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THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: IRS Agent Charged With Sexual Battery During Audit.

FIGHT THE POWER! STICK IT TO THE MAN! Students Boo Mandatory Diversity Class at University of Oklahoma.

We need more of this spirit. Plus: “The course is part of the portfolio for the new vice president of diversity programs, Jabar Shumate, a former press secretary to President David Boren (an ex-U.S. senator) who will be making between $200,000 and $250,000 a year, the Associated Press reported.”

TIMOTHY SANDEFUR: The Politics Of Star Trek.

The key to Star Trek’s longevity and cultural penetration was its seriousness of purpose, originally inspired by creator Gene Roddenberry’s science fiction vision. Modeled on Gulliver’s Travels, the series was meant as an opportunity for social commentary, and it succeeded ingeniously, with episodes scripted by some of the era’s finest science fiction writers. Yet the development of Star Trek’s moral and political tone over 50 years also traces the strange decline of American liberalism since the Kennedy era.

Indeed. Plus, binge-watching the entire Original Series in order. “After a while, it was like the same crazy hand-to-hand combat moves, cookie-cutter planet landscapes, and terrible setups to get the characters back in time were not just jokes that modern me could laugh and gawk at as much as they were clues to understanding a very, very different world. And I’m not talking just about the Federation—I’m talking about the real-life generation immediately before mine, too.”

Both via Rand Simberg.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Colleges brainwash students into believing 9/11 was our fault.

Not all of us will be mourning 9/11 victims and their families this Friday on the 14th anniversary of the attacks. Hundreds of college kids across the country will instead be taught to sympathize with the terrorists.

That’s because their America-hating leftist professors are systematically indoctrinating them into believing it’s all our fault, that the US deserved punishment for “imperialism” — and the kids are too young to remember or understand what really happened that horrific day.

Case in point is a freshman-level English class taught at several major universities across the country called “The Literature of 9/11” — which focuses almost entirely on writings from the perspective of the Islamic terrorists, rather than the nearly 3,000 Americans who were slaughtered by them.

The syllabus, which includes books like “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” and “Poems from Guantanamo: Detainees Speak,” portray terrorists as “freedom fighters” driven by oppressive US foreign policies.

Even highly ranked University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has adopted the curriculum. The 9/11 seminar is taught by UNC associate English professor Neel Ahuja, who specializes in “post-colonial studies.”

Cost of attending UNC Chapel Hill: In-State, $21,225. Out-of-state, $41,977.

EDWARD CONLON: The Racial Reality of Policing: Police bias and misconduct are serious problems—but so is the epidemic of homicide among young black men.

It’s not up to me to decide what activists should protest, but after years of dealing with the realities of street violence, I don’t understand how a movement called “Black Lives Matter” can ignore the leading cause of death among young black men in the U.S., which is homicide by their peers.

In 2011, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention counted 129 instances of black men killed by “legal intervention”—that is to say, by cops. The figure is incomplete because of a lack of national reporting requirements, and it says nothing about the circumstances of the killings or the race of the officers involved. But it gives a sense of the scope of the problem.

By contrast, in that same year, 6,739 black men were murdered, overwhelmingly by young men like themselves. Since 2001, even as rates of violent crime have dropped dramatically, more than 90,000 black men in the U.S. have been killed by other black men. With fatalities on this scale, the term epidemic is not a metaphor. Every year, the casualty count of black-on-black crime is twice that of the death toll of 9/11.

To talk about this vast slaughter isn’t changing the subject from police misconduct. It’s the only way a conversation about reforming police practices can begin.

In March, Attorney General Eric Holder released two reports on Ferguson. One covered in great detail the shooting death of Michael Brown by Officer Darren Wilson; the other described the broader patterns of policing in the city. Partisans have tended to choose one report or the other to support their reading of events.

No, Brown wasn’t shot in the back while attempting to surrender to a white cop, nor was he shot for jaywalking. He had just robbed a store, and he had punched Officer Wilson in the face and tried to steal his gun. In the wake of Brown’s death, Ferguson burned because people believed a lie; because many still believe it, cops have been shot there, and the threat of riot remains.

The other report showed that Ferguson was a speed trap for people going nowhere, six square miles of mostly black people, mostly poor, with 50 cops, almost all white, who were ordered to milk them for every possible nickel by white city managers. Black people were further bled dry in a punitive cycle of fines and fees; missed court dates led to arrest warrants, which left them increasingly incapable of having a chance at a productive life.

Which story to emphasize? It depends on your agenda.

Indeed it does.

VIRGINIA POSTREL: Princeton’s School Of Hard Knocks. “Every January a great team loses the Super Bowl. Every April three of the Final Four go down. And every September, extraordinary students arrive at highly selective universities only to discover that one out of every two really will wind up in the bottom half of the freshman class –and one out of every five in the bottom quintile.”

SPOILER: NO. Reihan Salam: Does Donald Trump represent the ascendancy of white nationalism on the American right?

However, with the Democrats pushing non-white identity politics so hard, the action/reaction principle suggests that white identity politics are likely to follow if this keeps up. Plus:

In a 1916 essay in the Atlantic, Randolph Bourne, at the time one of America’s leading left-wing intellectuals, attacked the melting-pot ideal, in which immigrants to the United States and their descendants were expected to assimilate into a common culture. He saw instead America evolving into “a cosmopolitan federation of national colonies, of foreign cultures, from whom the sting of devastating competition has been removed.” Instead of forging a common American identity, the country he envisioned would be one where members of minority ethnic groups preserved their cultural separateness.

To fully realize this ideal, however, it was vitally important that Anglo-Saxon Americans not assert themselves in the same way as the members of other ethnic groups. Why? Because if Anglo-Saxon Americans were to celebrate their identity as a people with longstanding ties to their American homeland, it would implicitly discount the American-ness of those from minority ethnic backgrounds. For Bourne, and for those who’ve advocated for his brand of cultural pluralism since, it is the obligation of Anglo-Saxon Americans, and other white Americans with no strong ties to a non-American homeland, to be post-ethnic cosmopolitans. But what if being a post-ethnic cosmopolitan is not actually that satisfying?

In his highly inventive 2004 book The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America, the sociologist Eric Kaufmann calls this bargain “asymmetrical multiculturalism.” Under asymmetrical multiculturalism, minority ethnic groups are encouraged to assert their group identities and to defend their group interests while the majority ethnic group is strongly discouraged from doing the same. Overt expressions of Jewish, Mexican, Laotian, or Bengali pride are very welcome. Overt expressions of WASP pride, however, are not. Kauffman maintains that because WASPs, and to a lesser extent other whites, are denied the option of celebrating their ethnic heritage, they instead champion essentially ideological ideas, like individualism or a vague, ill-defined belief in “American exceptionalism” that is bereft of any real cultural content.

Perhaps this explains the fervor of the overwhelmingly white Social-Justice Warrior demographic.

SECOND ANNUAL LABOR DAY INDIE AUTHOR SALE: Vengeance From Ashes by Sam Schall 99c

IS THIS THE GREATEST DISPLACED PERSON CRISIS SINCE WWII:  The refugee crisis Europe helped bring on itself [With Comment By John]

INSOMNIA THEATER: PENN STATE PROFESSOR SUPPRESSES STUDENT ARTWORK ON TERRORISM, CALLING IT “RACIST” – Tonight I’d like to share a FIRE video from several years ago that tells the story of artist and former Penn State grad student Joshua Stulman whose Portraits of Terror art exhibit, which satirized radical Islamic terrorism, was censored by his professor and school administrators. While this decision was reversed by the school’s president, Stulman’s work was never displayed at Penn State. Later on, Stulman made plans to showcase his work at Gratz College in Philadelphia, however the event was canceled for fear of a terrorist attack against the institution.

This strain of censorship is not new. At the time of the release of this video I wrote an extensive blog about the many cases we’d already seen of students getting in trouble for being critical of radical Islam, or even of Hezbollah and Hamas. All these years later, the risks are greater than ever. You can even expect people who rely on free speech, like cartoonist Gary Trudeau, to take the murder of other cartoonists as an opportunity to chastise those of us who believe free speech means nothing without the right to offend.

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ONLY IN THE SENSE IT’S LARGELY NON EXISTENT: Does God Hate Green Energy?

THE TRIUMPHANT RETURN OF BOOK PLUG FRIDAY: In which we ask, where are we? What are we doing here? Why did we go away?  What is literature?

SECOND ANNUAL LABOR DAY INDIE AUTHOR SALE: Survival Test, by David Burkhead, 2.99

INSERT YOUR OWN CENTIPEDE JOKE: Another week of embarrassing shoes dropping for Hillary.  We are quite sure her name isn’t Imelda, right?

AS ROBERT A. HEINLEIN SAID:  Roman matrons used to say to their sons: “Come back with your shield, or on it.” Later on, this custom declined. So did Rome. Jeremy Corbyn: Let taxpayers opt out of funding the army.

IT NEVER WORKED FOR ME: When I homeschooled I was far more formal, but it works for some kids and some parents.  Which is the point. Homeschooling is by definition individual. Class Dismissed: It’s Not Homeschooling, It’s Unschooling.

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WHY DOES THE AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE ASSOCIATION hate babies?

FREDDIE MERCURY WOULD BE 69 TODAY. Here he is at Live Aid.

BETTER WINE through spaceflight.

BYRON YORK: Taking the GOP immigration debate beyond Trump.

JOURNALISM: How Mainstream Media and Social Media Present COMPLETELY Different Views Of Syrian Immigrant Crisis.

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