Lena Dunham

Source: Wikimedia Commons

DRAGGING RAPE CULTURE THROUGH BROKEN GLASS
Rolling Stone is a magazine that should have died long before, or at least along with, Jerry Garcia. But its journalistic deflowering, and possibly its death knell, came in the form of an absurdly sensationalistic and patently false story of a gang rape at the “overwhelmingly blond” University of Virginia, which we have covered in stories here and here.

On Friday a federal jury decided that reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely, Rolling Stone, and Wenner Media acted with reckless disregard for the truth in the story “A Rape on Campus,” which was published late in 2014. University of Virginia administrator Nicole Eramo had sought $7.5 million in damages but can ask for a different amount. Next up: the defamed fraternity’s $25 million lawsuit against Rolling Stone. Here’s hoping they render that hippie dinosaur extinct.

PROFESSOR: COLLEGE STUDENTS ARE DUMB AS HELL ABOUT SLAVERY
University of Wisconsin English professor Duke Pesta has been quizzing his students for eleven years about rudimentary historical questions and has concluded they don’t know a thing about slavery”€”or at least they don’t realize it was not invented in America and has been practiced across the globe for millennia. Before the early 2000s, Pesta says his students were “often historically ignorant, but not politicized.” But now that has all changed:

They cannot tell you many historical facts or relate anything meaningful about historical biographies, but they are, however, stridently vocal about the corrupt nature of the Republic, about the wickedness of the founding fathers, and about the evils of free markets. Most alarmingly, they know nothing about the fraught history of Marxist ideology and communist governments over the last century, but often reductively define socialism as “€˜fairness.”€™…[Common Core] has further politicized the teaching of history, reducing the story of Western culture to little more than a litany of crimes, exploitations, and genocides, while simultaneously whitewashing the history of ideologies like socialism and communism.

This coincides with a recent survey of millennials which found that two-thirds of the historically brain-damaged whippersnappers thought that Hitler killed more people than Stalin.

STUDY: AUTOMATION KILLS MORE JOBS THAN OUTSOURCING
A recent study by Ball State University’s Center for Business and Economic Research found that while Donald Trump is correct that outsourcing has cost American workers factory jobs, a much more efficient job-killer is automation. According to the study, of the seven million or so factory jobs that have vanished since manufacturing employment peaked in 1979, only 13 percent were the result of trade deals; the rest were snatched up by robots.