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MICHAEL LEDEEN: WHO’S WINNING IN SYRIA? “It behooves us to maintain a healthy skepticism about likely outcomes.”

BOB ZUBRIN: A School Crisis in Colorado: Left-Right Rumble Misses the Real Enemy.

I have spoken to quite a few Jeffco school teachers, and they are indeed very upset, but mostly for reasons much more substantial than those provided on the recall petition. Specifically, while they are annoyed at the continued denial of meaningful raises, the thing that is really killing them is a massive amount of overwork caused by bureaucratic overload. Of the teachers I encountered, many are now working twelve hour days; six hours teaching, two hours of traditional preparation work, and four hours filling out online data entry forms, “setting goals,” being forced to read one vacuous educationalist methodology text after another, and engaging in numerous other unproductive exercises to satisfy enormous reportage requirements stemming from Common Core. In addition, the teachers find the wastage of something like twenty percent of class time on endless standardized tests extremely objectionable, as it makes creative teaching nearly impossible.

Now the fact of the matter is that this horrible stuff did not come from the Jeffco board. It came from the state and federal educational bureaucracies, both of which are controlled by the union’s liberal allies. The board must bear some responsibility too, however, because even though it didn’t invent this very Progressive wrecking operation against the public schools, it has chosen to go gleefully along with it. Instead of engaging in a left-right food fight with the teachers, the allegedly conservative board could and should have made common cause with them on this vital issue. But they did not, and as they have now outflanked the teachers far to the left in their support of educrat madness, really do deserve to be thrown out.

There is a broader lesson in this for conservatives. There are three million teachers in this country, comprising close to two percent of the total electorate. They need not be our enemies. While teachers in general tend to lean liberal on most issues, across the nation they are being forcefully oppressed by the domineering central planners of the Progressive agenda. There is common ground to be found, and an opportunity to show classroom teachers that they could have much better friends elsewhere than those their leaders are in bed with currently.

Worth a try.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Unions suffer loss in teacher tenure court case.

A lawsuit seeking to have New York’s teacher tenure protections ruled unconstitutional will advance, thanks to a judge’s ruling late Friday afternoon.

Teachers unions filed a motion to dismiss the case, but their motion was denied.

New York State United Teachers, along with the state and the city of New York, had argued that legislative changes in April made the suit unnecessary. But Justice Philip Minardo decided those changes were not grounds enough for dismissal. “The legislature’s marginal changes affecting, e.g., the term of probation and/or the disciplinary proceedings applicable to teachers, are insufficient to achieve the required result,” Minardo wrote in his decision.

The legislative changes make it easier for school districts to fire bad teachers and award tenure after four years of teaching instead of three.

The parents seeking to invalidate the teacher tenure protections argue the law robs children of their right to a basic education.

“Teachers in New York City are more likely to die on the job than be replaced because of poor performance,” according to the Partnership for Educational Justice, which is backing the case. Roughly 30 percent of New York students are proficient in math and reading.

Expect to see more lawsuits like this, and more reform legislation, as people catch on to what’s really going on in K-12 education.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: “To summarize, Ms. Massey is a drug-addled, mentally ill ex-stripper who has had the privilege of being educated first at the prestigious private New York University (annual tuition $46,170) and subsequently at elite Yale University (annual tuition $47,600), so that we might estimate she has consumed somewhere in excess of $300,000 in order to become a freelance writer. Considering that there are no real entry barriers to the field of journalism (Hunter S. Thompson became a Latin American correspondent in 1962 with no educational credentials beyond a high-school diploma), we must view Ms. Massey’s stunning profligacy as a typical example of The Higher Education Bubble.”

JOHN C. WRIGHT ON WHY CLASSIC SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY ARE NOW PROBLEMATIC:

We are in the Dark Ages, and the darkness influences all things in society, including speculative literature. I mean the term not as an exaggeration or a metaphor: the technological products of our enlightened forefathers spring from the worldview which says science is a proper way to discover the mind of God by studying His works. Eliminating that God from one’s worldview eventually eliminates the respect for human life, free thought, and reason in law and custom which are necessary precursors to scientific endeavors, and eliminating science eliminates technology. Once the lamps go out, the darkness is everywhere, even in the little corners of society where children read books about spacerockets or elves.

The moderns have been taught to hate and loath their own country, their ancestors, their parents, and been told everything written before the current day is racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, transcismophobic, and pure evil. These nutbags think that their own standard bearers of the Progressive movement, the founders of their genre, were not Progressives like themselves.

One need only hear sexual libertarian and radical egalitarian nut Bob Heinlein being excoriated as a member of the misogynist phallocratic patriarchy to realize how far off the edge of the world the lunatics have sailed the ship of fools.

This is not some lunatic fringe belief. It is lunacy, of course, but not fringe. It is mainstream. The core institutions and standard bearers of Science Fiction, the largest publishers, the most prestigious awards, our once-respected guild the SFWA, the oldest and most famous magazine: they all buy into the narrative and all support the narrative with a singleminded fury that is Bolshevik in its vehemence, patience, and pettiness.

Progressives hate the past and seek forever to blacken, demean, and obliterate it. Anyone reading the older books would see immediately that the modern works are only merely equal, not as innovative, and that the modern award-winning works are notably inferior.

The notion of progress is the notion that the past is bad and the present is better and the future will be better yet. If you read old books and find that they are either slightly better or remarkably better than modern offerings, you see a decline, not a progress, and the foundation of progressivism, is overthrown.

Orwell understood this, and so do people who tell us that our reading enjoyment ration has been increased from 300 grams to 250.

Plus: “Heroism is antithetical to Goodthink.”

BODY BY CHIPOTLE. You can do this eating anywhere, if you watch what you eat and also exercise.

I’M BEGINNING TO THINK THAT SHE’S JUST NOT ALL THAT UPSET WHEN BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO PEOPLE WHO DEFEND OUR COUNTRY: Hillary: hey, that VA scandal wasn’t that big of a deal.

HMM: New video purportedly shows US-Kurdish raid against ISIS.

STARTER SUPERCAR: Review: The 2016 McLaren 570S. “Don’t get hung up on the baby McLaren’s $187,400 base price. Like most 570S customers, you only need to concern yourself with 36 monthly lease payments of roughly $2200. That’s not exactly BMW 3-series money, but it’s feasible enough to make us wonder: What if all of life’s little luxuries were traded for one big and fast luxury?”

IN PUTIN’S RUSSIA, INTERNET DISCONNECTS YOU: Russian Experiment Tried — And Failed — To Block Citizens’ Access To The Rest Of Internet.

USELESS BUT KINDA COOL: Forgotten Weapon: The Delightfully Impractical Villar Perosa Double Machine Gun. “Other experiments were made, including mounting the guns to bicycle handlebars, but these were all pretty fanciful ideas and none of them proved practical.”

SORRY, STAR WARS FANS, YOU CAN’T GET YOUR CHILDHOOD BACK: A “Memo to overexcited ‘Star Wars’ fanboys,” from Kyle Smith of the New York Post. “’The Force Awakens’ is not the experience you’re looking for:”

Even if “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” turns out to be as good as “Star Wars” (I’m not calling it “A New Hope” or Episode IV, because I do not acknowledge the existence of Episodes I-III), it won’t be as good. Why? Because “Star Wars” wasn’t even as good as “Star Wars.”

In 1977, “Star Wars” exploded with the force of a thousand surprisingly fragile Death Stars because nothing like it had been seen before. The pace, for a mid-’70s kid movie, was breakneck. (Carrie Fisher remembers George Lucas constantly telling the cast, “Faster, faster!”) Combining wry wit with thrilling action was all but unknown.

The majestic score by John Williams, which elevated the story to a level of beauty and grace comparable to classic films, was from another galaxy compared to the competition. Recall what else was out there at the time. “The Apple Dumpling Gang.” “Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo.” “Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger.”

Succeeding generations saw “Star Wars” when they were 10, or 8, or 5 years old. That you is gone. You can’t lose your virginity twice, you can’t believe in Santa Claus again and you’ll never regain a child’s sense of wonder, even dressed as a Jawa.

Beyond the B-movies that Kyle listed above, as James Lileks noted on Star Wars’ 30th anniversary, what made Star Wars so novel a movie-going experience at the time was that it was the only film in the 1970s that combined both the majesty of 2001: A Space Odyssey’s gleaming interplanetary technology with that rarest of all things in ‘70s cinema: an unambiguously happy ending:

And what an ending, eh? Han Solo — Harrison Ford in his first great relaxed performance, and his last — conquers his selfishness and redeems himself. Luke uses the Force — which is sort of like magnetism, plus ethics — and blows up Peter Cushing and his Death Star, along with untold engineers, support staff, kitchen workers, etc. The movie could have ended there, but no: It concluded with an awards ceremony. At the shank end of the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, Carter-era malaise and ennui, Lucas filmed a movie that ended with a princess giving medals to heroes.

After a generation of movies with tortured antiheroes who couldn’t order a sandwich without making A Statement, it seemed remarkably fresh.

It saved science fiction. You could argue that “Star Wars” saved “Star Trek” as well; the success of the movie had everyone greenlighting space operas now, and the first Trek movie — a long, serious film by the director of “West Side Story” — was released a while later, leading to three more decades of Trek.

Disney countered with “The Black Hole,” a so-so movie ruined by things like robots with Texas accents. There were dozens of B-movie knockoffs; even schlockmaster Roger Corman made one. But no one ever quite put it together like the original “Star Wars.” Lucas had taken every cliché in the genre, stripped it down and served it up as new. Add some brilliant art direction and a stirring score, and you had the grandest slice of epic cheese ever made.

But other than, arguably, The Empire Strikes Back, it’s been nearly impossible to recreate that magic moment in 1977 when it all came together for both George Lucas and his audience. As Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels of all people once said, “You can’t fake virginity.”

Though if anybody can, it’s hardcore Star Wars fans…

JUST GOT THIS HP Wireless Laser Printer. The Insta-Wife took over my Brother (which is theoretically wireless, but hard enough to set up that I never bothered) and I wanted a wireless printer suitable for big documents (i.e., not an inkjet that prints using liquid gold) that also had a sheet-feeder copier so that I could copy multiple pages without having to do them one at a time. Setup was a snap, and it prints perfectly from anywhere in the house.

ELECTRIC EELS: Even cooler than we were taught. “To my knowledge, this is the first example of an animal generating a signal that simultaneously serves as a weapon and as a carrier for sensory imaging.”

IN CASE YOUR HALLOWEEN ISN’T PREDICTABLY TEDIOUS ENOUGH: A “Lesbian Feminist House Of Horrors.”

WHY ARE UNIVERSITIES SUCH HOTBEDS OF RACISM AND SEXUAL PREDATION? Inside Stanford Business School’s Spiraling Sex Scandal. “For the first time in his life, says Phills, who was one of the rare black professors at the business school when he arrived (and still rare, plus two or three, including Condoleezza Rice, when he left), he has felt the sting of racism, and at allegedly liberal Stanford, where bigotry seems bleached away by the perpetual California sunshine. At various points in their chats, Saloner—a Jew who fled apartheid South Africa rather than serve in its military—and Gruenfeld spoke of putting Phills in a cage and castrating him in public. Saloner relished seeing him in an orange jumpsuit in prison, and compared him to an elephant seal and a tarantula. To punish him and gain custody of their two mixed-race children, Phills charges, Gruenfeld reduced him—a man with three Harvard degrees, including a Ph.D. in organizational behavior—to the quintessential ‘angry black man.'”

Plus: “For Gruenfeld—who has been cited by Malcolm Gladwell; who tutored Sheryl Sandberg on gender issues (and sits on the board of Lean In, the nonprofit foundation connected to Sandberg’s best-selling book of the same name); and who sold her own book, Acting with Power, at auction last fall for nearly a million dollars—questions of credibility are equally crucial. How does it look for someone who built her career analyzing the abusiveness (she dubbed it ‘disinhibition’) of the powerful, and who, until a month before she became romantically entangled with the dean, was the G.S.B.’s sexual-harassment adviser, and who, as co-director of Stanford’s Executive Program for Women Leaders, counsels high-powered women on how to overcome gender stereotypes, to wind up secretly sleeping with her boss?”

Perhaps liberal academics think the rest of the world is this way because their world is this way.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 899.

PEOPLE WHO BUILT FALLOUT SHELTERS IN THE 1950S AND 1960S ARE MOCKED AS PARANOID, BUT WE KEEP HEARING ABOUT INSTANCES WHERE THE U.S. AND U.S.S.R. CAME SURPRISINGLY CLOSE TO NUCLEAR WAR: In 1983 ‘war scare,’ Soviet leadership feared nuclear surprise attack by U.S.

BUT REMEMBER, IT’S THE RIGHT WHO’S ANTI-SCIENCE: Sand Causes Cancer, Say British Fracktivists.

Green activists have found a new way to villainize hydraulic fracturing in Britain: claiming that sand, one essential component of the sluice pumped at high pressure into horizontal wells to “frack” shale, will give people cancer. . . .

By this logic, greens ought to be calling for the quarantining of beaches—to hear these activists tell it, the sand you’d be tanning on there would be as big a cancer risk as the UV rays you might be soaking up.

This kind of campaigning isn’t unique to this specific green group, either. It’s part of a pattern of behavior employed by the modern environmental movement, in which sober analysis of important policy decisions is overrun by overwrought and often emotional rhetoric—baseless fear-mongering. For a group that prides itself on being joined at the hip to science, greens show a remarkable tendency to ditch the facts when it’s convenient to serve their point, and this latest sand-causes-cancer campaign is a great example of that.

Once you realize that it’s about protection money and lefty agitprop, it makes more sense.

IS THERE ANYTHING THAT HASN’T GONE TO HELL IN THE AGE OF OBAMA? The Decline Of The American Brothel.

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MORE GUNS, LESS CRIME: Gun deaths down 30%.

The number and rate of firearm murders has hit a new low since the sky-high gun killings during the 1990s, with California topping an FBI list despite having some of the toughest anti-gun laws on the books.

Data from the FBI and Pew Research Center show that all gun violence has declined since the Clinton era, though suicides blamed on guns has ticked up.

In a new report, Pew said that between 1993 and 2000, the firearm murder rate dropped by almost half, from seven homicides to 3.8 homicides per 100,000 people. It also said that all gun deaths — murder, suicide, police and accidental — have dropped 30 percent since 1993.

Suicide, of course, shouldn’t count as gun violence, but rather as the exercise of the “right to die,” right?