YOU MAY NOT CARE ABOUT THE CRAZY LEFT, BUT THE CRAZY LEFT CARES ABOUT YOU: What Happens on Campus Doesn’t Stay There: Reining in Title IX won’t even begin to solve colleges’ sex-related problems.

The situation on college campuses is well summed up by a recent flurry of articles and books. For a representative sample, take Stuart Taylor, Jr. and K.C. Johnson’s “The Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack on Due Process at America’s Universities,” or Northwestern University Professor Laura Kipnis’s riveting Chronicle Review article, “Eyewitness to a Title IX Witch Trial,” an excerpt from her own recent book. The latter is not so much about Kipnis’s own surrealist encounter with Title IX enforcers as it is about her erstwhile Northwestern colleague Peter Ludlow, now effectively unemployable and living in Mexico. About American campuses, Kipnis observes, “Rampant accusation is the new norm.” About everything, she adds—but particularly about sex.

This commentary and the furious discussions it engenders feature the usual bêtes noires: Title IX, the Obama Administration’s “Dear Colleague” guidance letters, and campus administrative hearings. The consensus is that the Trump Administration ought to rescind the Obama-era directives, that Title IX ought to be re-tethered to its original purpose by Executive Order or Congress, and that colleges ought to be required by Federal mandate to hand over any sex-related incident to the criminal courts. Doing these things, so the reasoning goes, will restore proper due process and sanity to college campuses.

Doubtful.

For starters, Title IX is an ice cube beside the iceberg of campus-related regulations. Colleges are bound by numerous Federal laws even more aggressive, intrusive, and elastic than Title IX. These include the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act, the 2015 Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act (SaVE) amendment to the Clery Act, and the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), which has added its own conditions to the distribution of Federal student aid. The procedures, programming, and public reporting required by these laws is in addition to, and in frequent contention with, the separate legal requirements of such Federal regulations as the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) Privacy Rule, Title IX, Title VII, and Title IV.

I hope that Betsy DeVos is looking at these — and the leverage they can provide her to enforce sanity.

LOS ANGELES TIMES EXPLAINER: What would California’s proposed single-payer healthcare system mean for me?

The framing — in an ostensibly “straight” news explainer — is telling:

Whether you’re insured through an employer, through Covered California or on public programs such as Medi-Cal, as long as you’ve established California residency — regardless of legal immigration status — you would be enrolled in a single plan, which the bill’s backers call the “Healthy California” plan. That would eliminate the need for employer-provided plans and other commercial options.

Michael Lighty, policy director for the California Nurses Assn., put it bluntly: “You’ll never have to deal with an insurance company again.”

Benefits would be generous, including all inpatient and outpatient care, dental and vision care, mental health and substance abuse treatment, and prescription drugs. Patients would be able to see any healthcare provider of their choosing.

Older Californians on Medicare would also be wrapped into this plan. The plan envisions using all the existing federal dollars going toward Medicare and Medi-Cal beneficiaries in California in the state’s single-payer model.

But there’s a hitch: The federal government — a frequent punching bag for California Democrats at the moment — would need to grant a waiver to redirect that money.

“The question is: Will the Trump administration approve such a waiver?” Kominski said.

And:

“If you’re paying for health insurance right now through healthcare premiums and cost-sharing, you’d end up paying instead through taxes,” said Micah Weinberg, president of the Bay Area Council Economic Institute. “There are some people who at the end of the day will end up paying more, others who will end up paying less.”

“Benefits would be generous.” “You’ll never have to deal with an insurance company again.” “There are some people who at the end of the day will end up paying more, others who will end up paying less.” There’s no real discussion of perverse incentives for illegal aliens and welfare cheats, the effect on the job market of a 15% payroll tax, or whether businesses could afford the proposed 2.3% tax on gross receipts.

So of course, the only real question is whether mean old President Trump would approve of such a wonderful program.

Californians are being thoroughly prepared to vote in single payer, and they just might do it.

SHOCKER: Tests Show 76% of Suspicious ‘Child Refugees’ in Sweden Are Actually Over 18.

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TRUMP AND PUTIN: “What began as a simple false notion from the American Left―that the Russians hacked the 2016 presidential election to benefit Donald Trump’s candidacy―slowly evolved into a full-blown constitutional crisis.”

CONSPIRACY THEORIES AND A MURDERED DNC STAFFER: Wayne Allyn Root in the Las Vegas Review Journal.

RON RADOSH: The Fallout From Trump’s European Tour.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Judge Says Yeshiva University Cannot Fire Tenure-Track Professors For Financial Reasons.

OREN CASS: The climate change agreement was designed as a feel-good, do-nothing program.

The giveaway for the Paris charade is the refusal to set baselines. If nations are to hold one another accountable for progress on greenhouse-gas emissions, surely they must agree on a starting point from which to progress. Yet the framework for Paris pointedly omitted this requirement. Countries could calculate their own baselines however they chose, or provide none at all. Now, per Chait, the pledges have themselves become baselines, and each country receives applause or condemnation in inverse proportion to its seriousness.

Even failing on one’s commitment is acceptable, so long as the right things get said. Carbon Market Watch reports that “despite all of the fanfare that went on at the time, it seems that there are currently only three European Union countries pursuing climate policies that put them in line with the agreements made at the Paris Climate Change Talks.” Angela Merkel said that she finds the G7’s discussion of climate change “very difficult,” but not because her nation’s emissions have risen the last two years. Her difficulty arises from those ugly Americans’ unwillingness to keep up appearances.

Later this week, we will be treated to the spectacle of “a statement backed by all 28 EU states, [in which] the European Union and China will commit to full implementation of the Paris Climate Agreement”—undoubtedly accompanied by lamentations that the United States has disrupted the charade by walking off stage. How the world misses President Obama’s enthusiasm for a debating society that delivers no substantive action, or even a useful framework for assessing results, only a forum for bashing America.

The Accord is working even better as a feel-good program, since Trump’s withdrawal has given its supporters even more reason for bashing America.

SMART. STAND UP AGAINST BETTER EDUCATION FOR MINORITIES, ELIZABETH. DO IT LOUDLY AND OFTEN, IN SOUND BITES THAT CAN BE USED IN TARGETED CAMPAIGN ADS: Elizabeth Warren turns her fire on Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is setting her sights on Betsy DeVos, the wealthy Republican donor who has become a lightning rod for the liberal grassroots as President Trump’s secretary of Education.

And I don’t think it’s a good idea for Democrats to draw attention to student loans. The obvious Trump counterpunch is to limit the amount institutions can charge, and to put them on the hook for defaults. Which they should do anyway, and there are even Obama speeches they can quote. . . .

UNDERSEA ARMS RACE: China is developing a warship of naval theorists’ dreams.

There are two concepts in circulation: one is a high-speed warship with much of its hull submerged but otherwise has a functional superstructure with defense weapons and radar, the other is almost completely submerged arsenal ship with two conning towers. The scale of the designs are significant; either ship would displace roughly about 20,000 tons at full load.

Reports claim there has been substantial design work and concept proofing for this underwater arsenal ship. Even on his deathbed, leading naval engineer Professor Dong Wei Cai continued to work on a key aspect of the arsenal ship design: the high-speed wave hydroplane.

For stealth operations, the arsenal ship would have most of its hull inherently submerged, with only the bridge and a few other parts of the ship above the waterline, reducing the radar cross section. But when traveling with a high-speed naval taskforce, the arsenal ship will sacrifice stealth to use its flat hull bottom to hydroplane at high speeds, cutting across the waves like a speedboat or amphibious armored vehicle.

The second design is more conventional, it is essentially a giant, conventionally propelled submarine with two conning towers stuffed with snorkels, periscopes, and communications antennae. Given its need to keep up with high-speed surface ships and its lack of high-speed endurance underwater, this arsenal ship design would operate similarly to WWII submarines; the majority of its voyage will take place on the surface, and will submerge only during combat and under attack.

China is going to have to get much better at silencing to make something like this work.

NO. NEXT QUESTION? Did Donald Trump Just Make the Planet Hotter?

BEGUN, THE DNC-CLINTON WAR HAS: Data Gurus to Hillary: The Numbers Didn’t Lose, You Did.

“Forgive the analogy,” John Hagner, currently a partner at Clarity Campaign Labs told The Daily Beast. “The DNC is farming and what the campaign does is cooking. It’s hard to blame the farmer if the souffle folds.”

Hagner, who previously worked as the National Field Director for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, said that his company was primarily focused on governor’s races in the 2016 cycle. And he pointed to one particular victory as proof that the DNC data itself was not the problem: the narrow election of Governor Roy Cooper in North Carolina, a state that Clinton lost.

“We worked out of the same pool the Clinton folks did,” Hagner continued. “The Clinton folks did the targeting themselves. The Clinton campaign did a lot right. The world ended up working out differently than they hoped.”

And:

In many of the post-mortems on the failed Democratic bid, Clinton’s campaign was accused of missing or simply not believing warning signs in the so-called Blue Wall, midwestern states like Wisconsin and Michigan that were reliably Democratic strongholds but went to Trump last year. This, in the minds of data gurus is an error in judgment from the campaign, not an error in the actual data that was available to them.

“There was absolutely a failure by the campaign,” Tom Bonier, the CEO of TargetSmart, told The Daily Beast. “That had nothing to do with the data they got. It was about the way they used that data.”
Bonier said that he was “honestly shocked” when he heard the comments from Clinton and said they were “frankly wrongheaded.”

“The reason why it was so surprising from a perspective of veracity was that it was so contrary to the truth,” he said.

That’s never been much of a hurdle for Clinton.

THE REAL STORY, OF COURSE, IS THAT HILLARY CAN’T BE QUEEN BEE IF SHE SHARES A PLANE WITH THE FIRST LADY: “The Democrats can’t figure out why working class voters no longer identify with them. Maybe the sense of entitlement to separate airplanes expressed by Mrs. Clinton provides a clue. Of course, neither Hillary nor Michelle Obama paid for her own trip.”

CHARLIE MARTIN ON FACEBOOK: “If I’m following the discussion tonight, the US can only exhibit climate leadership by following along with what everyone else is doing.”

FLASHBACK: Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal. “Beyond mines in Kazakhstan that are among the most lucrative in the world, the sale gave the Russians control of one-fifth of all uranium production capacity in the United States. Since uranium is considered a strategic asset, with implications for national security, the deal had to be approved by a committee composed of representatives from a number of United States government agencies. Among the agencies that eventually signed off was the State Department, then headed by Mr. Clinton’s wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton.”

THIS KIND OF THING KEEPS HAPPENING: Washington Post’s Fake Conservative Blogger Hated The Paris Deal…Until Trump Agreed With Her. Trump derangement syndrome is real, and is by no means limited to people on the left.

I WAS WONDERING THE SAME THING: So what does Weiner have on Huma and Hillary? “Weiner, remember, hoarded oodles of secrets on his laptop computer under the header ‘life insurance’. . . . But it’s hard to explain the strange U-turns for this bizarre couple. Weiner is a pervert who likes to exhibit himself. Huma is a staunch and loyal aide to Hillary who likes to stay in the shadows. What does Weiner have on Huma or Hillary to prompt that strong a desire to keep him in the tent pissing out, instead of out of the tent pissing in?”

GOOD MORNING: Liz Sheld has your TGIF morning brief.

MIDDLEBURY COLLEGE ALUMNI: Universities Should Be Safe Spaces — for Intellectual Diversity.

ANTHONY WATTS: In one graph, why the #ParisAgreement is useless.

Even if we DID stay in it, (and all the other countries too) that .05°C savings is likely to get lost in the noise, since global temperature measurements are rounded. For example, in the USA, NOAA rounds the high and low temperature to the nearest whole degree Fahrenheit (0.55°C, a value over ten times greater than the .05°C savings Paris offers):

From NOAA’s REQUIREMENTS AND STANDARDS FOR NWS CLIMATE OBSERVATIONS:

The observer will round the entered data to whole units Fahrenheit by rounding up all positively signed values between T.5ºF and T.9ºF inclusive, (i.e., + 66.5ºF to 67ºF), and rounding down positively signed values between T.1ºF and T.4ºF, inclusive. For sub-zero temperatures, special attention is given to –T.5ºF values, to round it down. This method is known as ‘round half up asymmetric.’ For all negatively signed values between -T.5ºF and –T.1ºF, inclusive you round down (i.e., -3.5ºF to -3ºF) to nearest integer. For negatively signed values between –T.6ºF and –T.9ºF, inclusive, the data is rounded up (i.e., -10.6ºF to -11ºF) to higher absolute value.

Source: http://www.nws.noaa.gov/directives/sym/pd01013002curr.pdf

For Global temperature, GHCN data for example, NOAA rounds to the nearest tenth of a degree C, (0.1°C) TWICE the value of .05°C savings Paris offers.

Even the best case scenario out of the Paris Climate Accord will get lost in the data rounding.

I put on my reading glasses and still couldn’t see any difference on the chart, but maybe you’ll have better luck.

CHANGE: Trump Administration Considering Rule That Would Help Little Sisters of the Poor.

WELL, THAT’S OUR RULING CLASS: The Amazing Arrogance of the Paris Climate Agreement.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: University of California’s Board of Regents Partied Hard, Billed the State, Then Raised Tuition.