NEWS YOU CAN ABUSE: The Seven Keys to Depressing Yourself.

WHY ARE DEMOCRATIC-MONOPOLY INSTITUTIONS SUCH CESSPITS OF MISOGYNY AND  HOMOPHOBIA? Jimmy Kimmel: That Christian cake baker looks like a woman, and his job is gay.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, WUSSIFICATION EDITION: Public university forbids students from throwing snowballs.

BILL MAHER CRITICIZES SOCIAL MEDIA BANS: ‘ALEX JONES GETS TO SPEAK.’

It really says something about the organization when Bill Maher is the sanest person at Time-Warner-CNN-HBO.

IF THIS DOESN’T MAKE YOU FEAR FOR OUR COUNTRY … Mark Perry, writing in American Conservative:

“Here’s the arithmetic: One in three potential recruits are disqualified from service because they’re overweight, one in four cannot meet minimal educational standards (a high school diploma or GED equivalent), and one in 10 have a criminal history.

“In plain terms, about 71 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds (the military’s target pool of potential recruits) are disqualified from the minute they enter a recruiting station: that’s 24 million out of 34 million Americans.”

Read it all here.

THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED: Engineers refute allegations of gender bias in licensing exam. “A recent academic journal article speculated that ‘biases in the exam itself’ may be the reason that women pass the field’s licensing exam at a lower rate than men, but professional engineers find the allegation ‘hard to believe.’ The organization that administers the exam, in fact, pointed out that it has conducted annual reviews for well over a decade designed specifically to identify and excise gender bias from the test.”

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THE SHORT LIFE OF THE #METOO MOVEMENT: Minnesota Democrats endorse Ellison amid abuse allegation.

POLL: Trump ‘trusted’ more than Democrats to boost economy, keep US safe.

A new poll that shows Republicans “catching up” to Democrats leading into the fall midterm congressional election also shows that voters trust President Trump more than liberals on fixing the economy and keeping America safe.

By a wide 45 percent to 34 percent margin, the latest Zogby Analytics poll found that voters trust Trump more to “grow the U.S. economy.”

If so that’s amazing, given the tenor of the media coverage.

HMM: New York’s 19th Congressional District Resists ‘Blue Wave.’

Nobody, red or blue, should get cocky. And if you care about this, pick a campaign to donate to or volunteer for.

HEATHER MAC DONALD: Gender Is a Construct—Except When It’s Not: For academic feminists, male and female biology is either interchangeable or immutable, depending on what complaint they need to lodge.

A foundational tenet of academic feminism holds that alleged differences between males and females are socially constructed. This credo usually maximizes the opportunities for charging sexism, yet it will be discarded in an instant if acknowledging the innate biological and psychological differences between men and women yields an additional trove of feminist complaint. The current issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine shows how the game is played.

For years, medical research neglected “sex and gender differences” in health, according to the magazine. “Historically, the narrative of medicine has been driven by data derived from white men around the age of 40,” the associate dean for curriculum at the Yale Medical School told the magazine’s reporter. Clinical trials only occasionally included females and when they did, the results were rarely analyzed by sex. It’s mysterious why this alleged neglect should matter, if sex differences are “socially constructed.” If males and females are the same psychologically and physically before the patriarchy starts assigning sex roles, then medical research need not distinguish between males and females, either.

It turns out, however, that males and females differentially respond to stress, environmental risk factors, drugs, and disease, as an initiative called Women’s Health Research at Yale devotes itself to documenting. . . .

Such discoveries should be the death knell for social constructivism. Along with many others like them, they buttress the possibility that uneven sex ratios in various fields are in part the result of males and females’ different average dispositions toward competition, risk, and abstract rather than people-centered work (an observation that got computer engineer James Damore fired from Google).

And yet, feminist social-justice warriors are perfectly capable of proceeding on several contradictory fronts simultaneously.

Which itself reinforces a stereotype about women . . . .

PRIVACY IS FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Exclusive: U.S. government seeks Facebook help to wiretap Messenger – sources. “The U.S. government is trying to force Facebook Inc (FB.O) to break the encryption in its popular Messenger app so law enforcement may listen to a suspect’s voice conversations in a criminal probe, three people briefed on the case said, resurrecting the issue of whether companies can be compelled to alter their products to enable surveillance.”

STEVEN HAYWARD: China: Is Trump Winning Again?

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THINK OF IT AS EVOLUTION IN ACTION: When the Gene Pool Self-Chlorinates.

Being sufficiently idealistic can be a capital offense.

CHANGE: “Well-wired Republicans tell me that activists have begun pressuring Republican state attorneys general to act against social platforms on the basis of consumer fraud.”

WEIRD THAT THIS IS GETTING SO LITTLE COVERAGE: South Africa farm seizure: Terrified white farmers plot escape as crackdown looms.

GRATITUDE: Westminster terror attack suspect Salih Khater is new British citizen. “Salih Khater, 29, is from Sudan but is believed to have come to Britain in 2010 after working for two years in Libya. He came as a refugee and was granted asylum, sources confirmed to The Times. Friends in Birmingham, where he lived before allegedly carrying out Tuesday’s attack using a car outside parliament, claimed that Mr Khater, the son of sorghum farmers, was granted British citizenship in the past few weeks. The Home Office is understood to be checking that process.”

Yeah, good idea.

SEEN ON FACEBOOK: “You gotta feel for the Pope, tripping over all those abused kids as he lunges for a mic to talk about U.S. border policy.”

OPEN THREAD: Disport yourselves at will.

WOULD SPACE FORCE GIVE THIS A HIGHER PRIORITY? Defense inspector general finds key Air Force space programs vulnerable to cyber attacks, sabotage.

DON’T GET COCKY:  CBS News pollster reveals why ‘blue wave’ is unlikely.