DON’T GIVE THEM ANY IDEAS: How To Trigger A Global Recession In One Easy Step: Ban Fracking.

WELL, GIVEN THAT U.S.C. STANDS FOR “UNIVERSITY OF STANDARD CORRUPTION,” THIS IS NO BIG SURPRISE: Male Title IX activist expelled after “feminist witch-hunt.” Now it all hangs on USC provost Sally Pratt.

WELL, GOOD: Nigel Farage Won’t Fight Tories in Election Boost for Boris Johnson.

EVERYTHING SEEMINGLY IS SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL: The Associated Press asks, “The Democratic presidential race started with a record six female candidates, but only one is polling in the top tier. Is it sexism or just politics?”

Why are Democratic Party operatives with social media accounts asking why the Democratic Party is a cesspit of sexism? (Perhaps it’s progress of a sort, since in 2008, Democratic Party operatives with bylines believed that the Democratic Party was a cesspit of racism.)

Classical reference in headline.)

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Eric Ciaramella or Voldemort?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Pity the poor avocado-eating graduates: University-educated millennials have absorbed elite values but will never enjoy the lifestyle.

Countless articles have rehearsed the class insecurities of the “left behind” Brexiters. Generally these unfortunates are depicted fulminating over pasties and ale in shabby market towns and grim post-industrial cities outside the London area. The object of their antipathy is the shiny “elite”, plugged into a promise-filled, multicultural urban life and the knowledge economy, seemingly buoyant in the new, frictionless modern world.

Leaving aside its substantive, real-world pros and cons, Europhilia has become a mark of devotion to the culture and worldview associated with this “elite” and the modern world it navigates. It is a value set strongly correlated with tertiary education and that has come to be called “openness”. . . .

Meanwhile, the boom in openness-promoting tertiary education produced not so much a boom in graduate jobs as inflation in the qualification levels required to do the jobs we already had. This has left many young people struggling to service a mountain of debt on salaries that are never likely to show much of the “graduate premium” they were promised.

Today, thanks in part to the “open” economy whose values form the foundation of the “cultural Remain” identity, the cost of living — and especially home ownership — has rocketed. Simple aspirations that were within the reach of the working class in the 20th century are an unattainable dream today for millions of young people far higher up the sociocultural pile. And yet those young graduates have all, in the course of moving away to get their degree, absorbed the “open” value set now explicitly taught in tertiary education.

The result is an Everywhere precariat, that has absorbed the values of a world that has little to offer it in terms of concrete benefits, and resolves this conflict by renting the heavily-subsidised and internet-enabled perks of a smarter lifestyle than it can afford to buy. Where once rentals might have just been housing and cars, today that can even include clothing.

Related: Kenneth Anderson: The Fragmenting of the New Class Elites, or, Downward Mobility.

n social theory, OWS is best understood not as a populist movement against the bankers, but instead as the breakdown of the New Class into its two increasingly disconnected parts. The upper tier, the bankers-government bankers-super credentialed elites. But also the lower tier, those who saw themselves entitled to a white collar job in the Virtue Industries of government and non-profits – the helping professions, the culture industry, the virtueocracies, the industries of therapeutic social control, as Christopher Lasch pointed out in his final book, The Revolt of the Elites.

The two tiers of the New Class have always had different sources of rents, however. For the upper tier, since 1990, it has come through its ability to take the benefits of generations of US social investment in education and sell that expertise across global markets – leveraging expertise and access to capital and technological markets in the 1990s to places in Asia and the former communist world in desperate need of it. As Lasch said, the revolt and flight of the elites, to marketize themselves globally as free agents – to take the social capital derived over many generations by American society, and to go live in the jet stream and extract returns on a global scale for that expertise. But that expertise is now largely commodified – to paraphrase David Swenson on financial engineering, that kind of universal expertise is commodified, cheaply available, and no longer commands much premium. As those returns have come under pressure, the Global New Class has come home, looking to command premiums through privileged access to the public-private divide – access most visible at the moment as virtuous new technology projects that turn out to be mere crony capitalism.

The lower tier is in a different situation and always has been. It is characterized by status-income disequilibrium, to borrow from David Brooks; it cultivates the sensibilities of the upper tier New Class, but does not have the ability to globalize its rent extraction. The helping professions, the professions of therapeutic authoritarianism (the social workers as well as the public safety workers), the virtuecrats, the regulatory class, etc., have a problem – they mostly service and manage individuals, the client-consumers of the welfare state. Their rents are not leveraged very much, certainly not globally, and are limited to what amounts to an hourly wage. The method of ramping up wages, however, is through public employee unions and their own special ability to access the public-private divide. But, as everyone understands, that model no longer works, because it has overreached and overleveraged, to the point that even the system’s most sympathetic politicians understand that it cannot pay up.

The upper tier is still doing pretty well. But the lower tier of the New Class – the machine by which universities trained young people to become minor regulators and then delivered them into white collar positions on the basis of credentials in history, political science, literature, ethnic and women’s studies – with or without the benefit of law school – has broken down. The supply is uninterrupted, but the demand has dried up. The agony of the students getting dumped at the far end of the supply chain is in large part the OWS. As Above the Law points out, here is “John,” who got out of undergrad, spent a year unemployed and living at home, and is now apparently at University of Vermont law school, with its top ranked environmental law program – John wants to work at a “nonprofit.”

Read the whole thing(s).

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BYRON YORK: ANALYSIS: Democrats have a Colonel Vindman problem. “The public now has a transcript of Vindman’s deposition. And those who have taken the trouble to read the 340-page document will have a different picture of Vindman’s testimony than the one presented in early media reports.”

JEFFREY EPSTEIN DIDN’T KILL HIMSELF: Epstein Suicide Inquiry Subpoenas Roughly 15 Jail Employees, Others Reassigned, Placed On Leave.

PUTTING COMMIES IN THEIR PLACE: Evo Morales Finally Went Too Far for Bolivia: The socialist president claimed authoritarian powers in the name of the popular will. But average citizens were fed up with arbitrary rule.

Morales’s departure from office marks both a sea change in Latin American politics and a stinging rebuke to the naïveté of parts of the Western left. Even though there had always been strong evidence of their anti-democratic leanings, new socialist leaders such as Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Morales in Bolivia were widely celebrated throughout the first decade of the 21st century as the future face of Latin America.

Now virtually nothing remains of their erstwhile appeal. Chávez and his successor, Nicolás Maduro, have made Venezuela deeply authoritarian and shockingly poor. Meanwhile, the Bolivian people have come out in great numbers to stop Morales from violently crushing their protests. . . .

From east to west, and south to north, the dream of Latin America’s so-called pink wave has turned into a nightmare. And the many scholars, writers, and politicians who have for years sung the praises of aspiring dictators like Maduro and Morales should not be easily forgiven for sacrificing the rights of distant people on the altar of their rigid ideology.

Leftists are trash. Never forget that.

PATHETIC, BUT SADLY UNSURPRISING, BECAUSE ELITE HIGHER EDUCATION SUCKS: The Daily Northwestern Apologizes to Students for Reporting News That Triggered Them. A rousing “fuck you” would have been better, but today’s students lack the courage to stand up to idiocy and bullying from their peers. “Activist” should be treated as a synonym for “bullying idiot,” because, well, it actually is a synonym for bullying idiot.

Plus: “The piece must be read in its entirety to be believed. It sounds like parody—something The Babylon Bee would make up for a fake article mocking progressive deference to the hypersensitive.” Well, the Bee has gone from a parody site to America’s newspaper of record — because leftist activists are such bullying idiots that they’re basically beyond parody.

Also: “Is this what students at the country’s most prestigious journalism school are learning these days? That self-censorship is the paper’s best practice if someone is offended by what’s happening in the world?” Yes. That’s exactly what they’re learning there.

Related: Student Government Votes to Support Activists Who Think The Harvard Crimson Shouldn’t Even Quote ICE in Stories. Remember, “activist” is basically a synonym for bullying idiots, and “student government” is basically a synonym for idiots.

HEH: Al Gore Promotes Global Warming Workshop as Arctic Blast is Set to Bring Record Cold Temps to US 40 Days Before Winter Season Begins. Not from The Babylon Bee.

OPEN THREAD: A sure cure for those Monday blues.

PUT THE TELESCOPES IN SPACE, TOO: Why Astronomers Worry About the Brightness of SpaceX’s Starlink Satellite Megaconstellation.

CONTRARY TO WHAT WE’RE TOLD, NOT EVERYTHING IS RACIST OR SEXIST:  But, alas, it’s pretty much true that everything is illegal employment discrimination.  That makes the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission extraordinarily powerful (as well as extraordinarily unaccountable).  Read about how it got that way and how to rein it in.

JIM TREACHER: New Yorkers Boo De Blasio At Veterans Day Parade. “And this slice of Americana is brought to you by all our veterans. They fight to preserve our way of life, which includes telling our leaders exactly what we think of them, without fear of reprisal. You can boo your mayor at a parade, or boo your president at a football game, or boo anybody else you want anywhere else you want. It’s your god-given right as an American to tell people who suck that they do indeed suck. Liberty!”

GUESS WHO WAS CALLED A ‘FASCIST,’* BACK IN THE DAY:

Bigotry. Fascism. A threat to women’s rights. Alliances with foreign dictators. A president as entertainer, trampling labor and the environment.

It sounds like the contemporary complaints against President Trump.

Actually, it’s a 1984 newspaper advertisement from “Scholars Against the Escalating Danger of the Far Right.”

“With Ronald Reagan as its performing star in the White House, the Far Right is attempting to take over the Republican Party,” says the ad, published in the November 2, 1984, New York Times and signed by, among others, Carl Sagan, Linus Pauling, Corliss Lamont, Stephen Jay Gould, John Hope Franklin, Gloria Steinem, and Frances Fox Piven.

“Four more years of Reaganism…would see a sweeping attack on civil liberties. Four more years of Reaganism would also bring us closer to a nuclear Holocaust. Unlawful intervention in Central America threatens us with a new Vietnam,” the ad claims.

It says Reagan sought “to stifle women’s rights, including the right to legal abortion.” The ad says that under Reagan, “The Civil Rights Commission is anti-civil rights, the NLRB is anti-labor, the EPA is anti-environment. The Administration champions special privileges for the elite while life for the working people, the poor and minorities deteriorates.”

“There is a scent of fascism in the air,” the ad pronounces, warning that a second Reagan term would unleash “more bigots and chauvinists.”

Fortunately, the Gipper could give as good as he got, appearing in 1981 on the PBS series Ben Wattenberg at Large and saying:

I have known [FDR’s] sons for years. I know their own conversations about what he believed. I think [FDR] always thought that the things that were being done were in the nature of medicine for a sick patient. But people attracted to government and to government positions in those years, in many instances, did not view the medicine as temporary. If you remember, I was assailed during the campaign for saying that many of the New Dealers actually espoused what today has become an epithet–fascism–in that they spoke of how Mussolini had made the trains run on time. They saw in what he said he was doing—a planned economy. Harold lckes [FDR’s secretary of the interior] said that what we are striving for was a kind of modified form of communism. I don’t really believe that was really in Roosevelt’s mind. I think that, had he lived, and with the war over, we would have seen him using government the other way.

Or as the Washington Post paraphrased, “Reagan Still Sure Some in New Deal Espoused Fascism.”

He wasn’t wrong.

* You’d have a much shorter list referring to which Republican president or candidate starting with Coolidge who wasn’t called a fascist. With the possible exception of Gerry Ford — but to use a word popular with all the kids now, he certainly triggered the cast, writers, and producer of the first season of Saturday Night Live because of the (R) after his name.

HEH: “William Faulkner wrote his novel As I Lay Dying while working at his night shift job at a power plant. Good thing he didn’t have Twitter.”

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AN OLDIE BUT A GOODY: Marxists’ Apartment A Microcosm Of Why Marxism Doesn’t Work. From back before The Onion was surpassed by The Babylon Bee.

SAN FRANCISCO’S RETURN TO THE DARK AGES CONTINUES: World’s first airport therapy pig hogs the limelight at San Francisco airport.

The five-year-old Juliana pig and her owner, Tatyana Danilova, are part of San Francisco International Airport’s “Wag Brigade” — a program that brings therapy animals to the airport to cheer passengers up and help ease travel anxieties.

Dressed in a pilot’s cap and with toenails painted bright red, LiLou breezes through the metal detector at airport security and trots to the departure gates. She raises a hoof in greeting, poses for selfies and entertains departing passengers with a tune on her toy piano.

“People are very happy to get distracted from the travel, from their routines, whether they’re flying on their journey for vacation or work,” said Danilova. “Everybody is usually very happy and it makes them pause for a second and smile and be like, ‘oh, it’s great.’”

When she’s not delighting passengers at the airport, LiLou lives with Danilova in her downtown San Francisco apartment, where she enjoys a diet of organic vegetables and protein pellets, sleeps in her own bed and goes for daily walks around the neighborhood.

Danilova says LiLou loves interacting with people, but, as a prey animal, doesn’t like having anyone approach her from behind.

To paraphrase Reuters’ remarks on Mohamed Atta, one man’s emotional support pig is another man’s woke nightmare, and the comments to this Reuters article at Yahoo are much more grounded in reality than the reporter who wrote the above copy.

DAN MITCHELL: Honest Leftist Openly Acknowledges a Bigger Welfare State Requires Giant Tax Increases on Lower-Income and Middle-Class Taxpayers.

BOAT CLOAK BLUES. I have to say, they’re very handsome. I could see wearing one of the FDR models with a tuxedo, if I ever wore a tuxedo anymore.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Don Cherry, the Canadian Sports Network’s legendary hockey announcer, was “fired from Hockey Night in Canada over recent remarks that caused uproar,” on Remembrance Day, which coincides with America’s Veteran’s Day:

Cherry, 85, had singled out new immigrants in Toronto and Mississauga, Ont., where he lives, for not honouring Canada’s veterans and dead soldiers.

“You people … you love our way of life, you love our milk and honey, at least you can pay a couple bucks for a poppy or something like that,” Cherry said Saturday night on the popular “Coach’s Corner” segment. “These guys paid for your way of life that you enjoy in Canada, these guys paid the biggest price.”

* * * * * * * *

The Toronto Sun’s Joe Warmington was among the first to report the news about the firing on Monday. Cherry told Warmington that he was hurt to be fired today of all days, given it is Remembrance Day.

“I have just learned I’ve been fired by Sportsnet for comments made on Coach’s Corner Nov. 9,” Cherry told Warmington. “No problem.”

“I know what I said and I meant it. Everybody in Canada should wear a poppy to honour our fallen soldiers.”

“I speak the truth and I walk the walk. I have visited the bases of the troops, been to Afghanistan with our brave soldiers at Christmas, been to cemeteries of our fallen around the world and honoured our fallen troops on Coach’s Corner.”

The Rebel’s YouTube page notes that “Canada’s elites want to ‘cancel’ hockey legend Don Cherry, just for saying that all Canadians —including immigrants — should wear poppies on Remembrance Day. Ezra Levant agrees with Don (video):”

UPDATE: “Just in case you thought there was nothing they could do to make you hate the Multi-Cult more,” Kate of Canada’s Small Dead Animals blog writes, under the headline, “Hockey Night in Wokestan.”

The Rebel has a “Support Don Cherry” petition, which has almost 24,000 signatures, including mine.