Mormons and LGBT advocates in Utah came up with a compromise often heralded as what can be achieved by working together. Libertarian-minded conservative and gay rights advocate Walter Olson doesn’t like it. Also, Olson talks about how corporations became liberal culture warriors.

Rand Paul’s presidential announcement was taken offline due to YouTube’s copyright system.

As California tries to figure out its water problem, Alissa Walker argues that people should back off the almond-hate. Justin Fox says like hell!

Rebecca Nelson writes of The Secret Republicans of Silicon Valley. I can’t speak of Silicon Valley, but I will say that there was no place I kept a tighter lid on my heterodoxical beliefs than when I was in the Pacific Northwest. Everyone in Deseret assumed – for the most part – that I was a radical liberal. But that was okay, because I was not as alone as a radical liberal in Deseret as I would have been a conservative where I was working. (The team leader adjacent to us was a Paulite. He was treated more as a gadfly than a villain, though, so there’s that.)

If the GOP can ever become competitive in urban politics, their coalition will likely need to involve Asian-Americans.

After Rolling Stone has announced that it will not fire anybody involved with the atrociously bad Rape on Campus story, you might wonder what it takes to get fired from Rolling Stone. The answer? Giving Hootie and the Blowfish a negative review.

Who knows college basketball? Mitt Romney knows college basketball.

As the city of Houston tries to figure out what to do with the Astrodome, here are some pictures of people who broke in. Yesterday they actually allowed people in for a tour.

Katie Kilkenny thinks that Twin Peaks without David Lynch may not be so bad. Two thoughts: First, stop calling everything a “reboot” as this is a continuation, not a reboot. Second, I suspect this will die a quiet death.

A man in Texas was thrown in jail for failing to mow his lawn.

A creepy black and white video of the Teletubbies has gone viral:

Stone Temple Pilot already touched on telecreepies in the music video for Sour Girl:

My wife hates that music video because she says it makes the lead singer look like he masturbates to pictures of himself. I don’t disagree with that particular assessment, but I kinda like it anyway, even if the teletubby knockoffs kinda creep me out.

At the University of Michigan, a group of cowardly students forced the cancellation of a showing of the film American Sniper, claiming it “promotes anti-Muslim…rhetoric” and “create(s) an unsafe space that does not allow for positive dialogue.” Although I have not seen the movie, the various reviews I’ve seen make it clear that viewers are walking away from the film with different interpretations. Which is to say that it appears to be precisely the kind of movie that actively promotes critical thinking and creates an opportunity for students to engage in productive dialogue.

These efforts–too often successful–to preemptively foreclose debate because it might make some students uncomfortable seem to be growing in frequency. This is a disturbing trend. It’s different from the familiar habit of college administrators trying to squelch free speech because they want a nice, quiet, Stepford campus. This is college students demanding they not be exposed to ideas because they don’t want to be discomfited.

But that’s what education is about. We don’t learn unless we are made uncomfortable. The most well-educated person is the one who regularly reads those whose views are opposed to their own, who can make their intellectual opponents’ arguments as accurately–or even more so–than their opponents can, and who can accurately critique the weaknesses of their own perspective. There’s an old saying that a good research project is one in which you can believe the author’s mind could be changed.

This is the heart of the liberal arts ideal. By studying economics, my views on politics were challenged and changed. By studying anthropology and evolution, my understanding of human nature and the possibilities of human organization were shaped, which structured my views on politics. By studying psychology my perspective on the possibility of markets was refined.

If students refuse to be challenged, they will never become educated. If they run from debate by shutting it down, they will never hear challenges to their perspectives, will never learn the weaknesses of their ideas, will never learn to critically evaluate their beliefs, and will never learn to intellectually defend their understanding of the world around them.

In short, these students have rejected the ideal of the liberal arts education.

The liberal arts are a hard sell these days. People want to know how their course of study will lead to a job. All evidence is that a liberal arts education is a great basis for a broad range of careers, but perhaps too broad, because the direct connections may not exist. I can explain to students how a history major became an international shipping executive, or how an English Major ended up managing international supply chains, but the paths are so contingent, so unique and unrepeatable, that they provide little clear guidance. So students, or at least their parents, shy away from the liberal arts.

And of course careers matter, especially given the cost of college. But the reason the liberal arts are a good foundation for careers is because they train people to think and to learn, to incorporate disparate ideas from different fields and link them together to make sense of things. But not only do too few people see how that connects to careers, they no longer–assuming many people ever did–value critical thinking for itself, for its intrinsic value and the intangible value it adds to the individual’s life. They don’t value it for what it makes of a person.

This is the consequence: students who demand they not be challenged because it is uncomfortable, who demand intellectual safety over intellectual challenge, and who view their epistemic closure as right- thinking.

In the bigger picture this matters because a self-governing republic very well may require an educated populace: people who can think critically about different policy alternatives; citizens who can recognize that their own favored ideas are also imperfect; a public that can understand that vigorous public debate and open discussion of alternatives they dislike is not a threat to liberty but is the essence of liberty; a public that can accept electoral and policy losses without interpreting them as a sign of the system’s illegitimacy.

There is an irony for conservatives here. They have in many ways been at the forefront of the attack on the liberal arts, both because they don’t see enough monetary value in, for example, a theater degree, and because they object to the ways in which liberal academics have challenged their world view and made them uncomfortable. And now there are an increasing number of liberal students taking up that cause and making the same demands, but about conservative views.

And there is also an irony for liberals. In the 1960s liberal students fought for the right to freely discuss and learn about challenging ideas–they fought for intellectual openness. Today liberal students fight against free discussion and teaching of challenging ideas–they fight for intellectual closure.

The American academy is deeply imperiled by a host of factors, including rising costs, a public that doesn’t appreciate what education really does for a person, professors who don’t think it’s their job to teach the public that value (while sneering at them for not understanding it), anti-intellectual administrators, and accrediting agencies that impose ever more inflexible standards that undermine creativity and experimentation in teaching. If the idea of education is assaulted by the students as well, our last best hope for an educated public may disappear.

I finally got to listen to this audiobook, in its intended order. It turned out it was an issue with the file naming rather than it being on random. Which meant that I needed to go back and change a lot of file names.

The funny thing is that no matter what order you “read” the story, the sniper really does come out of nowhere. Though since I was aware that there would be a sniper, I found myself waiting in anticipation for it and was a little less surprised. The timing surprised me because, like I said, out of nowhere.

The random scene that describes the book most closely is, of all things, “He’s having dinner with someone and the food is being described.”

Though the title (“The Last Juror”) suggests its a legal thriller of some sort, it’s really not. It’s mostly just a show about the weird goings-on of a small Mississippi town through the eyes of an outsider who runs the local paper.

It wasn’t a bad book, but I might have enjoyed it more listening to it out-of-order.

“The promise of the management class is that they could manage colleges better than faculty. They have wildly failed at this on every level.”-Garry Canavan

Gracy Olmstead laments – and collects lamentations – on the expanding empire of child-free cities. Seattle is contemplating membership in the club.

It might indeed be “good for cities” to take cars off the road. Except that it’s not what people want.

The City Journal suggests that California’s blanket primary system could cost Democrats.

Vamien asks and answers the question of whether Arrow is a huge rip-off of Batman. The answer is the affirmative. When watching the Arrow-Flash crossover, it very much made me think of the Batman-Superman relationship.

Andrea Moore grew up in a crack-addled house, but feared being taken away from it.

Cleveland State wants its students to graduate on time, and they’re willing to pay for it. As we seek to hold colleges accountable for the results of their students’ progress, there may be more programs like this – and more done to entice the very students most likely to graduate on time. It’s an interesting set of incentives.

Kevin Williamson argues that our current transportation systems are royalist. There are actually some good points in here, but they’re not all easy to notice amidst attempts are partisan point-scoring.

In a piece about Iran, Spengler argues that rule-of-the-majority is superior to democracy. I was actually pondering a minoritarian form of government for an alien race for a story. The basic idea is simple: The minority’s innate vulnerability leaves them in a position where they have to heed the majority, in a way that’s not true for the inverse.

I think I’ve heard this before, but I can’t remember: The color blue is a relatively modern invention.

I love this: Peeing on a particular wall in Germany was becoming such a problem, they invented a way so that the wall will pee back.

Aaron Carroll talks about penis size.

Adam Ozimek argues that the red states are under no obligation to prop up blue state operational expenses.

Should unemployment insurance duration terms change with age?

You can AirBnB in an igloo in Massachusetts.

Nobody does lists like Cracked does lists. Here are five really fished up court trials.

Introducing a bus that runs on poop.

John Tammy argues that cities persevere not by keeping industry as much as through flexibility.

Birth tourism is a booming business.

Xavier Marquez looks at electoral parodies, which is to say when autocratic leaders scoff at the notion of democracy by pretending to engage in it.

Alice in Wonderland remains a classic, but its author’s reputation has taken a beating.

Jes Howen McBride says that small homes make for better cities.

A Russian stuntman decided to put himself on fire and jump off a building. With video!

The haunting beauty of Tokyo without advertisements.

Over at Bawdy House Provisions, I wrote a piece on the controversy regarding the Indiana RFRA:

Ross Douthat has made repeated mentions that the right is “negotiating its surrender.” He makes a point similar to the one I am about to make, but he seems to view it in the context of “the left changed” while I see it as “the right refused to until it was far too late.”

The problem here is that they are coming from such a place of weakness that there isn’t much to negotiate. The have to play off latent sympathy from the other side, to which they have shown none. Actions have consequences. Rather than relating this to a war that is winding down, though, I think the more applicable comparison is to trying to negotiate a settlement after the verdict is in. You had your chance to get a much better settlement. You were unreasonably cocky, and these are the consequences.

The writing was on the wall a decade ago. Gay marriage was going to become legal. It was just a question of when. We’re slightly ahead of schedule by my predictions. But the right had plenty of time to “evolve” on the issue and make a swift and orderly accommodation of the fact that gays, too, would like to be married, and the perspective that there aren’t many logical reasons why they shouldn’t that don’t involve an open bias that was likely to become increasingly unsavory.

One area I meant to explore but didn’t is that this is where policy conflicts with ideology. Which is to say that the purpose of a political party is to win elections. And on this front, the GOP’s stance served them well throughout the last decade. Each side held up its end of the bargain, in a short-sighted way. The fight will have outlived its usefulness in relatively short order, I believe, and the GOP will determine that even mostly symbolic measures like this one are costing them more than they’re getting from them. They won’t toss the religious right overboard, but it won’t carry on like the abortion issue has. And those advocating restricted rights – and social ostracization – will be left with less than they would have if the party had taken a longer view. But it’s not a party’s job to protect the interest of its constituents (against their own inclinations, in this case). It’s their job to win elections. It’s headed towards being an issue with all of the usefulness of a burned out candle.

So Taco Bell released this commercial.

Which is really quite gorgeous.

I’ve long wondered why Taco Bell doesn’t do breakfast, given that Sonic has previously gotten my business solely for having (very lackluster) breakfast tacos in parts of the country that don’t offer it regularly. It’s definitely punching up to go after McDonald’s on the breakfast front because that is what they do best.

Speaking of which, it’s looking like McD’s is finally rolling out the all-day breakfast in San Diego. It’s amazing what desperation will get you to do. Jack in the Box figured this out ages ago. It happens quite frequently these days that I end up getting breakfast sandwiches at Sheetz simply because they serve it later in the day.

And lastly, McDonald’s is also in the news for announcing that it’s going to start paying its employees more. However, given that they only own about one in ten of its locations, the effect will be limited. When I worked at McDonald’s, I was actually about fifty cents ahead of minimum wage. And when minimum wage went up, my pay went up, too.