EVENTUALLY THEY WILL GET IT RIGHT:  April 23 is the latest kooky prediction for the Rapture.

AVERAGE NET WORTH OF -$1,900:  College graduates with student debt have depressing net worth.

IT IS ALMOST AS IF THE MOVEMENT WASN’T ABOUT ABUSE BUT JUST AN ATTACK ON MEN:  Male victims of sex abuse feel left behind by #MeToo parade.

ITS ALIENS:  Why all your favorite burger chains are going vegetarian.

IT ISN’T AS IF THEY HAVE BEEN MAKING UP THE DATA FOR YEARS:  Philly Census Bureau already pinching pennies — and it could hurt data.

LAYERS AND LAYERS OF FACT CHECKERS:  Climate Derp.

THE GALLERY OF REGRETTABLE FOOD, THE EARLY DAYS:

The book is called Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century. Written by Laura Shapiro, it’s a history of the “Scientific Cooking” movement, in which a group of women of the late 1800’s and early 1900’s tried to revolutionize American cooking, introducing the idea of order and form as paramount considerations. Sounds rather dull, but I found the book surprisingly riveting.

It turns out that these ladies were trying to tame food and civilize it. The goal was to make it an esthetic and refined experience, as far from its “animal” roots as possible, and devoid of any “low” and ethnic influences–such as, for example, that tiny detail known to us as taste (if you are of a certain age, like me, and you wonder why the food of your youth was so uniformly bland, these ladies share some of the blame). Color was elevated to a matter of extreme importance, and white was the very best color of all.

Read the whole thing. P.J. O’Rourke once joked that “When you think of the good old days, think one word: dentistry.” Much of yesterday’s cooking qualifies as well.

(Speaking of which, classical reference in headline.)

EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN: Is it no longer safe to show your national pride in Great Britain?

The results, published in the Express, show a discouraging trend. One in four believe we are living in the least patriotic decade ever. The 1940s were named as the decade patriotism was at its height when the nation had been brought together by the Second World War.

The report shows that 79 per cent consider themselves patriotic with almost 90 per cent saying they are proud of their birthplace. Sadly, 22 per cent fear ridicule or abuse if they were to air those same views publicly with one in five feeling they can only display patriotism during large events when it is being encouraged.

“In today’s political and cultural climate, in a divided Brexit Britain, expressing pride in your birth nation can feel like something of a social grey area. “Our study has found that many of us are proud of our country, though feel it is generally only appropriate to express this pride at particular times.” according to Mr. Tatton-Brown.

Shades of England in the 1930s:

In 1933, the Oxford Union — a debating society and one of the strongholds of liberal elite opinion — held a debate on the resolution “this House will in no circumstances fight for king and country.” The resolution passed. Margot Asquith, one of England’s leading liberal lights, wrote that same year, quite sincerely: “There is only one way of preserving peace in the world, and getting rid of your enemy, and that is to come to some sort of agreement with him. . . . The greatest enemy of mankind today is hate.”

Churchill disdained the new liberalism, mocking one of his opponents as part of “that band of degenerate international intellectuals who regard the greatness of Britain and the stability and prosperity of the British Empire as a fatal obstacle. . . . ” So deep was this liberal loathing of empire that even as the first shots of World War II were being fired, Churchill’s private secretary, Jock Colville, witnessed at a theater “a group of bespectacled intellectuals” who, to his shock, “remain[ed] firmly seated while ‘God Save the King’ was played.”

These elites could see evil only at home. The French intellectual Simone de Beauvoir did not believe that Germany was a “threat to peace,” but instead worried that the “panic that the Right was spreading” would drag France, Britain, and the rest of Europe into war. Stafford Cripps, a liberal Labor member of Parliament, feared not Hitler, but Churchill. Cripps wrote that after Churchill became prime minister he would “then introduce fascist measures and there will be no more general elections.”

In an important sense, the British Empire’s strength failed because its elite liberal citizens stopped believing in it.

An attitude they would increasingly reacquire in the decades following WWII.

MAYBE THIS IS WHY SO MANY STUDENTS HAVE MENTAL HEALTH PROBLEMS NOWADAYS: Study: Attending a Dumbed-Down College Can Lead to Depression.

UNEXPECTEDLY! Bush-bashing professor has Fresno State scrambling to keep its donors.

OPEN THREAD: Enjoy!

KEVIN WILLIAMSON EXPLAINS WHAT HAPPENED AT THE ATLANTIC. While Kevin Williamson’s response to the Atlantic’s fiasco is behind the Wall Street Journal’s paywall, Jonathan Last quotes several paragraphs of it at the Weekly Standard, before concluding:

Liberalism controls the commanding heights of industry, technology, the media, entertainment, and the academy. Conservatives control, what . . . churches? (Though maybe not as much as people think.) And yet, the progressive left seems to genuinely believe that they are beset on all sides by conservative monsters.

Ultimately, the firing of Kevin Williamson wasn’t really about Kevin Williamson. It was simply a case of Who? Whom?

Just as it always is.

Read the whole thing.

THE BEST AND BRIGHTEST: Lawsuit Alleges Google Told Managers ‘Objectivity,’ ‘Colorblindness’ Are Racist.

IMPORTANT NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Vaginas absolutely need sex or they’ll waste away: study.

BACKFIRE:

From early on, the Clinton camp saw Trump as an enemy to encourage, Chozick writes. During the campaign, as had been previously reported, there was an effort to elevate Trump into a so-called Pied Piper in order to tie him to the mainstream of the Republican Party.

“An agenda for an upcoming campaign meeting sent by [Campaign Manager] Robby Mook’s office asked, ‘How do we maximize Trump?’” Chozick writes, describing a time when the GOP primary was still crowded. . . .

By the time of the conventions, though, as Trump was selected as the Republican nominee, the Clinton campaign was still trying to figure out how to improve her negative favorability ratings.

Choose the form of your destructor, indeed.

Plus, another reason why the Democrats should blame Hillary for Trump:

Chozick writes that the Clinton campaign, which she covered from the beginning, had reacted furiously to the prospect of a Joe Biden run, as floated first in an August 2015 Maureen Dowd Times column and then in a reported story by Chozick. In the book, she writes that “Biden had confided (off the record) to the White House press corps that he wanted to run, but he added something like ‘You guys don’t understand these people. The Clintons will try to destroy me.’”

True.

DISPATCHES FROM THE WAR ON WOMEN. NY Times Reporter: Male Hillary Clinton Staffers Directed Sexist Comments at Me.

The Post‘s Carlos Lozada relays that while [Amy] Chozick refers to Clinton’s female staffers by name in the book, she refers to Clinton’s male press staffers anonymously as “The Guys,” giving them nicknames like Brown Loafers Guy, Policy Guy, and Original Guy, the worst of the bunch.

“The Guys constantly mess with Chozick, magnifying her self-doubts,” Lozada writes. “‘I don’t care what you write because no one takes you seriously,’ Outsider Guy says. They suggest that a Times colleague is leaking her story ideas to a competitor at Politico and that more-experienced reporters in her newsroom will steal away her assignment.”

At times, the scorn from The Guys was overtly sexist. “They ask if there are any other Times reporters, preferably male, that they could talk to instead of her,” Lozada relates.

Lozada goes on to call out the rhetoric from Original Guy as particularly sexist. “The undercurrent of sexism spills over when Chozick and Original Guy spar over whether a prior conversation can go on the record, and he randomly paraphrases a crude line from ‘Thank You for Smoking,’ a 2005 film in which a reporter sleeps with a lobbyist for information. ‘I didn’t know I had to say it was off the record when I was inside you,’ Original Guy smirks.”

“The words hung there, so grossly gynecological,” Chozick writes in the book.

I know that Timespeople are invariably the last to know, but is Chozick aware of who Hillary is married to? …And who Hillary’s Girl Friday, Huma Abedin, was married to at the time?

SCRUTINY: A federal judge is threatening to appoint a “private prosecutor” to press a criminal investigation about FBI leaks to the press in an insider trading case.

YOUR DAILY TREACHER: ‘They Were Never Going to Let Me Be President,’ Said the Woman Who Thought It Was Her Due.

Norm Macdonald, in addition to being the best Weekend Update anchor ever, is also a keen student of human nature. Last year he summed up the results of the 2016 presidential election with this koan-like observation: “People hated Hillary Clinton so much that they voted for someone they hated more than Hillary Clinton in order to rub it in.”

Heh. Read the whole thing, needless to say.

IN THE SIXTIES, STUDENT ACTIVISTS KNEW WHAT “VIOLENCE” MEANT: And they weren’t shy about threatening it. On this day in 1969, a gang of rifle-toting Cornell students marched out of the building that they had been occupying for days. The country was shocked by the incident and mesmerized by the photographs documenting it. Donald Alexander Downs tells the story of that harrowing day (and the spineless university leadership that led up to it) in Cornell ’69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University.

These days one gets accused of violence for merely disagreeing with students. On the surface that might sound almost comforting. Your right of free expression might be threatened, but surely social justice warriors who are so very sensitive to the power of words that sting would be dedicated to non-violence themselves, wouldn’t they? Well … uh … don’t count on it.

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: The End of Castro’s Cuba.

Faster, please.

WEIRD, I THOUGHT TRUMP WAS GOING TO TWEET US INTO WORLD WAR III: North Korea Says to Dismantle Nuclear Site, Stop Weapons Tests.

THE HELL WITH NATALIE PORTMAN, THEN: Genesis Prize cancels ceremony after 2018 winner Natalie Portman said she won’t visit Israel.

AT AMAZON, save in Grocery and Gourmet Food.

Plus, deals in Health and Personal Care.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Duke Students Who Hijacked Alumni Event: Punishing Us Would Hurt Us Mentally. “The student activists of 2018 require a lot of hand holding as they overthrow their oppressors.”

Heh.™