NO. NEXT QUESTION? Can we trust government to correct our cognitive biases? The ones who aren’t idiots are usually thieves, so. . . .

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CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: FBI Forced to Admit It Has 30 Pages of Clinton-Lynch Tarmac Meeting Documents.

FALLOUT FROM THE HOLLYWOOD SCANDALS? “Because movies are shot through with human exploitation, we should withhold our patronage.”

Motion pictures: The “conflict diamonds” of the entertainment world.

BUT OF COURSE: New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to Keep $60,000 in Donations from Harvey Weinstein.

WHY IS THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY SUCH A CESSPIT OF BIGOTRY AND HATE? Texas Democrats Hesitant to Embrace Gay Candidate for Governor. Come on, this is 2017!

WOW: Alphabet’s Waymo demanded $1 billion in settlement talks with Uber.

Waymo’s tough negotiating stance, which has not been previously reported, reflects the company’s confidence in its legal position after months of pretrial victories in a case which may help to determine who emerges in the forefront of the fast-growing field of self-driving cars.

The aggressive settlement demands also suggest that Waymo is not in a hurry to resolve the lawsuit, in part because of its value as a distraction for Uber leadership, said Elizabeth Rowe, a trade secret expert at the University of Florida Levin College of Law.

Waymo recently persuaded a San Francisco federal judge to delay a trial to decide the dispute from October to early December, citing the need to investigate evidence Uber had not disclosed earlier.

Waymo is also demanding a public apology.

NRA GAVE AN INCH, CONGRESS WANTS TO TAKE A MILE: Your Bipartisan Bump Stock Ban Has Arrived. The bill, sponsored by both Republicans and Democrats, would ban much more than just bump stocks.

CHARLES SCHUMER WANTS TO HOLD THE PEOPLE OF PUERTO RICO HOSTAGE TO THE FINANCIAL WELLBEING OF HUGE INSURANCE COMPANIES: Dems float putting ObamaCare money in funding deal. See, that’s the kind of headline he’d get if he were a Republican.

THERE’S NOTHING TOXIC ABOUT IT: Masculinity Is the Solution to Weinstein-Like Scandals in Hollywood.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Can grad students’ conversation about how gays could be executed in Muslim countries lead to discipline at a U.S. university?

Sooner or later, taxpayers are going to wonder why they’re funding places like this.

CHICKS ON THE RIGHT: Hillary Clinton Says There’s A ‘Sexual Assaulter In The Oval Office.’ She Clearly Forgot Who She’s Married To.

GREAT AGAIN: Consumers’ view of U.S. economy at highest level in 13 years.

THE INSTA-WIFE: Is Marriage Bad For Men’s Health? The scientific consensus was that it’s good, but, shockingly, there are some caveats.

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CREATIVE DESTRUCTION: Layoffs Hit ABC As Rumors About The Network’s Future Swirl.

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DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: “The latest issue of a magazine run by Ohio State University students features a flow-chart designed to help students determine whether their Halloween costume is racist.”

THE SIGN SAID “FRESHEST SUSHI IN TOWN,” BUT THIS IS RIDICULOUS: Man Nearly Dies After Live Fish Jumps Down His Throat.

CHANGE: America’s Obesity Epidemic Reaches Record High, New Report Says.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Hecklers shout down California attorney general, assembly majority leader at Whittier College.

Last week, Whittier College — my alma mater — hosted California’s Attorney General, Xavier Becerra, in a question-and-answer session organized by Ian Calderon, the Majority Leader of the California State Assembly.

They tried to, anyway.

The event ended early after pro-Trump hecklers, upset about Becerra’s lawsuit against the Trump administration over DACA, continuously shouted slogans and insults at Becerra and Calderon. A group affiliated with the hecklers later boasted that the speakers were “SHOUTED DOWN BY FED-UP CALIFORNIANS” and that the “meeting became so raucous that it ended about a half hour early.”

The event, held in Whittier College’s Shannon Center theater, was free and open to members of the community, and featured introductions from both Whittier’s president and student body president. Becerra and Calderon were to have an hour-long question-and-answer session using audience questions randomly selected from a basket. As soon as they began the discussion, however, hecklers decked in “Make America Great Again” hats began a continuous and persistent chorus of boos, slogans, and insults.

On the one hand, I think that all campus speakers should be free to speak without interruption. On the other hand, I can’t help but note that in California, that rule hasn’t been observed equally, and quite a few left-leaning government and university officials have taken sides with lefty disruptors. So I have to hope that this sort of thing — a sort of mutual assured destruction — will cause them to rethink their positions and endorse free speech for all. Sometimes people need help learning:

There’s an old joke about a boy who complains to his mother that his little sister keeps pulling his hair.

“Oh,” responds the mother, “she doesn’t know that it hurts.”

A few minutes later, the mother hears the girl scream and runs into the other room. “She knows now,” the boy explains.

Principles that apply only part of the time aren’t principles at all, and tit-for-tat is a robust strategy for encouraging cooperative behavior, as Axelrod & Johnson have found. I’ve warned the left for years of the incentives their unprincipled behavior was creating; perhaps now that people are starting to react to those incentives, they’ll finally listen, instead of denouncing civil society and free expression as obsolete bourgeois values. Because I’d like to live in a world where everyone can be heard, but I don’t think you get to that world by giving free rein to (government-supported) bullies who want to shut down the “wrong” people.

And the folks at FIRE are entirely right that the protesters here are liable to prosecution (and correctly so) for shutting down the debate, and if such prosecutions became the trend, I’d welcome that. But, really, it’s easier for everyone to have a climate where everyone is free to speak without being shut down. But that climate has — intentionally — been allowed to slip away, and no one should be surprised to see people on the right take up tactics that seem to work, with impunity, for the left. We could have avoided this situation, if only the folks in charge had wanted to. As I’ve said before, “The thing is, you don’t get Hitler because of Hitler — there are always potential Hitlers out there. You get Hitler because of Weimar, and you get Weimar because the liberals are too corrupt and incompetent to maintain a liberal polity.” If something like this is all it takes to get them to do their jobs, we’ll have done better than, frankly, I expect.

21st CENTURY HEADLINES: ISIS Punk Rocker, Sally Jones, Reportedly Dead.

Years before committing herself to radical jihadism, Sally Jones’s name recognition derived from her stint with Krunch, an all-female punk band that had found success during the ’90s. Jones converted to Islam and migrated to Syria in 2013, following her husband’s conversion and subsequent pledge to jihadism. He was killed by a U.S. drone two years later in 2015. Since 2013, she had maintained an active presence on social media aggressively propagandizing on behalf of ISIS. Her primary objectives involved attracting female ISIS recruits, encouraging radicalized Brits to relocate to Syria and providing instructions on how to assemble homemade bombs and wage terror on British soil. Presumably to rally inspiration, posts were frequently accompanied by photos of Jones herself posing with weaponry.

The 21st isn’t working out the way I had hoped.™

ROGER AILES’ EVIL-GENIUS PLAN TO SINK THE COMPETITION BEARS FRUIT: Celebrity Publicists Don’t Want Their Clients Appearing On Megyn Kelly Today. “One publicist said they didn’t want their client to schmooze with Kelly, because her brand is too alienating, as a result of her association to the conservative news network. ‘I don’t even know if it’s as much her as it is Fox News,’ the publicist said. ‘Because she came from Fox News, she was set up for failure because the industry is so polarized now and no one wants to touch anything associated with Trump.’”

Despite her constant feuds with Trump. Or as Ace warned in June, “That said, to hell with MeAgain Kelly. She thought she would be accepted by the liberals; like Bret Stephens, she’s finding that the liberals only cheered her when she was a saboteur operating behind enemy lines. But they damn sure don’t want Bret Stephens or MeAgain behind their own lines…You know, Benedict Arnold expected to be treated like a hero by the British he gave West Point to. Instead, he lived miserably thereafter, shunned by the people he expected to embrace him. No one ever really trusts a turncoat. Even the people the turncoat turns coat to be amongst.”

(Classical reference in headline.)