NO MATTER WHAT YOU SAY, THEY WILL SCREAM AT YOU: “‘For many protesters, the specifics of what the opposition says is not the point. ‘It doesn’t matter what the guy’s going to say,’ said Michael Heaney, a professor at the University of Michigan who studies the sociology of protest movements. ‘He could talk about the joys of apple-picking. What matters is that the counter-movement is trying to use the energy of the (event) to grow. This is an opportunity for them — and they are likely to seize upon it.’”

In addition to ginning up the protesting faithful and getting new converts, for the left in general, it’s also an issue of control. As Ace of Spades noted on Friday when CNN’s Brooke Baldwin went into Margret Dumont mode to hyperventilate over Clay Travis saying “boob” on a network that every year had Kathy Griffin flashing hers on New Year’s Eve, “ever get the feeling that the actual issue isn’t any particular word, but simply exerting control over you?”, adding, “This is like living in an asylum, where you have to worry that any word you say might provoke an outburst from a lunatic.”

Kurt Schlichter writes, “The Fake Outrage Over Breastgate Shows Why We Must Not Play Liberals’ New Rules Game:”

Part of the strategy behind the new rules is to not actually have any firm rules, to make you so uncertain and timid that you’re unwilling to take any action because anything you do, at any time, can be a violation of a rule that didn’t exist 30 seconds before. If you do talk about female body parts, you’re wrong because you’re insulting womyn, and if you don’t talk about female body parts, you’re wrong because you are invisibling womyn. Basically, if you don’t have any female body parts, you’re just wrong all of the time. Unless you have fake female body parts and betrayed your country; then you are America’s greatest hero and a martyr to Harvard’s infamous legacy of transphobia. Or something.

Read the whole thing — as Kurt writes, “Since they are establishing new rules, there’s nothing wrong with applying them to our advantage.”

(Headline via Small Dead Animals.)

#FIGHTFOR15: Burger robots to appear at 50 locations.

COUNTER-PROTEST: St. Louis officers chant ‘whose streets, our streets’ while arresting protesters.

SOME PARTY: Party-loving Syrian refugee nightclub promoter ‘is second suspect arrested over Parsons Green Tube attack.’

OH MY: PRELIM RATINGS FOR EMMYS PREDICT NEW RECORD … LOW.

By the Obama era, television news had become closed-circuit TV for the ruling class. TV’s entertainment wing has followed suit. It’s fascinating that for an industry allegedly obsessed with profit, by alienating half the country, the media’s ideology sure leaves a lot of money on the table.

UPDATE: The Great Tune-Out:

Though adjustments may change the preliminary verdict, this year’s Emmys are set to underperform even last year’s all-time low ratings. Maybe the politics on display were irrelevant; maybe the rise of streaming services has made traditional broadcast television a dying product. Maybe. But the Emmys misfortunes are of a familiar sort. This tune out is starting to feel like a trend…Movies, cable and broadcast television, music; this tune out isn’t entirely about cord cutting. This is something broader.

Read the whole thing.

BECAUSE IT’S BEEN A CESSPIT OF POLITICIZED PSEUDOSCIENCE FOR DECADES: Here’s Why Gun Violence Research in The US Is About to Come to a Grinding Halt.

SPECIAL ELECTION BLUES: Trump to Campaign for Senator Strange in Alabama.. “It’s Trump vs. Bannon as the president’s former aide is all in for Roy Moore.”

AT AMAZON, Fall Deals in Hunting & Fishing.

GOVERNMENT TURNS TABLES BY SUING RECORDS REQUESTERS: AP reporting about a new trend in state bureaucrats doing their best bureaucratting. Not content to ignore or improperly deny public records requests:

Government bodies are increasingly turning the tables on citizens who seek public records that might be embarrassing or legally sensitive. Instead of granting or denying their requests, a growing number of school districts, municipalities and state agencies have filed lawsuits against people making the requests — taxpayers, government watchdogs and journalists who must then pursue the records in court at their own expense.

The lawsuits generally ask judges to rule that the records being sought do not have to be divulged. They name the requesters as defendants but do not seek damage awards. Still, the recent trend has alarmed freedom-of-information advocates, who say it’s becoming a new way for governments to hide information, delay disclosure and intimidate critics.

These people keep forgetting that silly rhetoric about “government of the people, by the people and for the people.”

HE MAY BE ONTO SOMETHING: Trump Thinks TV More Accurately Reveals The Public’s Beliefs Than Polls Do.

Fox News host and Daily Caller co-founder Tucker Carlson says President Trump told him that television programming is a more accurate reflection of the public’s beliefs than polling is.

“I know that he watches a lot of television. I know because I’ve talked to him about it at length, that he’s really interested in television, both the mechanics of it — he knows a lot about ratings and lighting, and producing and guest booking,” Carlson said on “The Jamie Weinstein Show.”

Trump was the executive producer and star of the highly rated reality show “The Apprentice,” and has tweeted about cable news throughout his campaign and presidency. However, Trump claimed in a July tweet, “I have very little time for watching T.V.”

Carlson told Weinstein that Trump “believes that television is a pretty clear window into what people care about.”

And keep in mind that Trump is (or at least was) a television producer.

SPACE: What Cassini’s Daring Dives Have Taught Us About Saturn.

WHY ARE DEMOCRAT-MONOPOLY INSTITUTIONS SUCH CESSPITS OF VAPORISH SCOLDS? How CNN Created Faux Rage When I Said Boobs.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Cassini was great, but we could do better if America wasn’t the fussy superpower: We could have been to Saturn by 1970.

I’D BUY THAT FOR A DOLLAR: The Publisher of Rolling Stone Magazine Could Be Putting It Up for Sale.

WHO COULD HAVE SEEN THIS COMING? Oh my: Prelim ratings for Emmys predict new record … low. “If this firms up in final ratings, it will surpass 2016 as the worst-rated Emmys of all time, and 2016 surpassed the previous low, and so on. In fact, as Newsweek pointed out yesterday, the Emmys have lost 50% of their audience since 2013 and the lowest ratings since 1990, and last night’s extravaganza certainly didn’t turn the ship around. One could blame the plethora of TV choices viewers have, including streaming, but those didn’t arrive only in 2014. Consumers have had lots of choice for two decades or more, and yet the sharp decline only started in the past few years. Why?” Yeah, it’s a real mystery.

RISE OF THE MACHINES: US Navy will make a second and maybe a third robotic sub hunter.

JOHN STOSSEL & MAXIM LOTT: $20,000,000,000,000 in Debt and Rising: Now that Trump’s made a deal with Democrats, our national debt is higher than ever.

I never expected Trump to be any good on the debt, and he hasn’t been. But neither has any other president, and one lesson of the Obama era is that apparently nobody cares about the debt except the Tea Party, which was neutralized because it was threatening bipartisan opportunities for graft.

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: Ideology unbound.

Imprisoned by their own imperatives they arrive at policy positions — such as limits on free speech — which they regard as “settled” even though hundreds of millions may not even know what they are talking about. This insidious process of begging the question is typical of totalitarian propaganda which made abundant use of expressions like “undeniably”, “unquestionably” or as “everyone knows” or their more modern equivalents like as “all decent people agree …”, “the science is settled” or “this is not who we are” to assume what must otherwise be proved. But it nevertheless compels obedience like a herd driving itself along.

This has the effect of positing a consensus which in fact may not exist. The inevitable outcome of a “national conversation” is conflict declared upon a population that may never have heard of the casus belli before. But it does more than that. In many cases it also creates its own anti-universe. The paradox Ben Shapiro represents is that he as an entity should not exist but inexplicably does. Yet he exists because he must. Many of most of the monstrous figures that make progressives physically sick have their origin stories in the framing of the narrative itself.

One of the most unsettling effects of the Left’s inward journeys is how it can instantly redefine everyone else. A population, for example, can go to uneventful sleep and awaken the next day to find the papers proclaiming they’ve been afflicted with cisnormativity or some other disorder, in a process not unlike how Kafka’s Gregor Samsa became a giant cockroach. Overnight there are suddenly 71 genders.

Read the whole thing.

GENDER NEUTRAL BATHROOMS CAN’T WIN THE POPULAR VOTE AT COLUMBIA:

Columbia University students recently voted against a proposal that would make all restrooms on a dorm-floor “gender inclusive.”

Students living in at least five of the elite school’s residence halls voted floor-by-floor to determine whether their male- and female-designed restrooms would be made “gender inclusive,” a practice made possible under a new Columbia University Residence Life Policy. . . .

Krish Bhatt, president of the Columbia Queer Alliance, slammed the new policy as one that privileges the voices of “cisgender” students.

“The voices of cisgender residents, who likely outnumber transgender or gender nonconforming students and are more or less unimpacted by the decision, are being centered [in this decision],” Bhatt told The Spectator, adding that trans-students are not properly represented under such a “democratic fallacy.”

“While I understand the intention of this decision…this rule reinforces a democratic fallacy, where those who would benefit from a decision to designate bathrooms as gender-inclusive are not necessarily represented or represented to the extent of their need,” Bhatt elaborated.

If only you could weight votes somehow, in some sort of college-electoral thing or something. The name’s on the tip of my tongue. . . .

Other points: (1) “Likely outnumber.” Delusional. (2) In fact, even on “liberal” campuses, most students don’t support this, they’re just bullied into keeping quiet. Forcing these decisions to secret-ballot votes is a good idea.

‘I DID THE BEST I COULD’: Chelsea Manning hits back at traitor accusations.

Accusations? Manning was found guilty and convicted of violating the Espionage Act, stealing government property, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, multiple counts of disobeying orders.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Princeton holds ‘F%*# Free Speech’ event for Constitution Day.

The ghost of Woodrow Wilson approves.

THE 21ST CENTURY IS NOT TURNING OUT THE WAY I HAD HOPED: ‘Mad Pooper’ wanted by Colorado Springs police.

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Weird Food for Sale in Venezuela But Nothing That Anyone Wants.

Walk into a Caracas bakery these days and you’ll find a wide variety of freshly-made breads on shelves that were barren a year ago. You can buy a fat, dense loaf called the gallego, or a soft sobado, or a campesino for sandwiches, even a sweet andino lined with guava jam or corn or fruit.

What you won’t find, though, is the one that Venezuelans actually want: the canilla, a soft, buttery take on the baguette that’s been the beloved bread of choice in this South American country for decades.

Why no canillas? Because its price, unlike for all those other loaves, is controlled by the government. And it is set at such a low level — 1,500 bolivars versus the 4,500 to 7,500 a gallego commands — that bakers complain it doesn’t come close to covering their costs. So they use new-found supplies of wheat in the country to bake every other kind of bread imaginable.

“Let them eat cake,” indeed.

BLOOMBERG: Obama Goes From White House to Wall Street in Less Than One Year. “Obama is coming to Wall Street less than a year after leaving the White House, following a path that’s well trod and well paid. While he can’t run for president, he continues to be an influential voice in a party torn between celebrating and vilifying corporate power. His new work with banks might suggest which side of the debate he’ll be on and disappoint anyone expecting him to avoid a trap that snared Clinton.”

Hey, they didn’t call him President Goldman Sachs for nothing.

But it’s yet another argument for my Revolving-Door Surtax.

Flashback: Joe Biden to Goldman Sachs execs: “I’m doing a job interview with you.”