IF YOU’RE LOOKING FOR MORE THINGS TO KEEP YOU UP AT NIGHT: Forget about global warming, North Korea, race relations or giant metal robots who want to steal your medicine. The New Yorker has found a historian/researcher who claims that “that there are probably around two thousand serial killers at large in the U.S.” The Daily Mail summarized the story with a Rogue’s Gallery of serial killers.

This comes two days after Newsweek published a spurious and much-ridiculed article noting that both Charles Manson and Donald Trump “used language” to “attract followers.” Imagine that. If Newsweek really wants to freak out their readership, they should publish a follow-up reporting that there are approximately two thousand Donald Trumps at large in the U.S.

**UPDATE** Newsweek removes reference to Trump, saying that “An earlier version of this story did not meet Newsweek’s editorial standards and has been revised accordingly.” 

**UPDATE 2 ** Newsweek still has original headline up on their Twitter feed…for now.

IN FINANCE WE CALL THIS A “DEATH SPIRAL:” Law School Won’t Admit New Students. Inside Higher Ed is reporting that Valparaiso University  announced Thursday that its law school would no longer admit new students. The law school is more than 130 years old, but it has been struggling to enroll enough students to function. Only 29 new students enrolled this fall, down from more than 200 as recently as 2013.

Asked why the university didn’t follow the lead of Whittier and simply shut down the law school, [President] Heckler said, “We have a 138-year tradition and very strong people.” […] The university will consider locations anywhere in the country, he said. Further, it will consider affiliations with law schools that do not share the university’s faith, provided there is respect for the law school’s commitment to service. Faculty members would have to support the new location or partner, he said. Depending on location, accreditors and state agencies might also be involved in a review of any proposed change.

Good luck with that.

OK, WHERE’S THE FLYING CAR I WAS PROMISED? The world’s first human head transplant has been carried out on a corpse in China in an 18-hour operation that showed it was possible to successfully reconnect the spine, nerves and blood vessels, The Telegraph reports.

At a press conference in Vienna on Friday morning, Italian Professor Sergio Canavero, director of the Turin Advanced Neuromodulation Group, announced that a team at Harbin Medical University had “realised the first human head transplant” and said an operation on a live human will take place “imminently”.

I suggest they harvest heads from Congress, because you’d want one that’s never been used.

WASHINGTONBABYLON.COM’S KEN SILVERSTEIN — one of my favorite curmudgeons — digs up a little nugget from the Don Jr./WikiLeaks traffic. Ken’s question is worth asking:

Why is Mother Jones helping run a site first started by a fucking Political Action Committee (PAC)? It’s like nobody noticed this because they’re all going bat shit over anything having to do with Trump, including the rather pedestrian revelations made in The Atlantic‘s much overhyped story. The rather disturbing relationship with the PAC is disclosed at PutinTrump.org but this isn’t about disclosure. The issue is whether any journalism outfit should be collaborating on a project that was created by a PAC.

I suppose it should shock nobody that Mother Jones has long been a leftist publication, and maybe there’s room for “advocacy journalism.” But it becomes hard to take them seriously:

A PAC run anti-Trump site putintrump.org is about to launch,” WikiLeaks wrote to Don Jr. The site, which has since become a joint project with Mother Jones, was funded by Progress for USA Political Action Committee, a PAC with seemingly one purpose, and one purpose only.

Says Silverstein: “It’s almost like Mother Jones et al. were the Clinton campaign’s rabid rapid response team.”

FREE SPEECH IS SEXY AGAIN: The Supreme Court has granted certiorari to six First Amendment cases this term, reports Bloomberg‘s Greg Stohr, three of them just yesterday.

They include a high-profile fight over a Colorado baker who refuses to make cakes for same-sex weddings and a challenge to the requirement in some states that public-sector workers pay for the cost of union representation […] In the new California case, a state law requires licensed pregnancy clinics to tell patients that they can call a county health department to learn about state-funded prenatal, family planning and abortion services. The law is being challenged by clinics that oppose abortion […] The justices also said Monday they will use a Minnesota case to consider guaranteeing people the right to wear political apparel when they go to the polls to vote. The final case involves a man who says he was arrested in retaliation for suing and politically criticizing his local government.

Not surprisingly, law professors are all over the place on what it means and what will happen. Harvard Law prof Rebecca Tushnet told Bloomberg that “the current court interprets the First Amendment more expansively in many ways than it did in the past,” while Eugene Volokh, a First Amendment scholar at UCLA School of Law says the latest issues are “mostly variations on topics the justices have been debating for decades.”

**DISCLOSURE: I defended Greg Stohr for more than 12 years at Bloomberg and did the pre-publication vetting of his book “A Black and White Case” about the landmark Gratz v. Bollinger affirmative action case.

BEWARE THE PIOUS: Our moral and intellectual betters in the news industry have some explaining to do, in light of the most recent American Society of News Editors‘ study:

In 2017, minorities comprised 16.55 percent of employees reported by all newsrooms in our survey, compared to 16.94 percent in 2016. Among daily newspapers, about 16.31 percent of employees were racial minorities (compared to 16.65 percent in 2016), and 24.3 percent of employees at online-only news websites were minorities (compared to 23.3 percent in 2016). The percent of journalists of color was still greatest at the largest news organizations. For example, at newspapers with daily circulations of 500,000 and above, nearly a quarter (23.4 percent) of the average workforce was made up of minorities (compared to 23.7 percent in 2016). The average newsroom workforce at all 661 legacy and digital sites was about 11.2 percent minority (up from 10.6 percent in 2016).

Of course, it can be carried to the opposite extreme.

AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM, PART DEUX: You can draw all the cartoons of Trump as an orange baboon you want, and the worst you’ll face is an angry or incoherent Tweet. Try that stuff in India, brave Social Justice Keyboard Warriors:

G Balakrishnan, 36, a freelancer associated with an online news portal, was held in Tamil Nadu’s state capital Chennai on Sunday for the caricature that blamed Chief Minister Edappadi K Palaniswami and top officials for not acting against loan sharks active in the state. He was charged with publishing defamatory and obscene material under the Indian Penal Code as well as the Information Technology Act, crimes punishable with three years in jail, police officer Anita Arokyamery said. (Emphasis added).

BONUS GAME: Try this in China or Saudi Arabia and see how long you last.

PRESIDENT OBAMA WAS CORRECT: ELECTIONS DO HAVE CONSEQUENCES. A week ago, reporters and editors in the combined newsroom of www.dnainfo.com and Gothamist voted to join a union. On Thursday, they lost their jobs, as Joe Ricketts, the billionaire founder of TD Ameritrade who owned the sites, shut them down. The owner’s logic is unfathomable to the denizens of the People’s Republic of Zabar’s:

“DNAinfo is, at the end of the day, a business, and businesses need to be economically successful if they are to endure.”

**DISCLOSURE** I was a member of The Newspaper Guild for many years when I worked at Time Inc., but those were in flush times when the First Amendment was basically a license to print money.

THE HACK LIST: Iconoclast and professional contrarian reporter and editor Ken Silverstein has started on his WashingtonBabylon blog a compilation of hacks in DC and elsewhere who deserve a good calling out. The heads alone are worth the price of admission:

“Hack List 2017: Why the New Yorker Sucks, in One Annotated Story”
“David Brooks: Gabagool By Any Other Name”
“Release the Transcripts! “Journalist”/Clinton Surrogate Ezra Klein Nets $30,750 For a Single Speech”
“The Lassie Chronicles: In New Book on Bill Clinton, Joe Conason Finds His Inner Lapdog.”

Ken is a preternaturally cranky guy, and deserves a place in the Pantheon of Journalists Who Despise All Politicians. As it ought to be.

I HAVE NO WORDS: University of Wisconsin-Madison Students Protest Abraham Lincoln Statue Because ‘He Owned Slaves’.

Maybe “higher education” means you have to be really, really high.

WHEN DOES THROTTLING ACCESS BECOME CENSORSHIP? The Daily Signal reports on a common occurrence, namely right-leaning posters being denied access to FB (often called “Facebook Jail”).  FB claims it was not content-based but allegedly a matter of their computers erroneously flagging the guy’s account for “overposting.” Allen Muench, a retired accountant told The Daily Signal that:

“Facebook suspended him for two weeks for posting a video of the American flag, and also suspended him for posting memes about Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel, and former President Bill Clinton.”

That may or may not be the case, but blaming the computer always sounds like a weak excuse. A Facebook spokesperson said that:

Muench was posting a large amount, including to various Facebook groups, which the company’s system could identify as spam because he often posted almost identical content or content that some members of groups didn’t like. Muench was not violating Facebook’s Community Standards, the spokeswoman said, and the error notices he saw when posting also could result from his posting too fast.

So the question becomes whether they are merely throttling access or making  content-based decisions. As a private actor, FB has the right to do the latter, but if that’s the case, they ought to be more honest about it. (Good luck with *that*.) The dispositive fact that’s missing is whether far-left FB members have had the same problem. Guesses don’t count, and other than a class-action suit, I don’t see how that data could be pried from FB.

EXPOSURE TO IDEAS? WHAT IS THIS, COLLEGE? The Daily Signal reports today that two Ohio legislators are introducing a bill to prevent publicly funded colleges in that state from disinviting speakers based on the content of their speech. The text says in part that:

“It is not the proper role of a state institution of higher education to shield individuals from expression protected by the United States … including, without limitation, ideas and opinions that the institution finds unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive.”

The article goes on to detail that the bill is based on the Goldwater Institute’s Campus Free Speech Act, designed with Stanley Kurtz of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which says that state universities should allow anyone who is lawfully present on a public campus to demonstrate or protest in public areas, like sidewalks and spaces outside of buildings. It also says colleges should make clear during freshman orientation that they are in favor of free speech and eliminate restrictive speech codes and so-called “free speech zones” on campus.

The Daily Signal piece also details recent activity in the creation of “Bias Response Teams”, which is the subject of an earlier post below by Sarah Hoyt.

STILL ALIVE AND WELL: Voice of America shows the world that the American Dream combined with common sense values and hard work can still be the envy of the world. Immigrant puts his shoulder to the wheel, works two jobs — one as a dishwasher at the Hilton Hotel, earning $5.65 an hour –and earns his way up to owning a successful transportation company. The kicker says it all:

“When a person is free, you can do anything,” he said. “So appreciate what you have, work so very hard, and get rid of the wrong pride we have back home that if you have a college degree you have to be in a professional line [of work] and you can’t dig the potatoes or do the dishes. Work is work and go out there and do what is available. Be proud of it.”

Try that in France or Spain. Not. Going. To. Happen.

IN HOLLYWOOD, YOU’RE NOBODY TILL SOMEBODY GROPES YOU: A former Playboy model has accused famed director Oliver Stone of groping her. The claim from Carrie Stevens came after Stone defended Harvey Weinstein to reporters, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Of course, uber-liberal, feminist icon and fashion millionaire Donna Karan had this to say:

“You look at everything all over the world today and how women are dressing and what they are asking by just presenting themselves the way they do. What are they asking for? Trouble.”

They told me that if I voted for…oh, hell, you know the rest.
**Stevens link slightly NSFW**

ADMITTING YOU HAVE A PROBLEM IS THE FIRST STEP: Naysayers will invariably discount anything James O’Keefe records, but this recording from Project Veritas is yet more grist for the mill about why legacy media is trusted about as much as used car salesmen (or lawyers). I really don’t mind ex-campaign staffers working for news organizations, but when they are so brazen about applying their agenda as editorial gatekeepers…

Dudich goes on to explain what he might do to target President Trump:

“I’d target his businesses, his dumb fuck of a son, Donald Jr., and Eric…Get people to boycott going to his hotels. Boycott… So a lot of the Trump brands, if you can ruin the Trump brand and you put pressure on his business and you start investigating his business and you start shutting it down, or they’re hacking or other things. He cares about his business more than he cares about being President. He would resign. Or he’d lash out and do something incredibly illegal, which he would have to.”

When the undercover journalist asks Dudich if he could make sure that the anti-Trump stories make it to the front, he replied, “Oh, we always do.” Now to be fair, it might be a simple case of a low-level nobody talking smack and trying to impress someone and overstating his importance. But it’s a good thing they have a Public Editor  to sort this out. Oh, wait…

SOMEBODY SKIPPED THEIR CIVICS CLASSES: Late-night “comedy” writer Bess Kalb of the Jimmy Kimmel Show deleted this tweet, but stupidity leaves a digital footprint. It explains a lot, really…

VIRTUE SIGNALLING: OVERCOMPENSATION FOR HYPOCRISY? There was something smug and self-righteous about the “Fearless Girl” statute (seen here with notorious douchenozzle Bill DiBlasio) meant to inspire women to take an adversarial stance to Wall Street. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but now I know what it was. Adweek reports in a story headlined “Financial Firm Behind ‘Fearless Girl’ Will Pay $5 Million for Allegedly Underpaying Women and Minorities“:

State Street Corp., parent company of the investment firm behind Wall Street’s iconic Fearless Girl statue, today agreed to pay a combined $5 million to more than 300 women and 15 black employees who were paid less than their white, male counterparts, according to a federal audit.

While State Street denied the claims, but coughed up approximately $4.5 million in back pay and $500,000 in interest. I suppose what annoys me the most is the gullibility of people who so desperately want their iconography to represent some reality. It quickly became the financial world’s most iconic symbol of gender equality and won 18 honors at the prestigious Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, including four Grand Prix top honors.

“Don’t do as I do, do as I say.”

INTERESTING CHOICE OF DOMAIN NAME: The Hill‘s Joe Concha reporting that:

A new media company aimed at millennials and featuring multiple former members of the Obama administration — including Jon Favreau, Tommy Vietor, Jon Lovett, Dan Pfeiffer and Ben Rhodes, along with former New Republic senior editor Brian Beutler — is expanding.

Check out the domain name they chose in second graf. I guess “JuiceBoxMafia.com” was already taken. Heh.

BUZZFEED ACTUALLY DOES SOME SURPRISINGLY FAIR WORK HERE, explaining Nikki Haley’s vote against the UN resolution on the Death Penalty:

The Trump administration is under fire from LGBT activists and human rights supporters over a vote on Tuesday against a resolution condemning the use of the death penalty. But it isn’t just this particular resolution or the current administration — the US has never supported any measure at the UN that condemns the death penalty.

Of course, they had to correct the story to add that the Obama Administration voted “present,” not “no.” (Shocker!)

What I find troubling is that in their abundant generosity to Democrats, they left out the inconvenient fact that while Governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton — running for President — signed a death warrant for a mentally incompetent man named Ricky Lee Rector:

Despite Rector’s mental state, then Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton made a point of returning to Arkansas to oversee Rector’s January 24, 1992, execution during the 1992 U.S. Presidential campaign.

OH, NOW WE GET IT: Norway’s minister of immigration drew comparisons Wednesday between the plight of Europeans suffering from increasingly common terror attacks with the experiences endured by Israel for decades.

“We are experiencing now the fear that [Israel] experienced for decades,” said Sylvi Listhaug in an exclusive interview with Ynet in Oslo. “Many people now understand the situation you live in. We see what is happening in Sweden, in Britain and in France.”

“It’s the new norm,” Listhaug concluded, “for Europeans to impose limits on freedom of speech in order to avoid offending minorities.” Well, at least beheady minorities, anyway.

PROFESSIONAL HUMOR REGULATORS: This is at least the third time that Facebook’s attempts to filter “fake news” has failed. The first time, they hired a handful of SJW’s with no journalism experience, then they tried an algorithm that over-filtered, and now clearly marked satire sites are being shunted away from appearing on news feeds. Frustrated with Facebook’s administrative opacity, the Italian humor site Lercio published the following:

“All we could do was ask the usual friend whose brother-in-law has a cousin whose sister is the mistress of Zuckerberg’s chauffeur” to tell them unofficially what might have happened. That is when they were told, still unofficially, that they had likely been caught by Facebook’s recently launched anti-fake news filtering measures.”

As the article’s author Francesca Fanucci points out: “Jokes and satire, no matter how disturbing or offensive, are not fake news, especially when they come from websites like Lercio whose entire raison d’être is to serve a massive group of readers who are totally aware of its humor.”

DEPRAVED ART IS THE BEST ART: “Egyptian authorities have arrested seven people they accuse of being gay and promoting homosexuality for allegedly raising the rainbow flag of the LGBT movement at a concert last week, even though there is no law banning the practices.”

Linda Sarsour could not be reached for comment.

THE FIRST RULE OF TITLE IX IS DON’T TALK ABOUT TITLE IX: TheFire.org summarizes a New Yorker piece today that shows college bureaucrats think  “1984” is a manual, not a warning:

In May 2015, Laura Kipnis was famously the subject of a Title IX investigation by Northwestern University for an essay she wrote suggesting there are too many Title IX investigations. Today, Jeannie Suk Gersen reports for The New Yorker that Kipnis was the subject of yet another Northwestern Title IX investigation earlier this year — this time for writing “Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus,” a book about being investigated for saying there are too many Title IX investigations.

Read the whole thing and donate a few bucks to The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education here.

GOVERNMENT TURNS TABLES BY SUING RECORDS REQUESTERS: AP reporting about a new trend in state bureaucrats doing their best bureaucratting. Not content to ignore or improperly deny public records requests:

Government bodies are increasingly turning the tables on citizens who seek public records that might be embarrassing or legally sensitive. Instead of granting or denying their requests, a growing number of school districts, municipalities and state agencies have filed lawsuits against people making the requests — taxpayers, government watchdogs and journalists who must then pursue the records in court at their own expense.

The lawsuits generally ask judges to rule that the records being sought do not have to be divulged. They name the requesters as defendants but do not seek damage awards. Still, the recent trend has alarmed freedom-of-information advocates, who say it’s becoming a new way for governments to hide information, delay disclosure and intimidate critics.

These people keep forgetting that silly rhetoric about “government of the people, by the people and for the people.”

FROM THE DAILY SIGNAL: Do We Need 641 Penalties for Nonviolent Drug Crime After Punishment?  Federal laws and regulations impose more than 600 post-prison restrictions that may be applied to people convicted of “nonviolent drug offenses”, according to a new GAO report. These rules cover individuals convicted of a nonviolent drug offense, defined as any federal drug offense that doesn’t involve the attempted, threatened, or actual use of physical force. The Op/Ed points out that:

 “[T]hose rules cover so many parts of a person’s life—from employment and housing to the constitutional rights to vote and carry a firearm—that if administered arbitrarily, some may needlessly frustrate reintegration into society and encourage a return to crime”

The analysis concludes that:

“It is not in anyone’s best interests to consign ex-offenders to a permanent second-class status. Doing so will only lead to wasted lives, ruined families, and more crime.”