BRUCE BAWER: Islam, Women, and Phyllis Chesler.

Phyllis Chesler’s new collection of articles, Islamic Gender Apartheid: Exposing a Veiled War against Women, is shot through with a notes-from-the-front-lines urgency and a righteous rage. The earliest of these pieces date back to 2003; the most recent are a few months old. Together, they form a chronicle of the post-9/11 era as observed by the only top-tier second-wave American feminist who – as the pernicious patriarchy of the Muslim world was increasingly introduced into the West – remained true to her values, consistent in ideology and in principles. Other feminists, including the entire academic Women’s Studies establishment, have linked arms with the sharia crowd. They’ve preached that it’s wrong for Westerners, operating from positions of post-colonialist privilege and power, to profess to “save the brown woman from the brown man.” They’ve made a heroine out of the vile, hijab-clad Linda Sarsour, a booster of sharia and apologist for jihad whose star turn at the Women’s March on Washington last January catapulted her to international fame. Even to suggest that such a person can be a feminist in any reasonable sense of the word is, of course, right out of 1984: war is peace, freedom is slavery, Sarsour is a feminist.

Read the whole thing.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: A Hedge Fund That Has A University: Taxing endowments’ investment income would help higher ed.

Whatever you may hear, the Republican tax-reform proposal isn’t an assault on higher education. The House and Senate plans include a new 1.4% excise tax on the net investment income of university endowments, but the levy applies only to private colleges with at least 500 students and endowments of more than $250,000 a student. Schools like Harvard, Yale, Stanford and Princeton—which together hold over $100 billion—are predicting doom. Yet this long-overdue tax will benefit higher education in the end.

Over the past 30 years universities have chased higher returns on their endowments, leading them to take greater risks. Our research shows that more than 75% of the assets in university endowments are now in risky investments: securities, hedge funds and private equity. Think of Harvard as a tax-free hedge fund that happens to have a university.

The proposed levy on investment income—dividends, interest and capital gains—is fundamentally a tax on this risk-taking, not on the endowments themselves. By taxing risk-driven income, the GOP plan doesn’t target higher education. It goes after hedge funds masquerading as university endowments. . . .

A large and risky endowment also reveals a university’s poor assessment of its internal investment opportunities, such as scholarships and research. If Harvard and Stanford have educational and research projects that could benefit from additional funds, why put their money at risk in the stock market? Perhaps the answer is that the opportunity to run a tax-free hedge fund is too attractive. In that case, why should taxpayers subsidize their activities?

Why, indeed?

MOLON LABE: Hand over your weapons.

At a New Hampshire forum in the fall of 2015, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton spoke approvingly of an Australian gun buyback program that collected more than 650,000 weapons — a buyback that, she neglected to mention, was compulsory.

And just a few months earlier, then-President Barack Obama offered coded support for the same confiscatory approach. “When Australia had a mass killing — I think it was in Tasmania — about 25 years ago, it was just so shocking, the entire country said, ‘Well, we’re going to completely change our gun laws,’ and they did,” he said.

Democrats have even let the word “confiscation” slip out, on occasion. After the shooting rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. in 2012, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said in a radio interview that when it came to assault weapons “confiscation could be an option, mandatory sale to the state could be an option.”

It was an option Cuomo didn’t pursue. But five years after that slaughter of schoolchildren — and with fresh tales of murdered kids on the floor of a Texas church — might gun-control advocates expand their agenda?

The logic of gun control lies, at bottom, in substantially reducing the number of deadly weapons on the street — and confiscation is far and away the most effective approach. Is there any conceivable turn of events in our politics that could make confiscation happen? And what would a mass seizure look like?

It would not look the way David Scharfenberg thinks it would look.

JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT IT WAS SAFE TO GO BACK IN THE WATER: Prehistoric, Dinosaur-Era Shark with Insane Teeth Found Swimming Off the Coast of Portugal.

EVERYONE IS EXPENDABLE WHEN THEY BECOME A BURDEN TO THE PARTY: Hell freeze over?! The NYT just defended Juanita Broaddrick … no seriously, it did. It’s almost comical how quickly they’ve turned on Bill now that he can’t do anything for them anymore, and now that they want to hustle Hillary off the political stage before 2020. The thing is, the Clintons are no more loyal to them, and might poison the well as they depart.

BABY BOOMER EXCESS LED TO HUBRIS, CULTURAL DECAY, writes Victor Davis Hanson: “It is hard to destroy the NFL or to discredit a liberal-arts degree from Yale, or to turn NBC or CNN into a bastard of Pravda or to make the Hollywood of John Ford, Frank Capra, and Alfred Hitchcock into that of George Clooney. But we managed it — and more still to come before we are through.”

Read the whole thing.

UH-OH: China leads in top 500 supercomputers with 202 versus the US with 143.

Just six months ago, the US led with 169 systems, with China coming in at 160. Despite the reversal of fortunes, the 144 systems claimed by the US gives them a solid second place finish, with Japan in third place with 35, followed by Germany with 20, France with 18, and the UK with 15.

China has also overtaken the US in aggregate performance as well. The Asian superpower now claims 35.4 percent of the TOP500 flops, with the US in second place with 29.6 percent.

The original plan was to upgrade the system with the newer Knights Landing devices. But after the US government instituted an embargo on these chips to certain Chinese supercomputing sites, including the Guangzhou center, the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) had to come up with plan B. In this case, that meant developing their own coprocessor. That turned out be the Matrix-2000, a DSP-type chip, tweaked for more general-purpose computation.

According to slides presented at the forum, each Matrix-2000 will deliver 2.4576 teraflops (peak), which more than doubles the 1.0 teraflops delivered by the original Xeon Phi chip.

China’s reputation has been a fast follower rather than an innovator, but that looks like it’s changing.

RELATED? China and the CIA Are Competing to Fund Silicon Valley’s AI Startups.

NO EXCUSE FOR NO EXCUSE?: Clark Neily asks a simple question – why do we still cling to the ancient maxim, “ignorance of the law is no excuse?” The sheer weight of criminal law alone makes it difficult to justify:

There have been multiple attempts to count the number of federal crimes, including by the Department of Justice, and no one has yet succeeded. Title 18 of the United States Code, which governs crimes and criminal procedure, has over 6,000 sections, and it is estimated that there are more than 4,500 federal crimes and over 300,000 agency regulations containing criminal penalties. And of course, this does not include the dizzying array of state and local criminal codes, ignorance of which is practically assured but still not excused.

As Clark asks, “If the government cannot even count all of the criminal laws it has enacted, how on earth can citizens be expected to obey them?”

PATRICK POOLE: Hillary Clinton PERSONALLY Overturned Visa Ban for Islamist Figure Now Accused of Rape.

DIPLOMACY: Saudi prince orders Palestinian president to accept Jared Kushner’s peace plan.

HMM: GOP megadonor Adelson publicly breaks with Bannon.

Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, the GOP’s most prominent megadonor, is publicly breaking with former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon over his efforts to oust Republican incumbents in 2018.

“The Adelsons will not be supporting Steve Bannon’s efforts,” said Andy Abboud, an Adelson spokesman. “They are supporting Mitch McConnell 100 percent. For anyone to infer anything otherwise is wrong.”

That’s pretty clear.

IT’S EASIER TO SUBORN THAN TO CONQUER: China’s Influence Game Down Under: China’s sophisticated infiltration of Australian politics is a troubling example of how authoritarian states can subvert open societies. The United States should heed the lesson. Well, to be fair, the Chinese did that to us during the Clinton years. So it’s really Australia that should have heeded.

NOW? Now It’s The Democrats Who Have A ‘Russian Problem.’

Richard Pollack with a Daily Caller exclusive:

Democratic fingerprints are all over a growing number of Russia-related scandals, including payments to Fusion GPS for its Russian-sourced Trump dossier, lobbying on behalf of Russia’s largest bank to lift economic sanctions, former President Barack Obama’s administration’s approval of the sale of Uranium One to Russia, and giving twenty percent of America’s uranium reserves to Moscow.

Republican Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Chuck Grassley of Iowa have called for the appointment of a special prosecutor to look into the mounting scandals tying Democrats to Russia.

“The bottom line is very simple, says former U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova in an interview with The Daily Caller News Foundation. “The Russian connection now is owned by the Democratic Party.”

What are the Democratic ties to Russia?

Read on.

I BLAME ALL THE ELIMINATIONIST RHETORIC FROM THE LEFT: Rabid Anti-Trumper Arrested in Calif. after Threatening to Go on Killing Spree. “News of his arrest was treated as a local story with no national significance. However, if this freak had been a right-wing activist, he’d have been a front-page story in every paper in the country.”

THE PAST IS A DIFFERENT COUNTRY: Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex reviews the public draft of David Friedman’s forthcoming Legal Systems Very Different From Ours. Fascinating stuff.

BUY THE DUMBEST APPLIANCES YOU CAN FIND: Popular Mechanics says the “Internet of Things” isn’t a particularly good idea…and so does Glenn Reynolds.

THEY TOLD ME IF DONALD TRUMP WERE ELECTED, OPEN RACISM WOULD BE NORMALIZED. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! Wisconsin College Dems leader: ‘I f—ing hate white men.’

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LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Wikileaks, RUSSIA, Hannity and Much, Much Moore.

THE ABA BECAME AN ARM OF THE DNC SO GRADUALLY THAT . . . OH, HELL, ACTUALLY EVERYBODY NOTICED: The ABA Jumps the Shark: Why did the group ask where a judicial nominee’s children went to school? “Looks as if the American Bar Association picked the wrong judicial nominee to play politics with. If Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee are smart, they will use the ABA’s appearance at a hearing Wednesday to call the group out. . . . ‘The ABA is running a smear campaign based on the idea that Steve is a kale-hating, puppy-kicking monster,’ says a fellow Nebraskan, Republican Sen. Ben Sasse. ‘But no one in Nebraska on either side of the aisle recognizes that man.'” That seems unwise. I think the kale-hating constituency alone is enough to put him over the top.

Plus: “The best revenge, of course, is getting this man confirmed notwithstanding his ABA rating. But the day after the attacks on Mr. Grasz at his hearing, Mr. Sasse delivered an impassioned speech on the Senate floor, raising an even larger question: Since when did the Senate accept the idea that its members should outsource to a third party their constitutional responsibility to evaluate the fitness of the president’s nominees to the federal bench?” The ABA doesn’t even represent the interests of most lawyers, much less the interests of America.

HOW CAN DEMOCRATS SUPPORT THIS? Roy Moore’s Democratic Challenger Recently Ran an Ad Praising the Confederate Army. I’m sure all the press folks will ask all the leading Democrats that question. (Bumped).

DIPLOMACY: After Trump Intervenes, 3 UCLA Basketball Players Set To Leave China. “President Donald Trump confirmed that he did intervene with China President Xi Jinping in the case of three UCLA basketball players who were arrested after shoplifting in China and those players are set to leave the country.”

YOU DON’T SAY: Louis C.K.’s former manager: ‘What I did was wrong.’

Dave Becky wrote a lengthy response, confirmed by EW, about his role in the stand-up comic’s actions — most specifically about an incident at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen in 2002, when Louis C.K. allegedly exposed himself to comics Dana Min Goodman and Julia Wolov in his hotel room. Goodman and Wolov said they “heard that Louis C.K.’s manager was upset that they were talking about [the misconduct] openly.” Becky originally told the Times: “I never threatened anyone.”

Here’s Becky’s new full statement:

“I profoundly regret and am deeply sorry for not listening to and not understanding what happened to Dana and Julia. If I had, I would have taken this event as seriously as it deserved to be, and I would have confronted Louis, which would have been the right thing to do.

“I knew nothing!” doesn’t come across as a very believable apology. Worse, it feeds into the (correct) perception that Hollywood is steeped in Sergeant Schultz-ism, with Becky and untold others like him enabling a culture of sexual abuse.

THREE CARRIER STRIKE GROUPS IN THE WESTERN PACIFIC: The three carrier strike groups (Reagan, Roosevelt and Nimitz) are participating in an exercise with the South Korean Navy. StrategyPage calls it a rare photo –and it is.

DIPLOMATICALLY RELATED: Politico says North Korea is asking experts if Trump is crazy. Other publications noticed months ago that The Donald has rattled Rocket Man.