2018 RADICAL MAN: Harvard’s New President Could Extend Diversity To Encompass Ideology.

From Ira Stoll’s open letter to new Harvard President Lawrence Bacow:

The boldest response might be actually to make some adjustments to the university. That doesn’t mean surrendering principles. But it could mean doing some things differently. As you told a University of California audience last year, “if you’re not managing change, you’re not leading, you’re presiding.”

What might that mean in Harvard’s case? It could mean redefining the emphasis on diversity beyond race and gender also to encompass ideology. It could mean reaching even more students via online courses and the extension school, so that the university shifts its measurement of success away from how many tens of thousands of applicants it rejects, and toward how many it educates.

It could mean expanding geographically beyond relatively prosperous, and politically liberal, Cambridge and Boston, toward more economically challenged and politically diverse parts of the state. Tufts has a veterinary school in Grafton, Mass. and its medical school founded a rural community health center in the Mississippi Delta. Harvard has a forest in Petersham.

With NYU operating in Abu Dhabi, Cornell in Qatar, and Yale collaborating on a college in Singapore, it’s harder to make the case that Petersham, in Central Mass., or even, say, Pittsfield, in Western Mass., are so remote from Cambridge that ramping up activity there would prevent effective control or definitely dilute the brand.

A similar case has been made for moving Federal agencies far beyond Washington.

PETER SUDERMAN: If You Really Wanted to Ban Porn, Here’s What It Would Take.

To start with, you would need to stop the production of porn by business enterprises, forcing, at minimum, every person who has ever attended the Adult Video News Awards in a professional capacity to immediately find a new line of work.

Next, you would need to find a way to stop a slew of high profile, incredibly lucrative websites from posting, hosting, or otherwise distributing explicit material.

After you cracked down on the pros, you would need to go after amateurs by finding some way to stop tens of millions of iPhone-wielding Americans from making home movies—many of which would resemble professional products in quality—and distributing them anonymously online, or even just amongst trusted circles of friends.

To be at all effective, you would also need to enforce criminal penalties against former professionals who continued to produce porn for the black market. And you’d need to penalize thrill-seeking amateurs as well, which would mean going after, and perhaps locking up, a wide array of sympathetic and otherwise law-abiding individuals from all walks of life whose only crime was to record and distribute consensual sexual activity. You’d also need to punish illicit viewers, whose numbers could easily reach into the tens of millions.

This is in response to Ross Douthat’s weekend NYT piece headlined “Let’s Ban Porn.”

“Let’s ban [blank]” rarely works out as intended.

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: ‘It’s humiliating’: plight of Venezuelan middle class is pawn shops’ gain.

Not so long ago, Nelly Osorio used to drive a newish car, drink a glass of whiskey every Friday night and get a manicure at least once a month. But today she is waiting outside a pawnbroker’s to sell off her jewelry.

Like many members of Venezuela’s dwindling middle class, Osorio, 60, has seen her life change drastically over the past two or three years.

The country’s minimum wage is 797,510 bolivars a month – about £2.40 at a black market exchange rate. Osorio still owns an apartment in the eastern part of the capital and as a chemical engineer, she earns 10 times the minimum wage. But every day, she feels poorer.

When her youngest son’s university fees were due, neither Osorio nor her husband had enough in their bank accounts. So she headed to the pawn shop to sell off a gold ring.

“It’s humiliating,” she said, as she waited outside.

Plus, this being The Guardian, the obligatory Command-F:

It’s a mystery what went wrong.

LOVE TRUMPS HATE OR WHATEVER: ‘Dammit, they missed’! Lefties spew HATE after Donald Trump Jr.’s wife is hospitalized.

TYLER O’NEIL: Susan Rice Email Suggests Obama Intel. Community Did Not Proceed ‘By the Book’ on Trump-Russia. “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.”

They usually doth.

CHRISTIAN TOTO: One ‘Animal House’ Alum Is 100 Percent Wrong About Hit Comedy.

Tim Matheson seems to be bemoaning the fact that Animal House couldn’t get made today, while embracing the mindset that would prevent Animal House from getting made today.

THESE ARE HEINLEIN’S CRAZY YEARS — WE JUST LIVE IN THEM: Meet the 10-Year-Old Drag Prodigy Who Just Stole the Show at Gypsy Sport.

THESE ARE PRETTY MUCH THE END TIMES FOR CALIFORNIA: Invasive 20-pound rodents increasingly burrowing into California.

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Does Legalizing Marijuana Threaten Wine (And Beer) Consumption?

Pot has been legal here in Colorado since 2014, and I’m happy to report that the Green family’s liquor budget has only increased in all that time.

HANS A. VON SPAKOVSKY: How the Criminal Referral on Christopher Steele Corroborates the Nunes FISA Memo.

BARACK OBAMA’S PORTRAIT FAITHFULLY CAPTURES HIS ADMINISTRATION: The longer I look at this thing, the worse it gets.

SERIOUSLY, REUTERS? Head held high, Kim’s sister returns to North Korea.

One man’s Director of the Propaganda and Agitation Department of the Workers’ Party of Korea is just another man’s Yankee Imperialist-Defying Superwoman.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Dear America: Your News Media Absolutely Hates You.

Recall the quote from Daniel Patrick Moynihan while Ambassador to the United Nations: “Am I embarrassed to speak for a less than perfect democracy? Not one bit. Find me a better one. Do I suppose there are societies which are free of sin? No, I don’t. Do I think ours is, on balance, incomparably the most hopeful set of human relations the world has? Yes, I do. Have we done obscene things? Yes, we have. How did our people learn about them? They learned about them in the newspapers.” And that is important.

But we cannot say these things when the American media, time and again, illustrates its utter hatred for the nation and its people in those newspapers and on television. Having judged the American project kaput after the election of Donald Trump, they are now stooping to the level of defending the North Koreans – perhaps the most brutal and heinous regime in the world today – thanks to some side-eye from its minister of propaganda, the sister of Kim Jong Un.

Read the whole, damning thing.

ALLIES: The heartbreaking story of Turkey sentencing an American NASA scientist to 7.5 years in prison.

INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE OR WHATEVER: Censor of the Year: Wikipedia.

NOW THAT’S WHAT I CALL COLLUSION: Hillary Clinton’s Fingerprints Are All Over The FBI’s Investigation Into Trump’s Russia Ties.

CHANGE: The Education Department Officially Says It Will Reject Transgender Student Bathroom Complaints.

WHAT THE HELL? Homicidal Anaphylaxis Scene in Sony’s ‘Peter Rabbit’ Angers Parents of Kids with Allergies.

TOP SECRET: YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG. This is America’s Top-Secret Plan to Crush North Korea in a War.

CHANGE: Less-cool Facebook losing youth at fast pace.

Related: Twitter made its first profit, but still can’t grow its user base.

The once-upstart blogosphere is staid compared to social media, but given Facebook’s ubiquitous creepiness and the social-justice mob mentality of Twitter, I think we’ll be around longer.

I hope so, anyway.

DANGEROUS JOBS: US commandos searching Syria for executed hostages’ remains.

Three officials briefed on the ground searches by U.S. commandos — the first real effort to recover the remains of two American journalists and two American humanitarian aid workers killed from 2014 to 2015 — said they were undertaken on the basis of new intelligence from two ISIS members from London captured last month by Syrian Kurds.

“Intel people are digging hard and directing ground guys to locations,” a counterterrorism official who is not authorized to speak publicly told ABC News.

Two other counterterrorism officials confirmed to ABC News that ground searches have begun and suggested the efforts are limited so far but could be expanded. The remains are believed to be spread out over several sites.

A really dangerous job: It’s Hard to Believe, but Syria’s War Is Getting Even Worse.

UH-HUH: Trump Impeachment Protester: Growing Economy is ‘Obama’s Doing.’

As Bill Whittle quipped on Right Angle a few weeks ago, “Obama could have served thirty years [perish the thought -S.] and ‘his’ recovery wouldn’t have started until the 31st year.”

SENATOR KIRSTEN GILLIBRAND: Trump Needs To Resign Or We’ll ‘Take Action.’

Jazz Shaw:

So what sort of “action” does she plan to take when the President inevitably ignores her demand and fails to slink away and hand the keys over to Mike Pence? She’s still not saying The I Word and isn’t even suggesting some sort of 25th Amendment workaround. What she wants now are hearings. Of course she does. If there’s one thing better than driving a president of the opposing party out of office, it’s clogging up the news cycle all through a midterm election year with hearings about his alleged bad behavior.

If we’re being fair to the Democrats here, though, it probably does strike some observers as curious that there aren’t any hearings going on regarding Trump’s female accusers from the past. Nearly everyone else in politics who has been accused has either resigned or faced some sort of inquiry. But Trump has maintained his desired status as Teflon Don and has avoided that particular spectacle.

It’s unclear at this point if Gillibrand could actually force any sort of action in terms of hearings.

It’s not about impeachment action. It’s not even about hearings. It’s about branding with the far-left progressives who might just determine the winner of the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries.

THEY ALL KNEW: Harvey Weinstein drivers ‘required to keep condoms and erectile dysfunction injections in the car at all times.’

The lawsuit describes employees hired specifically to facilitate sex for Weinstein, with many other employees, such as drivers, enlisted to help.

“[Weinstein]’s drivers in both New York City and Los Angeles were required to keep condoms and erectile dysfunction injections in the car, in order to provide them to [Weinstein] as needed,” the lawsuit states.

“Two [company] employee witnesses described having to procure [Weinstein]’s erectile dysfunction shots, one of whom received a [company] bonus for obtaining them and was at times directed by [Weinstein] to administer the injections,” it goes on to state.

“Another [company] witness described how she had to ensure [Weinstein had an adequate supply of them in his travel bag — referred to within the company as his ‘go bag’ — at all times.”

Weinstein’s use of erectile dysfunction drugs, and his use of staff to procure the drugs, was previously reported by multiple news outlets.

Flashback: Harvey Weinstein in 2009: ‘Hollywood has the best moral compass.’

Well, Hollywood seems to have done everything it could to keep Weinstein’s pointed north.

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: MSM Normalizes the NorKs, Schiff Spins Like a Whirling Dervish and Much, Much More.