IT’S COME TO THIS: Baltimore Professor: “White People Should Deposit Their Unearned Wealth In Black Accounts.” “Lawrence Brown is an assistant professor in the Public Health Department at Morgan State University in Baltimore. He’s an activist who basically believes blacks should receive reparations, that America is segregated, that blacks suffer from historical trauma from white supremacist America.” He even kind of looks like Al Sharpton with that megaphone. The old, fat Sharpton, not the current manorexic-lollipop Sharpton.

And this remains evergreen, alas:

L.A. TIMES: That Goffman book: Is the next big publishing scandal about to break?

Steven Lubet, a law professor at Northwestern, has placed the issue of Goffman’s methods and veracity back on the front burner. Goffman has answered his critique in a way that leaves him “even less certain how much of the book is true.” Others, including Eugene Volokh of the Washington Post’s Volokh Conspiracy law blog, have taken a closer look at “On the Run,” and come away with similar doubts.

Goffman’s publishers at the University of Chicago Press and Picador, and her current employers at the University of Wisconsin, have been largely silent or dismissive about the controversy. But the book, previously regarded as a landmark in urban ethnography, may be due for a reevaluation. And that’s perilous ground. . . . Goffman may effectively have immunized herself and her book against second-guessing by cloaking all of her subjects behind pseudonyms and destroying her field notes — a step she says she took to avoid being subpoenaed for the names of subjects she witnessed in criminal activity.

Nothing suspicious about that. I’m reminded of Michael Bellesiles’ documents that were lost in a mysteriously undocumented flood.

HEALTH: Every Virus a Person Has Had Can Be Seen in a Drop of Blood, Researchers Find. “Using less than a drop of blood, a new test can reveal nearly every virus a person has ever been exposed to, scientists reported on Thursday. The test, which is still experimental, can be performed for as little as $25 and could become an important research tool for tracking patterns of disease in various populations, helping scientists compare the old and the young, or people in different parts of the world. It could also be used to try to find out whether viruses, or the body’s immune response to them, contribute to chronic diseases and cancer, the researchers said.” I predict that we’ll eventually discover that there are a lot of viruses with no obvious symptoms that nonetheless play a major role in people’s mental and physical health.

SPYING: What an NYPD Spy Copter Reveals About FBI Spy Planes.

JOANNA WILLIAMS: Who Cares What Colour Philosophers Are? It’s their ideas that matter, not their race or sex. To be fair, most of those agitating for diversity do so because they (rightly) feel they wouldn’t get far on merit.

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HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: We don’t need fewer lawyers. We need cheaper ones. Unable to afford representation, more Americans are going to court alone, and they’re losing.

This is discussed in my colleague Ben Barton’s excellent new book, just out from Oxford University Press, Glass Half Full: The Decline And Rebirth Of The Legal Profession. It’s a must-read for anyone interested in where lawyers and lawyering are headed.

MARK FRAUENFELDER: Kitchen Shears Are Often Better Than A Knife. “I use my $10 kitchen shears to chop lettuce. I put lettuce in a salad bowl, stick in the shears, and make a bunch of random cuts until the volume of the lettuce drops to a reasonable level. I also use shears to cut pizzas, open plastic bags, cut chicken, open boxes, and lots of other stuff. They frequently go missing because my wife and kids take them to use in another room. There’s not much I can do about that other than gnash my teeth and curse the universe for allowing me to be born in such a world. They clean up in the dishwasher.”

UBER FOR TAILORS: Familiar face launches online service that summons a tailor to your home. “The online service works like this: You need a tailor? You go to zTailors.com— yes, the “Z” is for Zimmer — or use its app, type in your ZIP code and summon a tailor to your home to alter your wardrobe (they measure you, pick up what needs to be tailored and return it within a week). The service officially launches Monday but Zimmer already successfully rolled it out in stealth mode in some cities, including Oakland, California, zTailors’ home town. It already has approximately 600 tailors in its stable.”

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE: No criminal charges for teacher who seduced two pupils. “A teacher who seduced two of her pupils – including ‘sexting’ them and pulling one boy out of classes so they could have sex – has lost her teacher’s license, but will not face criminal charges over the inappropriate relationships. Melanie Hendriks initiated sexual relationships with the St John’s College pupils when she was a drama teacher at the Hamilton school.” I blame today’s pervasive culture of female sexual entitlement.

#SHREWCULTURE: Kamila Shamsie: let’s have a year of publishing only women. The picture looks exactly as you would expect.

SHE’S FEARLESS: Reported target Pamela Geller says threats won’t stop her.

Anti-jihadi activist Pamela Geller — reportedly the initial target of the foiled Boston beheading plot — says she is ready to “die standing for freedom.”

And she had some pointed words for the Everett man accused of colluding with slain terrorism suspect Usaamah Rahim.

“I would ask him to re-examine his premises,” Geller said of David Wright, now in federal custody. “He thinks his God wants him to kill over cartoons. I would ask him to step back and think about whether the supreme being could really be so small, petty and vicious.”

The purported horrific beheading plot comes four weeks after a pair of gunmen wounded a security guard outside a Prophet Muhammad cartoon contest in Texas that was organized by Geller as a free speech and anti-Sharia- law exercise. A traffic cop shot and killed the gunmen. . . .

“They’re trying to silence me by force — the last thing I am going to do is be silent. That would be handing them a victory. Watch for some new initiatives coming soon, making a stand again for the freedom of speech,” she said.

She also had a message for any other terrorists plotting to harm her.

“You will lose,” Geller said. “Life and freedom will prevail.”

Much of the criticism she gets is from people who know they would take the coward’s way out, and are ashamed.

UPDATE: Related: Erik Wemple: Who’s Being Needlessly Provocative Now?

The news introduces a juxtaposition: Organizing a cartoon contest vs. scheming to behead an individual. Which is needlessly provocative?

CNN’s Erin Burnett last evening got Geller on the phone and asked her, among other things, “Do you on some level relish being the target of these attacks?”

Geller responded, “Relish being the target? Who self-promotes to get killed?” She said she has recruited an “an army of security” for protection and criticized the media for siding with “those that would target me.”

It’s a fair criticism.

STEPHEN GREEN: Those Stealth Fighter Blues: “If the PAK FA program were any damn good, Putin would find the money for it in his black budget. The Russian Air Force has been living off the scraps of the Sukhoi Su-27 — an airframe which first flew five days before Star Wars premiered in 1977. It has since been upgraded into fourth-generation ‘plus’ planes like the Su-30 and Su-33, but the fact remains that Moscow hasn’t been able to develop a world-beating fighter in nearly 40 years.”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 757.

MEGAN MCARDLE: What We Don’t Know About False Claims Of Rape.

The number of false rape reports is obviously a number we’d like to have. Whether that number is many, or few, alters how vigorously police interrogate victim’s stories, how the media treats accusations of rape, how juries decide tricky cases. Maybe it shouldn’t, you’d argue, but humans are imperfect, and it inevitably does. It’s not surprising that in the wake of the Rolling Stone debacle, we’ve had a lot of feminists claiming that we should draw no wider lessons from this case because statistics show that false positives are rare, and a lot of people on the other side arguing that they can show beyond a reasonable doubt that false reports are epidemic. Both sides should stop, because they are wrong.

I don’t mean that they disagree with me. I don’t mean I think they are wrong. I mean that they are wrong.

Any number of pieces have recently been written suggesting that we actually know — or have a pretty good idea — how many rape reports are false. Deadspin, for example, of the Jameis Winston case: “There’s no doubt that being falsely accused of rape is a dreadful thing that no one should have to endure. One of the reasons it is such a dreadful thing is that false accusations of rape basically do not happen. Statistically, between 2% and 8% of reported rapes are found to be false, but only about 40% of rapes are reported. Do a little math and that means that, for every false accusation of rape, there are up to 100 actual rapes that take place.” When I pointed out on Twitter that the author did not know the percentage of false rape reports, and therefore could not possibly calculate the ratio of false reports to rapes, he suggested that this was a matter of opinion: Maybe I liked one study better, but he thought his was pretty good. This is not a difference of opinion; it is simply a misunderstanding about the data. He has substituted a number he knows — which is, presented in its absolutely best light, the percentage of reports that can definitely be shown to be false by investigators using stringent criteria — for a number he does not know, which is how many reports of rape are actually false.

Perhaps a parallel will make what I mean more clear. Every year, it’s virtually certain that some number of people get away with killing their spouses. More than occasionally, it happens that investigators think they killed their spouses. They’re maybe even pretty sure that they killed their spouses. But they can’t prove it. In the statistics, this will not show up as “spousal murder” or “intimate partner violence”; it will show up as an unsolved case. But they still killed their spouse. How often does this happen? We have absolutely no idea.

I’ve now spent quite a bit of time reading research on rape prevalence over the last few decades. What you see in the literature on false reports is a general move from methods designed to exclude more false negatives (finding a rape report to be true, when in fact it was false), toward one that is designed to minimize the number of false positives (finding a rape report to be false, when in fact it was true). They use quite stringent criteria, where you basically need a confession, or strong evidence that the attack could not have happened as described, to declare it false.

First determine the outcome you want, then develop your methodology. It’s not social science. It’s social science.

SHOCKER: FRACKING IS SAFE: The EPA Fracking Miracle.

So even the Environmental Protection Agency now concedes that fracking is safe, which won’t surprise anyone familiar with the reality of unconventional oil and natural gas drilling in the U.S. But if no less than the EPA is saying this, then the political opposition doesn’t have much of a case left. . . .

EPA’s conclusion really is remarkable. The agency has yearned for an excuse to take over fracking regulation from the states, which do the job well. So if there was so much as a sliver of evidence that fracking was dangerous, the EPA would have found it. Think of this as the Obama Administration’s equivalent of the Bush Administration failing to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Heh. Let’s watch the contortions of the progressive science deniers now.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Health experts have figured out how much time you should sit each day. “Experts now say you should start standing up at work for at least two hours a day — and work your way toward four.”

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I’M SO OLD I CAN REMEMBER WHEN AL QAEDA WAS ON THE RUN: Quietly, al-Qaeda offshoots expand in Yemen and Syria.

WELL, THAT’S BECAUSE NOW IT’S LIBERALS BEING TARGETED: Jonathan Chait: The Liberal Backlash Against The New Campus PC Is In Full Swing:

The bizarre Title IX investigation of Northwestern professor Laura Kipnis represents a milestone in the growing awareness among liberals that the left’s approach to identity has gone badly astray. The notion that Kipnis’s essay ridiculing the campus sexual atmosphere was not merely misguided, but an act of gender discrimination, crossed a threshold of ridiculousness. The absurdity of the proceedings was compounded, Erik Wemple reports, when Kipnis’s “faculty-support person” briefed their colleagues about her bizarre ordeal, and that person also became the subject of Title IX discrimination charges, the classic witch-hunt logic by which anybody who questions the fairness of the accusations becomes the subject of more accusations. . . .

What’s important, rather, is that Kipnis’s antagonists believe that she deserves to be punished by the university administration for writing a column they didn’t like. The official demand of mattress-bearing protestors was “a swift, official condemnation of the sentiments expressed by Professor Kipnis in her inflammatory article” on the grounds that the offending column “has caused tremendous hurt to members of Northwestern’s community.”

The move to sanction Kipnis was not a misguided one-off, but the natural expression of a worldview that I described in a story earlier this year about resurgent political correctness. This is a set of illiberal social norms that have spread throughout much of academia and some virtual communities in social media.

After I published the story, Vox responded with a story by Amanda Taub explaining, “The truth about political correctness is that it doesn’t actually exist.” Now Vox has a new story explaining that, actually, political correctness is everywhere.

You can always count on Vox. But yes. Student activists — usually egged on by faceless “student life” and “diversity” administrators — formed the Red Guards of this cultural revolution. There were never very many of them, but they were loud and universities bent over backward to accommodate them because, basically, they agreed with them. Only when it became obvious — as some of us had been warning for a while — that this threatened to destroy higher education’s reputation at a time when it was already financially and politically vulnerable, and when it became plain that left-politics were no shield against such attacks, did the backlash start.

Related: Josh Marshall: Thoughts on The Kipnis Clown Show and the Drama of University Life. “In other words, Kipnis wrote a sharp-tongued, one-dimensional caricature of university sexual assault and trigger warning activists at Northwestern. And they turned around and proved her one-dimensional caricature 100% right.”

Meanwhile, I’d like to know the names of the students filing all these bogus complaints. And a question: If you file bogus complaints under Title IX to silence people’s exercise of free speech, are you guilty under federal and state laws regarding conspiracy to deprive people of civil rights? Note that there’s a civil suit provision, too. . . .

AUTOMATIC VOTER FRAUD: Hillary Clinton calls for automatic voter registration. I’m sure this wouldn’t lead to any problems.

“Today Republicans are systematically and deliberately trying to stop millions of citizens from voting,” she said during a speech at Texas Southern University in Houston.

“I call on Republicans at all levels of government, with all manner of ambition to stop fear-mongering about a phantom epidemic of election fraud and start explaining why they are so scared of letting citizens have their say.”

Clinton went after former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush by name, accusing the Republican presidential hopefuls of taking part in “a sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise” minorities, young people and the poor.

Automatic voter registration is just another ploy by Democrats to swell their base’s turnout at the polls, including those who lack legal ability to vote, including illegal aliens and convicted felons.  This shouldn’t be surprising, as a recent poll revealed that 60% of Democrats agreed that illegal immigrants should be able to vote, and another revealed that illegal Hispanic immigrants favor Democrats by 54 to 19 percent over Republicans. Democrats in Congress have introduced legislation to restore voting rights for convicted felons.

Keep talking, Hillary. A recent Rasmussen poll showed 76% of likely voters support voter ID, including 58% of Democrats. In recently upholding Indiana’s voter ID law in 2008, liberal Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens (now retired and replaced by Elena Kagan) observed in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board:

[F]lagrant examples of such fraud in other parts of the country have been documented throughout this Nation’s history by respected historians and journalists,that occasional examples have surfaced in recent years,and that Indiana’s own experience with fraudulent voting in the 2003 Democratic primary for East Chicago Mayor—though perpetrated using absentee ballots and not in-person fraud—demonstrate that not only is the risk of voter fraud real but that it could affect the outcome of a close election.

There is no question about the legitimacy or importance of the State’s interest in counting only the votes of eligible voters. Moreover, the interest in orderly administration and accurate recordkeeping provides a sufficient justification for carefully identifying all voters participating in the election process. While the most effective method of preventing election fraud may well be debatable, the propriety of doing so is perfectly clear.

The incentive to commit voter fraud for political gain is indisputable. Hillary’s policy proposal would only amplify such incentives. Moreover, President Obama’s unilateral lawmaking executive action on immigration has made it easier for illegal immigrants to register to vote (and vote) by granting them drivers’ licenses and Social Security numbers.

Clinton’s remarks indicated that the automatic registration should occur when an individual turns 18, but it’s unclear how such automatic registration would be executed. It is clear, however, that under New York v. United States and its progeny, the federal government cannot commandeer States to carry out federal law, so the federal government would have to implement such automatic voter registration itself somehow, perhaps via Social Security’s database.

States already have the capability of requiring automatic voter registration if they wish.  So this is truly another attempt by Democrats to impose a one-size-fits-all “solution” to a non-problem.

STEVEN LUBET: Sociologist Alice Goffman’s Denial of Murder Conspiracy Raises Even More Questions: The sociologist wrote about joining a murder plot. Now she insists that it was “not about actual violence.” Remember that there are two issues with her book: The murder conspiracy, and suspicions of research fraud. Her response to the former seems to increase the likelihood of the latter.

WILLY STERN: Attorneys at War: Inside an elite Israeli military law unit. Very interesting, and it’s troubling to see that the Israelis, too, seem to have over-lawyered their warmaking.

Though I bow to no one in my love for law and lawyers, I don’t believe that either should have as prominent a role in Western warmaking as they do, especially when warring against enemies who do not follow the laws of war. Personally, I believe that observance of such customs should be entirely based on reciprocity, and that those who do not reciprocate should be treated as pirates of old. Such an approach would not flatter the self-image of Western elites, but it would be far more effective.

ASHE SCHOW: Do women journalists get to choose what topics they report?

Female journalists tend to cover education, health, lifestyle and religion, while male journalists tend to cover economics, politics, sports and technology. Is this evidence of discrimination?

The findings come from the Women’s Media Center, which aims to make “women visible and powerful in the media.” It does this through “media advocacy campaigns, media monitoring for sexism, creating original content, training women and girls to participate in media and promoting media experienced women experts,” according to its website.

The Center’s 2015 report, released Thursday, details the lack of women in journalism. The underlying impression is that this is a problem that needs to be remedied in order for women to achieve equality. The entire report appears to imply that discrimination — or the patriarchy — is to blame for there being fewer female journalists. It’s almost like the Science, Technology, Economics and Math argument — that women are being held back due to sexism — but for journalism.

One particularly irksome section claims that “most women wrote about education, health and lifestyle; far fewer females covered economics, politics, sports, tech and other key assignments.” Is this an indication of a problem? Or evidence that women choose to write about different things than men.

Well, plenty of subjects are reserved for women. Men don’t really get to cover sex — unless they’re gay, like Dan Savage. Because straight guys talking about sex is gross and creepy.