?

“BOOM. Putin intimate defects to USA, cooperates with FBI, gets brutally murdered. Whatever could have happened?,” the New York Observer’s John Schindler rhetorically tweets.

WASTING AWAY AGAIN IN AN OBAMAVILLE: San Francisco mulls state of emergency over homelessness. But will it help?

If past history is any indication, the answer is no. Next question?