THE RETURN OF DUCK AND COVER: ‘Don’t look at the flash or fireball’ — Guam Homeland Security releases fact sheet in light of North Korea threats.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): The Unexpected Return of “Duck and Cover.”

SPENGLER: Leftover Libels of Sebastian Gorka Served up at Rolling Stone.

DAVID BROOKS: Sundar Pichai Should Resign as Google’s C.E.O.

The mob that hounded Damore was like the mobs we’ve seen on a lot of college campuses. We all have our theories about why these moral crazes are suddenly so common. I’d say that radical uncertainty about morality, meaning and life in general is producing intense anxiety. Some people embrace moral absolutism in a desperate effort to find solid ground. They feel a rare and comforting sense of moral certainty when they are purging an evil person who has violated one of their sacred taboos.

Which brings us to Pichai, the supposed grown-up in the room. He could have wrestled with the tension between population-level research and individual experience. He could have stood up for the free flow of information. Instead he joined the mob. He fired Damore and wrote, “To suggest a group of our colleagues have traits that make them less biologically suited to that work is offensive and not O.K.”

That is a blatantly dishonest characterization of the memo. Damore wrote nothing like that about his Google colleagues. Either Pichai is unprepared to understand the research (unlikely), is not capable of handling complex data flows (a bad trait in a C.E.O.) or was simply too afraid to stand up to a mob.

Or (the worst and seemingly likely option) Pichai is the mob’s leader.

JAW, JAW IS BETTER THAN WAR, WAR: Mattis Says War with North Korea would be ‘catastrophic.’

JUSTICE: Man Expelled Over Rape He Was Incapable of Committing Reaches Settlement.

LABORATORIES OF EDUCATION: DeVos Scales Back Federal Role, Lets States Lead.

“It’s encouraging to see so many states pass pro-student and pro-parent legislation that expands the educational opportunities available to children and their families,” DeVos told RealClearEducation in a statement. “I’ve always said that parents and educators at the grassroots level know best what their students need.”

While the secretary is a vocal proponent of school choice, she prefers that states and local officials take the initiative. Even with Republican control of the White House and Capitol Hill, DeVos has pledged not to push a federal school choice program and has indicated that any federal action would come in the form of support for choice programs that states can opt to participate in.

The secretary’s philosophy runs counter to much of the modern history of American public education.

That can’t be a bad thing.

MEGAN MCARDLE: As a Woman in Tech, I Realized: These Are Not My People: The Google memo, saying women aren’t very into engineering, reached a similar conclusion.

Until the age of 26, I was employed as a technology consultant by a small firm that served the financial industry. I built servers and workstations, mostly for banks, and in a happy foreshadowing of my future writing for Bloomberg View, I installed some of the first PC-based Bloomberg terminals for a Japanese firm’s office in New York.

Finance back then was heavily male, as it is now. And technology, the same. At the intersection of the two … well, I can count on one hand all the women I worked with directly during almost four years of consulting.

It was very male-centric. I heard about client outings, involving strippers, to which I was obviously not invited. And the sexual harassment (entirely from clients, not colleagues), could be spectacular.

Which has nothing to do with why I left. This will make me sound a bit dim, but at the time, it never occurred to me that being a female in this bro ecosystem might impinge my ultimate career prospects. Nor did I miss having women in the room. I liked working with the bros just fine. And the sexual harassment, while annoying, was just that: annoying. I cannot recall that it ever affected my work, nor that I lost any sleep over it.

No, the reason I left is that I came into work one Monday morning and joined the guys at our work table, and one of them said “What did you do this weekend?”

I was in the throes of a brief, doomed romance. I had attended a concert that Saturday night. I answered the question with an account of both. The guys stared blankly. Then silence. Then one of them said: “I built a fiber-channel network in my basement,” and our co-workers fell all over themselves asking him to describe every step in loving detail.

At that moment I realized that fundamentally, these are not my people. I liked the work. But I was never going to like it enough to blow a weekend doing more of it for free. Which meant that I was never going to be as good at that job as the guys around me.

For them it’s not a job, it’s a way of life. Plus:

So why did the internet react as if he’d imperiously told women to get back in the kitchen where they belong? Why did his company fire him?

Well, for one thing, the next time the company gets sued for sexism, that memo is going to be Exhibit A. Firing him makes that less of a problem for the company’s lawyers. You can also argue that it will be impossible for him to work with the female colleagues whom he has richly angered. But of course, these are problems mostly because people decided that these sorts of arguments are beyond the pale. And given that his empirical claims seem to be the consensus of most of the scientists who study the matter, you have to ask why people decided that.

Because many people are emotional children.

HEALTH: Five Die While Using Obesity Devices, FDA Says.

ALLIES: Spain Is Now Helping Turkey Arrest Journalists.

While largely ignored in the mainstream media, a Turkish / Swedish journalist has been sitting in jail in Spain for the past week and it’s not because he broke any Spanish laws. Hamza Yalcin, a journalist working out of Sweden, was detained in Spain and placed under arrest on the orders of Turkey, who demanded that he be held and extradited for “supporting terrorism.” (Which is the charge that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan always summons up when he wants to imprison a political opponent.) The real mystery here is why Spain went along with it.

Indeed.

IF “SOCIAL JUSTICE” IS A SYNONYM FOR “TRIVIAL AND CONTRIVED,” THEN THEY’RE RIGHT: ‘Fat Studies’ course deems ‘weightism’ a ‘social justice issue.’

AT AMAZON, fresh New Releases, updated hourly.

Plus, today’s new Kindle Daily Deals.

And shop the Digital Deals of the Day.

HMM: Survey: Most Google Employees Disagreed With Decision To Fire Memo Writer. But they’ll be afraid to express that view now.

WEIRD, I WAS TOLD THAT THIS SORT OF THING NEVER HAPPENED: College student gets 100 days in slammer for registering dead voters for Dems.

SARAH HOYT, APOSTATE: Those Who Walk Away from Feminism.

THE CONNECTION BETWEEN college indoctrination and corporate intolerance.

FLASHBACK: WaPo: Email batch provides additional evidence that Clinton Foundation donors got access at State Department.

THEY JUST FIRED A GUY FOR FAILING TO TOE THE LINE: Google Cancels Employee Meeting Because of Harassment Fears.

FLASHBACK: New audio: Ted Strickland jokes that Scalia’s death came ‘at a good time.’ Well, he may feel differently now.

DEEP STATE UPDATE: How the Postal Service tried to swing the election for Hillary Clinton.

With the media fawning over allegations of Russian influence and hacking of the presidential election, it seems there is no limit to the appetite for tales of intrigue. But this tale is not about foreign agents or a rogue government.

Instead, the culprits are much closer to home: the U.S. Postal Service.

The Washington Post recently reported that the “Postal Service broke law in pushing time off for workers to campaign for Clinton.” The law in question is the Hatch Act, which limits federal employee participation in certain types of political activities.

An internal investigation was launched after several USPS employees approached their union representatives to complain.

But the broader scandal isn’t just that government employees were in the tank for the Democratic candidate or even that employees possibly violated the Hatch Act (or that the USPS lost $2.1 billion in one quarter). It’s that government unions have for years been incentivizing their workers to spend time pushing their political agenda rather than serving their customers. Campaigning for a candidate who wants to grow government is just a more egregious form of that all-too-common practice.

Unions such as the the American Federation of Government Employees, the AFSCME, and the American Federation of Teachers contribute millions to liberal groups, which then turn around and advocate higher taxes and spending that directly benefit those unions.

The potential for corruption in such a system is obvious.

It’s more than just potential.

FASTER, PLEASE: Trump Still Hasn’t Drained Obama’s IRS Swamp.

Kimberly Strassel:

Voters put a Republican in the White House in part to impose some belated accountability on the scandal-laden Obama administration. And the supreme scandal was the IRS’s assault on tea-party groups—a campaign inspired by congressional Democrats, perpetrated by partisan bureaucrats like Lois Lerner, and covered up by Mr. Obama’s political appointees. This abuse stripped the right to political speech from thousands of Americans over two election cycles. To this day, no one has answered for it.

The groups targeted are still doggedly trying to obtain justice through lawsuits that have dragged on for years. They believed Mr. Trump’s election would bring an end to the government obstruction. It hasn’t. “The posture of the DOJ and the IRS under the Trump administration is identical to the posture under the Obama administration,” Mark Meckler, president of Citizens for Sound Governance, tells me. “Nothing has changed.”

Mr. Meckler was one of the founders of Tea Party Patriots. His current organization is funding a class-action suit in Ohio federal court on behalf of groups targeted by the IRS. So far the effort has cost $3 million.

That money is now going to fight Mr. Trump’s administration.

Heads need to roll, and lots of them. If that means the IRS can’t fulfill all of its nasty functions for a while — well, tough.

CHINA WARNS NORKS: You’re on your own if you go after the United States.

China won’t come to North Korea’s help if it launches missiles threatening U.S. soil and there is retaliation, a state-owned newspaper warned on Friday, but it would intervene if Washington strikes first.

The Global Times newspaper is not an official mouthpiece of the Communist Party, but in this case its editorial probably does reflect government policy and can be considered “semiofficial,” experts said.

China has repeatedly warned both Washington and Pyongyang not to do anything that raises tensions or causes instability on the Korean Peninsula, and strongly reiterated that suggestion Friday.

“The current situation on the Korean Peninsula is complicated and sensitive,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said in a statement.

“China hopes that all relevant parties will be cautious on their words and actions, and do things that help to alleviate tensions and enhance mutual trust, rather than walk on the old pathway of taking turns in shows of strength, and upgrading the tensions.”

Translation: China can’t afford a war and a refugee crisis on its northern border, and the Administration’s threats have had the effect of forcing Beijing to finally rein in its difficult ally.

If it works, this might just be our biggest win in Korea since Inchon — and without any loss of life.

WELL, IT SEEMS LIKE A GOOD IDEA: The Hill: Trump promises ‘billions’ more for missile defenses.

GOOGLE CANCELS TOWN HALL, ISIS SETS UP SHOP ON EBAY, AND DANA LOESCH IS IN THE CROSSHAIRS: All that and more in Liz Sheld’s morning brief.