A REMARKABLE VETERANS DAY MIRACLE: My friend and colleague Bret Bernhardt shares for the first time ever beyond his immediate family an amazing moment on the Mall at the Vietnam Memorial that united him with a Vietnam veteran he had before only seen once and then only on TV.

YOU DON’T SAY: Today’s Electric Car Batteries Will Be Tomorrow’s E-Waste Crisis, Scientists Warn.

REFERENDUM 88 VICTORY:  It is now safe to announce that the effort to re-impose affirmative action preferences on Washington State has been defeated.  It was too close to call with certainty for a while.  Minding the Campus’s John Rosenberg discusses “Lessons from Washington State on Affirmative Action.“

“JOHN, THIS IS MONIKA. I AM OVER THE WALL”:  A journalist’s recollection of the Fall of the Berlin Wall.

MATTHEW CONTINETTI: How States Like Virginia Go Blue. A hapless state GOP doesn’t help.

WELL, TO BE FAIR, IT’S ONLY IMPEACHABLE WHEN DONALD TRUMP DOES IT: If attaching strings to foreign aid is impeachable, cancel it all.

SEEMS LEGIT: Whistleblower will not testify in public, Democrats say.

The impeachment mess would look less like a kangaroo court and an insult to the Constitution and congressional institutions if it weren’t such a kangaroo court and an insult to the Constitution and congressional institutions.

SAD: Cold Welcome for Veterans on Campus: Students at elite colleges seek to undermine the values that service members signed up to defend.

“But don’t you ever feel like a sucker for serving?”

A fellow military veteran asked me this question a couple of years ago, when I was a senior at Yale. Like me, he had recently completed his service and was studying at a top university.

He said he was mystified, observing that the predominantly working- and middle-class people in the military swear an oath to defend with their lives the U.S. Constitution, including the First and Second amendments. Meanwhile, affluent college students regularly trash the First and seek to dismantle the Second. Are veterans being duped, he questioned, into believing they are upholding American values while the richest kids in the world—the ones being groomed for success and power—try to undermine them?

He’s not the only one who feels that way. Many veterans I know who enter college are bewildered by what they see: students from the top income decile expressing derision for the values that service members signed up to defend. Perhaps they could be forgiven for feeling like suckers.

Seeing our peers question the Constitution isn’t the only jarring experience for veterans. For many, the treatment of race on campus is a major culture shock. The military is perhaps the most meritocratic institution in the U.S. Women and men of all backgrounds come together, united in their purpose to defend this great country. The best research we have shows that women and nonwhite service members report greater job satisfaction and quality of life than do white male members. Arbitrary physical features like race and sex were treated as inconsequential because we were evaluated primarily on rank and performance. In college, however, there are clear social incentives to disparage people for their race.

I recall being stunned when one student, with a gleeful expression, bellowed to a classmate, “F— your white tears!” Other students around her snapped their fingers to express approval. One’s sex is fair game, too. For veterans trying to integrate on campus, insulting men signals coalitional solidarity with those who adhere to the dominant campus ideology. This works even, perhaps especially, if you are a white man.

The intent behind the insult matters. In the military, we exchanged insults often. It’s a form of social bonding, a way to strengthen relationships with the target of the insult. It helps to bring us together. College students also insult each other to bond socially—but not with the targets of the insults. They wish to impress the onlookers. They’re looking for bystanders to snap their fingers or share their social-media posts. The purpose is to vilify a transgressor in order to bond with observers. It’s effective.

Higher education in America today is dysfunctional, and actively destructive.

MACKUBIN OWENS: Praetorianism And The Deep State. “Of course, the president’s critics mocked the idea of a deep state as a crazy right-wing conspiracy theory. But they have come around now not only to admit that the deep state does exist, more importantly, they claim, it’s a good thing!”

The permanent bureaucracy says that the government belongs to it, not to the voters. If so, why should the voters comply with its edicts, support it financially, or even allow it and its denizens to exist?

COLD WAR II: Russia’s Suspected Internet Cable Spy Ship Appears Off Americas.

According to position tracking data, the Russian Navy’s Yantar left her home port about a month ago, and has not been visible on open sources until suddenly appearing in the Caribbean on Friday. That she appeared on ship trackers so suddenly is unusual.

She has gained attention in the past for hovering in the vicinity of the undersea cables which connect the world. Called Submarine Communications Cables (SCC), these crisscross the world’s oceans carrying Internet traffic and military communications.

Yantar is a ship of particular interest among Western Navies. According to naval officers familiar with the situation, she is suspected of being involved in placing listening devices on undersea communications.

Just another front in the shadow war Russia is waging against the West. I’d like if we hit them back — electronically, of course — until they cut this stuff out.

HEROES OF A GENERATION: OSS spy Martin Gelb, 100 years old.

It was 1944. Martin Gelb, an orthodox Jew from Brooklyn, was behind Nazi lines with a .45 and a Tommy gun.

“I was asked to do a lot of strange things, but you follow orders. It did get a little crazy,” the 100-year-old OSS veteran from Hudson, N.H., told the Herald last week.

He was part of William “Wild Bill” Donovan’s small crew of intelligence operatives working with the French resistance, hunting down German scientists and rounding up war criminals.

He was an expert radio operator who knew Morse code and International Morse code who slipped into France and Germany along with the D-Day invasion. He remained in Europe all the way through the Nuremberg trials. . . .

I was assigned to an advance radio group that would contact resistance fighters,” he said. “Everything was secret. So secret.”

He doesn’t highlight that he was a Jew fighting against the perpetrators of the Holocaust, but he doesn’t hide the fact that he was driven to succeed. He’s partially blind but his mind is sharp. Martin Gelb is one of the Heroes of a Generation the Herald is chronicling.

But unlike other World War II veterans, his bravery remained top secret until records from the Office of Strategic Services — the precursor to the CIA — were declassified in 2008. He was recently awarded the OSS Congressional Gold Medal for his service. . . .

Gelb recalls a mission to capture a German engineer in Germany, only to lose him to the Russians who got there first. That “engineer,” Gelb said, was involved with nuclear science. He had to shoot his way to safety using his Tommy gun that day.

He avoided snipers, was almost shot in the Battle of the Bulge, hauled German industrialists to the Nuremberg trials and said he once got into trouble with Gen. Omar Bradley — commander of the First Army — when he refused to leave an officer’s mess hall because he had an enlisted man with him.

“Bradley asked me ‘Who’s your commanding officer?’ And I said William Donovan.”

“Wild Bill? I know Wild Bill,” Bradley answered, Gelb said. And the general let the two men have lunch.

Wise decision.

TRUE: Andy Kessler: Liz Warren Is The WeWork Of Candidates.

Are presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren and WeWork founder Adam Neumann the same person? I mean, they have different hairstyles and all, but their philosophies are more alike than not.

They both claim, falsely, to be capitalists. Ms. Warren told the New England Council last year, “I am a capitalist to my bones.” She then told CNBC, “I am a capitalist. Come on. I believe in markets.” It was almost as if she didn’t believe it herself. Then came the caveat: “But only fair markets, markets with rules. Markets without rules is about the rich take it all, it’s about the powerful get all of it. And that’s what’s gone wrong in America.” She clearly doesn’t understand capitalism.

Neither does Mr. Neumann, who said of WeWork, “We are making a capitalist kibbutz.” Talk about mixed metaphors. In Israel, a kibbutz is often defined as “a collective community, traditionally based in agriculture.” WeWork’s prospectus for its initial public offering mentioned the word “community” 150 times. Yet one little secret of kibbutzim is that many of them hired outsiders to do menial jobs that the “community” wouldn’t do, similar to migrant workers on U.S. farms. A capitalist kibbutz is a plain old farm, much like a WeWork building is plain old shared office space. Big deal.

Ms. Warren wants to reshape capitalism, while Mr. Neumann wants to “revolutionize your workspace.” Meanwhile, the Vision Fund, with capital from SoftBank and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, has thrown good money after bad, writing off $9.2 billion in its quest toward this WeWork revolution. The same mismatch between communitarian vision and market realities would doom Ms. Warren’s economic reshaping.

But Neumann has made out like a bandit, and Warren hopes to do the same. Socialism always fails, but socialist leaders often profit.

Related: “Remember, under free markets the rich become powerful. But under socialism, the powerful become rich.”

GOOD LORD: Demographic Jihad? Virginia Muslim Doctor Tied Women’s Tubes Without Their Consent.

JOEL KOTKIN: What’s Unsustainable In California Is The Politics.

The recent rash of fires, like the drought that preceded it, has sparked a new wave of pessimism about the state’s future. But the natural disasters have also obscured the fact the greatest challenge facing the state comes not from burning forests or lack of precipitation but from an increasingly dysfunctional society divided between a small but influential wealthy class and an ever-expanding poverty population.

We are not addressing either the human or natural challenge. Once the ultimate “can do” state, California is morphing into one that is profoundly “can’t do.” Neither right nor left seems to have any program to confront the state’s worsening malaise on issues ranging from housing, education and the economy to the care of the environment.

To be sure, the right is correct to lay some of the blame for fires on green policies that have restricted brush clearance, and have prevented the thinning of the state’s forests, a finding shared by the state’s Little Hoover Commission. But it’s been years since Republicans have been able to present a coherent program — not surprising since vanishingly few in the state listen to, much less follow, the conservative agenda.

For its part, the progressive left controls the debate, the academy, most of the media, but has few answers to the problems plaguing our state. For many, scare-mongering about climate change defines and justifies even the most economically ruinous actions; activists even blame the recent power outages on climate, though the primary cause was lack of investment and maintenance by the state-regulated electrical utility.

Blaming PG&E, President Trump, oil companies, housing developers, car commuters or manufacturers for our problems is no doubt emotionally satisfying to the zealots in Sacramento and their media allies. But despite all this sturm und drang, California’s emissions over the past decade have fallen less than 39 other states and are essentially irrelevant on a global level. Even if the United States adopted the Green New Deal, the impact on climate, notes some recent studies, would be almost infinitesimal. The big emissions increases are almost entirely coming from China and other the less developed countries. . . .

We talk boldly about going “all electric” but close down emissions-free nuclear plants, shutter efficient gas facilities while refusing to expand hydro-electric systems. No state imports so much of its energy, notably from the enlightened nation of Saudi Arabia, just to keep the lights on — at great cost to both consumers as well as soon to be unemployed California energy workers.

When things get bad enough, Trump can invoke the Insurrection Act and recognize a new California government that will split it into multiple states.