WHEN DUELING FAITHS COLLIDE: Devotees of Science Versus Followers of Religion — Are Only the Latter to Be Taken to Task for Their Alleged Superstitions?

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: “Memo to loony campus progressives: if you’re demanding apartheid, you’re probably a racist.”

JOEL KOTKIN: Erasing Anglo cultural heritage risks what makes our republic diverse.

It’s increasingly unfashionable to celebrate those who made this republic and established its core values. On college campuses, the media and, increasingly, in corporate circles, the embrace of “diversity” extends to demeaning the founding designers who arose from a white population that was 80 percent British.

In this American version of Mao’s “Cultural Revolution,” which tried to eviscerate traces of China’s past, venerable buildings are being renamed, athletes refuse to stand for the national anthem and, on some campuses, waving the American flag is now considered a “microaggression,” while English students at Yale want to avoid reading the likes of Milton, Shakespeare and Chaucer.

Of course, some changes are justified. Asking anyone, particularly African Americans, to revere the Confederate flag or attend schools named after the founder of the Ku Klux Klan is, indeed, offensive. But in our zeal to address old wrongs, we may also be sacrificing the very things that have made this republic so attractive to millions from distinctly different backgrounds for the last two centuries. . . . What ties most Americans to the founders is not race, but our embrace of a political and legal culture based on distinctly Anglo-Saxon ideas about due process, representative government, property rights and free speech. These proved infinitely superior to the divine right of czars, kaisers, emperors and other hereditary autocrats for generations of non-Anglo-Americans.

This system, always capable of amendment, has allowed waves of traditional outsider groups — African Americans, Latinos, women, Mormons, Jews and Muslims — to join the economic, political and cultural mainstream. In some cases, as in the case of President Obama, they have also secured the highest reaches in the national firmament.

Read the whole thing.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Seven Steps for Eliminating Arguing and Back Talk in Kids.

I guess duct tape is out of the question, huh?

MARY KATHARINE HAM: My Defective Obamacare Health Insurance Product Just Blew Up.

Last year, the letter said my Bronze plan, purchased on the marketplace formed by the, ahem, Affordable Care Act, would increase by almost 60 percent.

This year, my premium is going up 96 percent. Ninety-six percent. My monthly payment, which was the amount of a decent car payment, is now the size of a moderate mortgage. The president refers to these for thousands of citizens as “a few bugs” when to us it feels like a flameout.

For this astronomical payment, I get a plan with an astronomical deductible that my healthy family of three will likely never hit except in the most catastrophic of circumstances.

Let’s rewind to my pre-Obamacare health care situation. Throughout my life and career, I have had both employer-based coverage and significant periods during which I bought private insurance with high deductibles and low premiums. During the run-up to Obamacare, President Obama referred to these plans as “junk” plans, but my family and I received perfectly good care and service through them. We were responsible, healthy citizens consuming a small amount of health care, paying out of pocket for most of it, and making sure we weren’t deadbeats should something catastrophic come to pass. Our health insurance was a rational and responsible purchase.

The State does not desire rational or responsible citizens, comrade.

I AM INCURIOUS CASE YELLOW:  War In Europe? Ho Hum.

(Multiple classical allusions in headline.)

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1268.

IT’S COME TO THIS: GRAY LADY ACCUSES TRUMP OF STALKING MUSLIM KIDS IN THEIR DREAMS. “The Times is so busy writing its standard ‘Muslims are victims’ piece that it inadvertently exposes a larger truth: that many Muslims who emigrate here to escape their hostile culture are inculcating the very same hostile culture in their children. Maaria’s family are truly radical Islamists – not only is the mother a Hijabi, but their young 7-year-old daughter is made to cover up as well.  That exceeds even what is required in many fundamentalist Middle Eastern countries.  It’s radical even for Islamic radicals, which is saying something. We should be more concerned about Maaria being indoctrinated into following sharia law than that liberal propaganda is giving her bad dreams.  But the Times has different priorities.”

Read the whole thing.

To be fair, it’s pretty safe to say the Times’ article is a serious case of projection, considering that he’s also living rent-free in their columnists’ heads as well.

GAME CHANGER? Donald Trump could cash in on ‘Bill Clinton Inc.’ leaks. “Trump himself blasted what he called the ‘outright corruption’ of the Clintons on the campaign trail and sought to use it as a glimpse into what a Hillary Clinton White House might look like.”

Related: Howie Carr: I wouldn’t stand too close to Doug Band this weekend.

Another thing I wouldn’t want to do is have to write a life insurance policy for Doug Band. In case you haven’t been paying much attention to the inner workings of the Clinton Foundation as 
detailed in the WikiLeaks dumps, Doug Band’s role is summed up nicely in this headline from the 
L.A. Times:

“An aide says he once arranged for $50 million in payments for Bill Clinton.”

Fifty million! And now it’s all laid out, in public documents, by Doug Band himself. Far, far beyond a reasonable doubt, if you want to get technical about it. Even James Comey could make this case — but he wants to keep breathing, too.

These latest leaks really do explain the whole breathtaking pay-to-play aspect of the Clinton Foundation. Band is bragging about his prowess as an extortionist, although he prefers to call it “the unorthodox nature of our roles.” But he does point out with some pride that his shakedowns, I mean charitable outreaches on behalf of Bill Clinton, “guided more than $30 million for him personally, with $66 million to be paid out over the next nine years.”

Wow! Whatever happened to, “Never write when you can speak, never speak when you can nod, never nod when you 
can wink”?

These people didn’t just write it down, they emailed it out, on unsecure servers.

Why not? What consequences have they suffered?

ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS NOBODY IS ASKING: Why Portland is Getting Sick of Portlandia:

When I was in Portland, I heard complaints about how development is destroying “the Portland we love.” Now, as Portlandia gets ready to film its eighth and final season in 2017, some people are directing their blame at the TV show. Rent is increasing, it’s getting more crowded, shops some people loved are moving.

There’s a funny thing about people who complain about development: They tend to embrace it until they settle in, when they want it to cease as soon as all the coffeehouses, brewpubs, and yoga studios they love have been opened.

Flashback: Elderly perma-hippies loathe younger, smellier hippies moving into Haight-Ashbury. You kids get off my patchouli patch!

RISE OF THE MACHINES: Trump will win the election and is more popular than Obama in 2008, AI system finds. “An artificial intelligence (AI) system that correctly predicted the last three U.S. presidential elections puts Republican nominee Donald Trump ahead of Democrat rival Hillary Clinton in the race to the White House. MogIA was developed by Sanjiv Rai, the founder of Indian start-up Genic.ai. It takes in 20 million data points from public platforms including Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in the U.S. and then analyzes the information to create predictions. The AI system was created in 2004, so it has been getting smarter all the time. It had already correctly predicted the results of the Democrat and Republican Primaries.”

Hmm. Make of this what you will. It’s 2016, and nobody should get cocky.

JOHN FUND: WikiLeaks Dumps Mean Hillary’s Presidency Would Be Tainted from Day One.

ritics of WikiLeaks claim its leaking of sleazy Clinton e-mails is serving the interests of Vladimir Putin, who wants Donald Trump to win the 2016 election. But, if Putin is in fact behind the WikiLeaks dumps, he may actually be making a safer bet. Should Trump lose, a weakened Hillary Clinton will take office with a big chunk of the American people viewing her as illegitimate and many others as untrustworthy in foreign affairs. That kind of geopolitical advantage could be priceless.

The latest WikiLeaks revelation is a 2011 memo from top Clinton aide Doug Band outlining conflicts of interest at the Clinton Foundation while Hillary was secretary of state. It essentially is a confession of massive charity fraud and corruption. As Politico reports: “The memo at one point refers bluntly to the money-making part of Clinton’s life as ‘Bill Clinton Inc.’ and notes that in at least one case a company — global education firm Laureate International Universities — began paying Clinton personally after first being a donor to the Clinton Foundation.” . . .

According to investment analyst Charles Ortel, who follows charities closely, the Clinton Foundation hasn’t complied with New York laws that clearly require the identity and amounts of all government grants (domestic and foreign) be reported. New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman has suspended the Donald J. Trump Foundation from operating in New York over its questionable activities. As Joe Scarborough noted on Thursday, “Why will Schneiderman not shut the Clinton Foundation down, given that its size dwarfs the Trump Foundation?”

I think we know why. An election in which Hillary Clinton is on the ballot is less than two weeks away. Once the details of the Foundation’s activities come to light, there will likely be evidence of it engaging in massive solicitation and operating frauds. . . .

Should Hillary Clinton become president, she will drag the country into yet another national nightmare over her ethics and the ethics of the Clinton Foundation. Who knows what else will be belatedly revealed should she win the White House? Whatever it is, it’s not likely to be pretty or enable her to command the respect of the American people or leaders abroad when she makes tough decisions.

Which is a win for Vladimir.

OUT: WORRYING ABOUT TOO LITTLE OIL. IN: WORRYING ABOUT TOO MUCH OIL. What Peak Oil Demand Would Do to the Global Economy.

“Peak oil” supply concerns have been dismissed as groundless foolishness in recent years, with the American shale revolution acting as the nail in the coffin of the notion peddled by doomsaying greens. But though oil production is booming around the world, and despite the fact that a global glut has brought crude prices down to less than half of what they were 28 months ago, there’s a new “peak” concern for crude: namely, that demand for oil is going to begin to fall within the next 20 years.

Unlike those fears over hydrocarbon scarcity, there are some concrete reasons to be concerned about the future of oil demand. Electric vehicles are gaining market share, and because they don’t run on refined petroleum products, their ascendancy will naturally impact the oil sector. But the global economy is intricately tied to the oil industry, and if demand does peak around 2030, trillions of dollars of economic activity could be affected.

Meh. Frack, baby, frack.

P.S.: Remember when Obama said “we can’t drill our way out” of high oil prices? Expiration date passed!

UPDATE: From the comments: “Remember when that dope Sarah Palin said we could drill our way out? That was after her dumb remarks about Russia being a threat. No place in politics for the likes of her!”

JAYVEE: ISIS ‘executes’ 232 near Mosul, takes thousands as human shields, UN says.

WE’RE ONLY HUMAN: Andrew Ferguson reviews The Kingdom of Speech by Tom Wolfe:

Clearing the popularizers from the field, as many specialists would like to do, would cede all scientific argument to scientists, who in many notable cases have not earned the deference they demand. The danger is doubled when scientists use science to draw metaphysical lessons—when, that is, they assert that human beings and primates are in essence the same kind of creature. A flurry of data and polysyllabic detail shouldn’t obscure the fact that such a thesis defies human experience and devalues the noblest human endeavors (including science, by the way).

Wolfe joins a small and hardy band of writers and other high-brows who take joy in staring down the bullies of scientism: Marilynne Robinson, David Berlinski, Wendell Berry, Thomas Nagel, a few others. But Wolfe is the best of them. And, listen, he does it . . .  somehow . . . I mean, really!!!! – at the (((HEE_YAH!))) mother-lovin’ age of eighty-freakin’-six!!!!

(Sorry.)

Heh. Read the whole thing.™

And if you missed it in late August, here’s my own review of Wolfe’s new book, written in a flurry after staying up ‘til 3:00 am or so to devour the whole book immediately upon its publication.

MEGAN MCARDLE MAKES A MODEST PROPOSAL: Bring the Right Wing Into the Mainstream Media:

There was certainly no liberal media conspiracy, just an iterative process controlled by no one: Being human, liberals naturally prefer the work of folks who agree with them, so those are the folks they tend to hire and promote.  As they became increasingly dominant in the media, the trend became self-reinforcing. Fewer conservatives wanted to enter the castle in the first place, and few were allowed to. Now the castle residents are peering into the swamp and wondering what the heck is going on out there.

But whoever is to blame for the problem, yelling at the residents of the swamp to behave themselves is probably not going to fix it. What would fix the problem is if the folks in the castle made a concerted effort to open the doors and persuade some of the swamp-dwellers to move inside. Not just to move inside, but to help run the place, pushing back on liberal pieties and dubious claims with the same fervor that liberals push back on conservative ones.

Good luck with that – as Charles Krauthammer wrote 14 years ago, “To understand the workings of American politics, you have to understand this fundamental law: Conservatives think liberals are stupid. Liberals think conservatives are evil.”

And being human, to borrow Megan’s phrase above, there’s vast difference between how we treat the two classifications. If you’re the leftist editor of a newspaper and hire someone whom you ultimately come to believe is stupid, you can always assign him to cover planning boards and sewer zoning meetings, where his writing will do relatively little harm. But why would you hire – why would you trust – someone whom deep down, you believe is evil?

RESET: Lithuania issues manual on what to do if Russia invades.

It is the third time the Lithuanian government has distributed a handbook of this type to its citizens since the Russian annexation of Crimea.

The last one, published in December 2015, was entitled “Prepare to survive emergencies and war: a cheerful take on serious recommendations.”

It included cartoons of a family with a cat and noted that “while no country is immune to adversities of any nature” it is important not to panic if there is an emergency.

There is nothing cheerful about the latest edition, which details how Lithuanians should spy and inform on the enemy if Russia succeeds in occupying part of the country.

There are also detailed images of Russian-made tanks, grenades, mines and guns and instructions on how to recognize different types. Further instructions cover first aid and surviving in the wild.
There will be 30,000 copies available in schools and libraries and it will also be published online.

It never hurts to be prepared.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): So it’s basically a new edition of Robert Conquest and John Manchip White’s What To Do When The Russians Come. The 1980s called! White, by the way, was a UT colleague of mine.

JUSTICE: As trial ends, surreal scene leaves defense lawyer stunned with Taser, tackled by U.S. Marshals.

Olson said Mumford was getting animated, but he did nothing physical. He didn’t charge the bench, or block marshals from his client. “He raised his arm as if to say, what the hell…And they grabbed him, Tased him and took him down. It was just shocking. It was completely inappropriate,”Olson said.

Defense lawyer Matthew Schindler, standby counsel for defendant Kenneth Medenbach, said he was disappointed by Mumford’s challenge to his client’s return to custody, considering he faces more serious federal charges in Nevada.

Schindler said Mumford was exhausted, having “put out everything he had,” during the past six weeks of the case.

“Unfortunately he let his passion and desire and belief in his client overcome his good judgement,” Schindler said.

Margaret “Margie” Paris, a University of Oregon law professor and former dean, said she couldn’t believe what occurred when she learned of the confrontation.

“It just blows my mind,” Paris said. “To have a lawyer who’s making an argument in court physically restrained and taken down is extraordinary. He’s entitled to make these arguments. If he was repeating himself over and over, the more typical response is to hold him in contempt. But to physically accost him is just shocking.”

I wonder what will happen next?

WHY ARE DEMOCRAT-RUN CITIES SUCH CESSPITS OF OFFICIAL VIOLENCE AND ABUSE? A Digital Archive Documents Two Decades of Torture by Chicago Police.

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WELL, IT’S 2016. ANYTHING COULD HAPPEN. Clinton lead shrinks, even as nearly 6 in 10 expect her to win, Post-ABC tracking poll finds. “Clinton holds a slight 48-44 percent edge over Trump among likely voters, with Libertarian Gary Johnson at 4 percent and Green Party nominee Jill Stein at 1 percent in the survey completed Sunday through Wednesday. Clinton held a six-point edge in the previous wave and a 12-point edge in the first wave of the tracking poll by ABC News Sunday (50 percent Clinton vs. 38 percent Trump). In a two-candidate contest, Clinton holds a five-point edge over Trump, 50 to 45 percent. Trump’s growth in support from 38 percent to 44 percent is fueled by shored-up support among Republican-leaning voting groups as well as a significant boost among political independents. Trump has made up ground among whites, particularly those without college degrees and women. Trump now leads by a 30 percentage point margin among white voters without college degrees, up from 20 points from this weekend. White women now tilt toward Trump by 48 to 43 percent after leaning 49 to 43 percent in Clinton’s favor before. Trump saw his biggest gains among political independents, favoring Trump by a 12-point margin in the latest tracking poll, 49 to 37 percent, after giving Clinton a narrow edge in late last week. Neither candidate has maintained a consistent lead among independent likely voters in Post-ABC polling this fall.”

Some people are having trouble with the Post paywall, so I added an excerpt.

OCEANIA HAS ALWAYS BEEN AT WAR WITH EASTASIA: Watch Donald Trump Force Liberals To Contradict Themselves On Everything.

To be fair, leftists have never had a problem cutting their consciences to fit this year’s fashions.

(Via Betsy Newmark.)

FASTER, PLEASE: ‘A new deal for black America’: Trump woos African-American vote with dramatic move onto Democrats’ home territory.

PAY-TO-PLAY: Clinton donor got State Department invite — and Bill got $17M.

The head of a for-profit university that donated up to $5 million to the Clinton Foundation was rewarded with an invite to a high-profile State Department dinner at the request of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Doug Becker, CEO of Laureate International University, got his senior VP, Joseph Duffey, into the meeting of world-class academics at the August 2009 dinner because Becker was someone “who Bill likes a lot” and his school was “the fastest growing college network in the world,” Clinton wrote in an e-mail to her chief of staff revealed on WikiLeaks.

“It’s a for-profit model that should be represented.”

Roughly nine months later, the university signed Bubba to a sweet deal as an “honorary chancellor,” paying him $17.6 million over five years until the contract ended in 2015 as his wife launched her presidential run.

Analysts said Duffey’s presence at the dinner likely opened doors to the school that otherwise might have remained closed.

You don’t say.