CATHY YOUNG: Betsy DeVos is right about campus sexual assault. “Why the fury? DeVos offered a full-throated defense of due process, asserting that ‘every survivor of sexual misconduct must be taken seriously’ but “every student accused of sexual misconduct must know that guilt is not predetermined. It is the right message, whatever one thinks of the messenger.”

GEORGE LEEF: The Racial Gap In Student Performance.

CASSINI FLIES TOWARD A FIERY DEATH ON SATURN.

The Cassini spacecraft that has orbited Saturn for the last 13 years would weigh 4,685 pounds on Earth and, at 22 feet high, is somewhat longer and wider than a small moving van tipped on its rear. Bristling with cameras, antennas and other sensors, it is one of the most complex and sophisticated spy robots ever set loose in interplanetary space.

On Friday morning, the whole world will hear it die.

At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, the scientists of the Cassini mission will figuratively ride their creation down into oblivion in the clouds of Saturn. They will be collecting data on the makeup of the planet’s butterscotch clouds until the last bitter moment, when the spacecraft succumbs to the heat and pressure of atmospheric entry and becomes a meteor.

So will end a decades-long journey of discovery and wonder.

It’s been quite impressive.

UNDERCOVER IN NORTH KOREA: ‘All Paths Lead to Catastrophe.’

From novelist and journalist Suki Kim who lived and worked in the North, risking her life to report on the regime and its people:

Nothing will change because it’s an unworkable problem. It’s very dishonest to think this can be solved. North Korea will never give up its nuclear weapons. Never.

The only way North Korea can be dealt with is if this regime is not the way it is. No agreements are ever honored because North Korea just doesn’t do that. It’s a land of lies. So why keep making agreements with someone who’s never going to honor those agreements?

And ultimately what all the countries surrounding North Korea want is a regime change. What they’re doing is pretending to have an agreement saying they do not want a regime change, but pursuing regime change anyway.

Despite it all you have to constantly do engagement efforts, throwing information in there. That’s the only option. There’s no other way North Korea will change. Nothing will ever change without the outside pouring some resources in there.

It’s past time for China to step up.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: How U.S. News college rankings promote economic inequality on campus: Once ladders of social mobility, universities increasingly reinforce existing wealth, fueling a backlash that helped elect Donald Trump.

The lack of economic diversity extends far beyond the Ivy League, and now includes scores of private and public universities, according to the Equality of Opportunity Project, which used tax data to study campus economic trends from 2000 to 2011, the most recent years available. For instance, the University of Michigan enrolls just 16 percent of its student body from the bottom 60 percent of earners. Nearly 10 percent of its students are from the top 1 percent. . . .

Class-based anger was a driving factor in the 2016 presidential campaign, as white voters without college degrees vented their frustration by voting for Donald Trump in record numbers; it was the single best statistical predictor of a Trump voter. In the wake of Trump’s election, the majority of Republicans say colleges and universities have a negative effect on the country, according to the latest polling by the Pew Research Center. Young people still see college as necessary to get a good job and move up in society. But the vast majority don’t believe the higher education system is helping them do that, according to a recent report by New America, a Washington-based think tank.

“Elite colleges are part of the apparatus that produces Trumpism and produces working class, white resentment,” said Walter Benn Michaels, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

“It fits perfectly into Trump’s narrative … Basically, if you’re a low-income or working-class white student who works hard and you find out that what matters in admissions is who your daddy is, or what your race is, you’re completely left out,” said Richard Kahlenberg, senior fellow at the Century Foundation. “When a politician like Donald Trump comes along and says the system is rigged, you’re very likely to believe that. In this case, it is rigged — against those students.”

Well, we need to do something about that. For starters, we can abolish the Ivy League. But the real answer is to take away higher education’s role as gatekeeper to the upper-middle and upper classes.

Plus: “If you could deliver the same quality at lower cost, you’d go down in the rankings.”

Related: Me: America’s New Class System.

Also: Abolish The Ivy League.

DON’T BE WEEVILS: Google Bias Against Leading Conservative Websites—Including PJM—Is Real.

SOMETIMES THE TRUTH CAN BE HARSH: Yes, you are an inferior officer.

FLASHBACK: MOVIE ATTENDANCE REACHES AN ALL-TIME LOW IN 1971. Hollywood learned from its mistakes in the early ’70s. Can it do so again? I have some thoughts over at Ed Driscoll.com.

AT AMAZON, save in Arts, Crafts, and Sewing.

Plus, fall deals in Patio, Lawn, and Garden.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Fewer Humanities Courses, More Ph.D.’s. “A new report says that humanities departments in the United States produced 5,891 doctorates in 2015, the largest since the numbers were first tracked in 1987. Meanwhile, the chief market for those grad school grads, a tenure-track position at a decent school, has steadily contracted. Things just keep getting worse.”

CHARLES BLAHOUS: Fix The Federal Spending Baseline First.

IT’S REAL, AND IT’S SPECTACULAR: ‘Star Trek: Wrath of Khan’ director: Quit asking if Ricardo Montalban’s chest is fake.

SURPRISINGLY, THIS STORY IS NOT ABOUT COLIN KAEPERNICK: Football fans still loyal despite concerns about players’ brains.

WAIT, PAUL RYAN IS BLOCKING CONCEALED CARRY RECIPROCITY? So what, exactly, is he good for?

I DON’T TRUST THE INTERNET OF THINGS: Hackers could program sex robots to kill.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Science fiction writer Jerry Pournelle offered fact-based hope for our future: The 1970s was a gloomy period to grow up in. Pournelle did the math and reported that we could survive — and, in his words, survive with style.

IN THE LONG RUN, 9/11 DIDN’T BRING US ANY CLOSER TOGETHER, David Harsanyi writes:

People tend to retrofit their memories to comport with the most helpful telling of a story. Perhaps I’m prone to the same revisionism. But as I remember it, everything having to do with politics pre-9/11 would instantaneously become frivolous once the Twin Towers came down. The day after 9/11, and many days after that, I was unable to commute into my office in Manhattan. The local train station was littered with the cars of those who I assumed would never come home. So I sat in front of my TV staring at cable news most hours of the coming days. For those few weeks, I don’t remember anyone ever using the event to bludgeon their political opponents.

There were a few — I remember immediately after 9/11. National Review Online quoting the zaniest takes in an briefly recurring series collating the worst of what veteran TV writer Evan Sayet dubbed “the 9/12 Democrats” in his famous 2007 Heritage Foundation speech: those who believed that America deserved everything it got, and then some. But for many on the right, there really was a belief that the culture had significantly changed as a result of 9/11. In retrospect, the far left had simply gone to ground temporarily, and what followed, as Charles Krauthammer dubbed it mid-election year in 2004, was “the Pressure Cooker Theory” in action:

The loathing goes far beyond the politicians. Liberals as a body have gone quite around the twist. I count one all-star rock tour, three movies, four current theatrical productions and five bestsellers (a full one-third of the New York Times list) variously devoted to ridiculing, denigrating, attacking and devaluing this president, this presidency and all who might, God knows why, support it.

How to explain? With apologies to Dr. Freud, I propose the Pressure Cooker Theory of Hydraulic Release.

The hostility, resentment, envy and disdain, all superheated in Florida, were not permitted their natural discharge. Came Sept. 11 and a lid was forced down. How can you seek revenge for a stolen election by a nitwit usurper when all of a sudden we are at war and the people, bless them, are rallying around the flag and hailing the commander in chief? With Bush riding high in the polls, with flags flying from pickup trucks (many of the flags, according to Howard Dean, Confederate), the president was untouchable.

The Democrats fell unnaturally silent. For two long, agonizing years, they had to stifle and suppress. It was the most serious case of repression since Freud’s Anna O. went limp. The forced deference nearly killed them. And then, providentially, they were saved. The clouds parted and bad news rained down like manna: WMDs, Abu Ghraib, Richard Clarke, Paul O’Neill, Joe Wilson and, most important, continued fighting in Iraq.

With the president stripped of his halo, his ratings went down. The spell was broken. He was finally, once again, human and vulnerable. With immense relief, the critics let loose.

And they haven’t stopped since. Which is why, as Harsanyi  concludes today, “here’s a depressing thought on the anniversary of 9/11: What if those two or three weeks of harmony 16 years ago will be the last we experience for a very long time?”

But then, in retrospect, they really weren’t a period of harmony, so much as the left reevaluating tactics and reloading for the next phase of their culture war, which looks to be near-eternal these days.

JULIETTE OCHIENG: A Seemingly Random Near-Miss.

THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU PICK A FIGHT WITH YOUR STATE’S VOTERS: Civil Rights Center at UNC Law School Shut Down.

WHY OUR SHIPS KEEP RUNNING INTO THINGS: “What gave out was leadership. The admirals did not put their careers on the line and object about anything. They rolled over to save themselves.”

Plus: “If you put the emphasis on social issues, you get a social force. If you put it on operational issues, you get an operational force. . . . The mistakes made were all simple things: basic ship handling, navigation and seamanship stuff. Destroyers do not get run down by merchants; they are faster and much more maneuverable. No, they were not hacked; they were not run down on purpose. They just were asleep at the wheel.”

KURT SCHLICHTER: The True Conservatives Hype A Trumpocalypse In A Desperate Bid For Attention.

The latest Never Trump meme is that Donald Trump has defected to the Democrats, a notion that might charitably be labeled “wishful thinking” if it actually involved any thinking. But the “wishful” part is in full effect as this tattered remnant of worshippers at the altar of Establishment Conservatism seeks to revive their failed cult and reassume their position as the priesthood of all things on the right.

You remember Establishment Conservatism, right? It is to conservatism as Unitarians are to Christianity – “Well, I sort of believe in something, but mostly I just want whatever I do validated.” Establishment Conservatism is the sect that promised for seven years to repeal Obamacare then…didn’t. But that was Trump’s fault, of course, because reasons and because you’re a fake conservative for asking and also shut up.

So, this week’s True Con embarrassment arose because the Republicans were somehow going to score yet another smashing victory in a debt ceiling fight, as they always do, but darn that Trump! He got in the way of their cunning scheme. Or something.

“As they always do.” Gold.

SARAH HOYT REPORTS FROM PARIS: Non-Muslims Get Special Terrorism Screening — by Muslims.

LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Hurricanes Show Why Drones Are the Future of Disaster Relief: When it comes to assessing damage and spotting people in distress, drones may be hard to beat.