Tuesday roundup

How have things been going at the University of Missouri since the events of November 2015, when Black Lives Matter convinced the football team to go on strike, which metastasized into occupation of some areas of campus and the etched-in-infamy "need-some-muscle-over-here" exhortations of now-fired professor Melissa Click?

Not good. Freshman class has shrunk by 23 percent. Dorms are being shuttered. Budget shortfall of perhaps as much as $32 million. Announcement of a plan to cut nearly 400 jobs.

Mizzou officials blamed the enrollment decline — the second steep enrollment drop in two consecutive years — on ongoing “public perception concerns,” according to the Post-Dispatch.

Erick Erickson at The Resurgent says he knows a source for the WaPo story on the loose-lips-at-the-meeting-with-Lavrov-and-Kislyak meeting, and that said source says that "what the president did is far worse than what is actually being reported."  This source says DJT "does not want advice, cannot be corrected, and is too insecure to see any constructive feedback as anything other than an attack."

You can call these sources disloyal, traitors, or whatever you want. But please ask yourself a question — if the President, through inexperience and ignorance, is jeopardizing our national security and will not take advice or corrective action, what other means are available to get the President to listen and recognize the error of his ways?

This is a real problem and I treat this story very seriously because I know just how credible, competent, and serious — as well as seriously pro-Trump, at least one of the sources is.

Senator Mike Lee is spearheading a project that addresses the malady at the root of our societal dysfunction:

Today, Americans face a wide variety of challenges in our era of tumultuous transition. We are materially better off in many ways than in the past. But despite this real progress, there is a sense that our social fabric has seen better days. Leading thinkers have issued warnings that we are increasingly “bowling alone,” “coming apart,” and inhabiting a “fractured republic.” At the heart of those warnings is a view that what happens in the middle layers of our society is vital to sustaining a free, prosperous, democratic, and pluralistic country. That space is held together by extended networks of cooperation and social support, norms of reciprocity and mutual obligation, trust, and social cohesion. In short, it is sustained by what we do together. 

The Social Capital Project is a multi-year research effort that will investigate the evolving nature, quality, and importance of our associational life. “Associational life” is our shorthand for the web of social relationships through which we pursue joint endeavors—namely, our families, our communities, our workplaces, and our religious congregations. These institutions are critical to forming our character and capacities, providing us with meaning and purpose, and for addressing the many challenges we face. 

The goal of the project is to better understand why the health of our associational life feels so compromised, what consequences have followed from changes in the middle social layers of our society, why some communities have more robust civil society than others, and what can be done—or can stop being done—to improve the health of our social capital. Through a series of reports and hearings, it will study the state of the relationships that weave together the social fabric enabling our country—our laws, our institutions, our markets, and our democracy—to function so well in the first place. 

Camille Paglia is probably my favorite Democrat. She confirms that status yet again with a very good Washington Free Beacon interview. 

Here's how smart she is:

You say in your new book that feminism’s "sex war" has stunted the maturation of both girls and boys. What do you think is the end result of that?

Second-wave feminism went off the track when it started to demonize men and blame them for all the evils in human history. It’s a neurotic world-view that was formulated in too many cases by women (including Gloria Steinem and Kate Millett) with troubled childhoods in unstable homes. First-wave feminism, in contrast, focused on systemic social problems that kept women in secondary or dependent status. My favorite period in feminism has always been the 1920s and 1930s, when American women energized by winning the vote gained worldwide prominence for their professional achievements. My early role models, Amelia Earhart and Katharine Hepburn, were fierce individualists and competitors who liked and admired men and who never indulged in the tiresome, snippy rote male-bashing that we constantly hear from today’s feminists. I am an equal opportunity feminist who opposes special protections for women. What I am saying throughout my work is that girls who are indoctrinated to see men not as equals but as oppressors and rapists are condemned to remain in a permanently juvenile condition for life. They have surrendered their own personal agency to a poisonous creed that claims to empower women but has ended by infantilizing them. Similarly, boys will have no motivation to mature if their potential romantic partners remain emotionally insecure, fragile, and fearful, forever looking to parental proxies (like campus grievance committees or government regulators) to make the world safe for them.

And she's one Bernie supporter who has no use for Fauxcahontas:

Could you envision Elizabeth Warren running successfully as a populist candidate in 2020 against Donald Trump?

Elizabeth Warren, a smug Harvard professor, is no populist. She doesn’t have an iota of Bernie Sanders’ authentic empathic populism—but Sanders will be too old to run next time around. I tried to take Warren seriously during the run-up to the primaries, but her outrageous silence about Sanders’ candidacy when he was battling the corrupt Hillary machine made me see Warren as the facile opportunist that she is. She craftily hid from sight throughout the primaries—until Hillary won the nomination. Then all of a sudden, there was bouncy, grinning Warren, popping in and out of Hillary’s Washington mansion as vice-presidential possibilities were being vetted. What an arrant hypocrite! Warren stands for nothing but Warren. My eye is on the new senator from California, Kamala Harris, who seems to have far more character and substance than Warren. I hope to vote for Harris in the next presidential primary.

Now, being a Democrat, she doesn't escape having some skewed judgement. Come on, Professor Paglia - Kamala Harris? Seriously?

The North Korean threat is more serious than we've been thinking.