THE LONG MARCH THROUGH THE INSTITUTIONS HAS REACHED KENNESAW STATE: University students in Georgia forced to confess their white privilege. “The taxpayer-funded university is already facing two federal lawsuits alleging bias against conservatives.”

IT’S DIFFERENT WHEN THEY DO IT (CONT’D): Clinton campaign app may have harvested Facebook data of millions.

AND HE JUST STARTED A LEGAL DEFENSE FUND: Report: McCabe Lied Four Times. I wonder who contributed to that GoFundMe?

OPEN THREAD: Close out the month of March with thread-excellence.

FORGET ALL THIS REPEAL-THE-SECOND-AMENDMENT TALK. Whatever happened to repealing the Seventeenth Amendment?

TO BE FAIR, NOT EVERY PRESIDENT CAN BE HISTORY’S GREATEST MONSTER. Former President Jimmy Carter Rips Trump [Again]: America ‘Apparently’ Wants a ‘Jerk’ for President.

Well, there he goes again, to coin a presidential phrase.

(Classical reference in headline.)

GET IT ON DVD BEFORE IT’S BANNED: Blazing Saddles.

NOT A MOMENT TOO SOON, IT SEEMS: Monash discovery uncovers clue to disarm gonorrhea superbug. “Monash University researchers have discovered a way the gonorrhea bacteria cleverly evade the immune system — opening up the way for therapies that prevent this process, allowing the body’s natural defenses to kill the bug.”

CONFESSIONS OF A CLICKBAIT GURU: Five Ways Social Media is Destroying Journalism and Politics.

GREAT MOMENTS IN SELF-AWARENESS: CNN’s Chris Cuomo calls Laura Ingraham ‘part of a machine’ to destroy that which doesn’t suit its agenda.

And if you publicly disagree with him or his agenda, his network will dox the daylights out of you.

BROWN M&Ms AND RELIGIOUS ILLITERACY: A pair of tweets spotted by Rod Dreher highlight the smug ignorance of the MSM when it comes to religious matters.

If we can’t count on leading journalists to understand the most basic facts about Christian practice and belief, how on earth can we trust them to report fairly and accurately about something as complicated as Christian sexual teaching? How can they trust themselves? How can they even begin to understand why we believe what we believe on all kinds of issues?

The rock band Van Halen was famous for putting a rider in their contracts requiring that a bowl of M&Ms be backstage for them, and that there be no brown M&Ms in the bowl. It sounds like typical rock star vanity, but there was actually a good reason for it. The band had this provision buried in their contract as a trick to see if the local crews assisting the band had actually read the contract. In a similar way, minor mistakes like these are the brown M&Ms of journalism about religion. They reveal a fundamental carelessness that might have more serious consequences.

Read the whole thing.

FASTER, PLEASE: New cancer drug 93 percent effective with pediatric patients.

AT AMAZON, deals on Amazon Instant Video.

Plus, bestselling Game Downloads.

Also, Kindle Daily Deals.

WITH SOCIAL MEDIA DYING, some people are returning to the blogosphere. More like this, please!

WHAT COULD GO WRONG? New Wave of Migrants from Central America Headed to US.

DISPATCHES FROM THE NEWSPEAK DICTIONARY: Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary Changes Definition Of ‘Assault Rifle’ After Parkland Shooting.

It’s been politicized for years, but that seems to have accelerated post-2016: Why Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary is Trolling Trump.

ANDREW SULLIVAN: Denying Genetics Isn’t Shutting Down Racism, It’s Fueling It.

Reich simply points out that this utopian fiction is in danger of collapse because it is not true and because genetic research is increasingly proving it untrue. On the male-female divide, for example, Reich cites profound differences, “reflecting more than 100 million years of evolution and adaptation.” On race, he is both agnostic about what we will eventually find out with respect to the scale of genetic differences, and also insistent that genetic differences do exist: “You will sometimes hear that any biological differences among populations are likely to be small, because humans have diverged too recently from common ancestors for substantial differences to have arisen under the pressure of natural selection. This is not true. The ancestors of East Asians, Europeans, West Africans and Australians were, until recently, almost completely isolated from one another for 40,000 years or longer, which is more than sufficient time for the forces of evolution to work.” Which means to say that the differences could be (and actually are) substantial.

This will lead to subtle variations in human brains, and thereby differences in intelligence tests, which will affect social and economic outcomes in the aggregate in a multiracial, capitalist, post-industrial society. The danger in actively suppressing and stigmatizing this inconvenient truth, he maintains, is that a responsible treatment of these genetic influences will be siloed in the academic field of genetics, will be rendered too toxic for public debate, and will thereby only leak out to people in the outside world via the worst kind of racists and bigots who will distort these truths to their own ends. If you don’t establish a reasonable forum for debate on this, Reich argues, if you don’t establish the principle is that we do not have to be afraid of any of this, it will be monopolized by truly unreasonable and indeed dangerous racists. And those racists will have the added prestige for their followers of revealing forbidden knowledge. And so there are two arguments against the suppression of this truth and the stigmatization of its defenders: that it’s intellectually dishonest and politically counterproductive.

I felt a genuine relief reading the op-ed because it was so nuanced and so low-temperature.

Many people, of course, have a vested interest in fueling racism.

WHATEVER COULD BE THE CAUSE OF THIS? Knife Violence on the Rise in Germany.

AT AMAZON, deals on Dockers for Men.

THERE’S MORE EVIDENCE FOR #2 IN MY OPINION: Will Coffee Give You Cancer, Or Improve Your Health?

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Sweden’s State Curriculum Forces Preschoolers to Act Like the Opposite Gender.

H. CLAY AALDERS: Knives in Pop Culture: Dan, Roseanne, and the pocket knife.

GOD AND MEN AND JORDAN PETERSON: In the New York Times, Ross Douthat asks, “can a Peterson man and an Oprah woman be happy together? Can they be at least as happy as Christian women and their somewhat-less-pious, prone-to-bolting Christian men? A lot may hang on this strange question: the happiness of the next generation, the very existence of the generation after that.”

As of the time of this post, Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life is back to #1 most read on Amazon.

OBAMA DIDN’T KNOW HEALTHCARE COULD BE SO COMPLICATED.

As a wise woman warned in 2008, “My fellow citizens, the American presidency is not supposed to be a journey of personal discovery.”

Naturally, she was pummeled into oblivion for such an observation.