THIS IS NEWS?  China Industrial Policy Seeks to Steal ‘Crown Jewels’ of U.S. Tech.

FBI CORRUPTION IS WHAT ALL THE WAILING ABOUT MYTHICAL “CHILDREN IN CAGES” IS SUPPOSED TO DISTRACT YOU FROM:  Strzok escorted from FBI building.

ABOUT TIME!  U.S. withdraws from farcical U.N. Human Rights Council.

MY FACE. MUCH SHOCKED. SO SURPRISED:  Occupy Wall Street Tweets About Killing ICE Agents And Twitter Allows It.

ABOUT TIME:  The Commie Cadet Gets Kicked Out of the Army. Finally. Communism is incompatible with an oath to protect the US Constitution.

AT AMAZON, deals on Men’s Watches.

CHICKENS COME HOME TO ROOST: ‘About 60 Organizations’ Are Considering a Lawsuit Against the SPLC Following $3M Nawaz Settlement.

OPEN THREAD: There are many open threads, past and future. But this is today’s open thread. Make the most of it, before it’s gone.

HOSTAGE TAKER: Chuck Schumer just exposed the Dems’ whole border crisis charade. “Gee it’s almost like they’d rather have a political issue they can wield against GOP than actually fix the problem.”

UPDATE: “Call Schumer’s bluff. Advance the bill. See if Democrats filibuster,” David French tweets.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Freckling: The new dating trend of the summer. “No, not dating someone with freckles – freckling means casually getting involved with someone over the long, lazy days and light, balmy evenings of the summer months, only to drop them come autumn, when the coats come back out and the freckles disappear again.”

This seems like one of those “trends” that exist largely in marketing offices and the minds of assignment editors.

IF WE DON’T DO IT, CAN WE TRUST WHO WOULD: Sarah Hoyt asks, Should There Be a Space Corps?

AN OPEN LETTER TO MARK ZUCKERBERG: Tell Us What You Mean by ‘Hate Speech.’

Why would he do that? It’s much more fun to keep the dumb f*cks (classical reference) guessing by constantly moving the goal posts — invariably back and to the left, back and to the left, as Oliver Stone would say.

THAT WAS DIFFERENT BECAUSE SHUT UP: Flashback: Both Hillary And Obama Advocated Separating Migrant Families, Strict Border Control.

SLANDER A VETERAN, LET YOUR PUBLISHER APOLOGIZE FOR YOU, THEN HIDE: As pointed out here and and here, The New Yorker’s smarter-than-you Talia Lavin (@chick_in_kiev) has now protected her tweets. What that says to me is the bubble hardens, and those smug elitists just retreat into an ever-smaller echo chamber.

Having legally vetted thousands of stories in my career as a media lawyer, I am always surprised (and disappointed) by reporters who attack someone and justify it by saying “hey, they’re fair game, they stepped up to the plate, they need to learn to take the high inside fastball.” I heard this time and time again when I questioned stories about Sarah Palin, John McCain, Ted Cruz and others. What I can’t understand is why simpering babies hide or whine when the shoe is on their foot. Yes, I’m talking to you, Jim Acosta. Grow a pair or get out of the game.

FASTER, PLEASE: Unique microbe could thrive on Mars, help future manned missions.

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Plus, deals in Pools, Hot Tubs, and Supplies.

DOES MARIJUANA INCREASE SEXUAL DESIRE? Mostly in women, I suspect.

ILYA SHAPIRO: Harvard Is Too Discriminating: A lawsuit may eventually give the Supreme Court a chance to clarify its view of racial preferences.

In Fisher v. University of Texas (2013), the justices ruled 7-1 that the use of race in university admissions was permissible only if it was narrowly tailored to achieve “the educational benefits of diversity” and administrators had made a good-faith effort to consider race-neutral alternatives. In 2016, after Justice Antonin Scalia’s death, the court ruled in favor of the university in another appeal from the same case. Seemingly exhausted by the topic, the justices held 4-3 that Texas’ idiosyncratic admissions program satisfied the test. Fisher II was the first and only time Justice Anthony Kennedy has approved a use of racial preferences in college admissions. His opinion made clear that the key to surviving judicial scrutiny was “holistic” individualized review rather than quotas or other group-based screens.

Yet holistic review can facilitate discrimination by concealing a process that amounts to a quota. That’s what Harvard did when it devised this method to cap the number of Jews it admitted in the 1920s and ’30s. The university is now credibly accused of doing the same thing to Asian-Americans.

The lawsuit was filed in 2014, but paused as Fisher played out. It picked up steam in August 2017, when the Justice Department opened its own investigation into Harvard’s use of race. This past April, after the department filed a “notice of interest” that cited the need to allow public access to the lawsuit’s filings, a federal judge in Massachusetts ruled that most of the evidence the plaintiffs had obtained in discovery could be made public. It was last Friday, in legal papers filed with a motion for summary judgment—a request that the judge rule against Harvard without a trial, based on facts not in dispute.

The plaintiffs argue that Harvard intentionally discriminates. “An Asian-American applicant with a 25% chance of admission,” the plaintiffs’ motion summarizes, “would have a 35% chance if he were white, 75% if he were Hispanic, and 95% chance if he were African-American.”

That’s not because Asians are weak in areas other than academics that might legitimately be considered in admissions decisions. Harvard’s own documents show that Asians have higher extracurricular and alumni-interview scores than any other racial group, and scores from teachers and guidance counselors nearly identical to whites (and higher than African-Americans and Hispanics). Yet admissions officers assigned them the lowest “personal” rating—an assessment of “positive personality,” character traits like “likability,” “helpfulness,” “courage,” and “kindness,” and whether the applicant has good “human qualities.” It’s reminiscent of the old stereotype that Jews weren’t “clubbable.”

The plaintiffs’ motion asserts that Harvard officials’ testimony “amounts to a confession” of racial balancing. Statistical analysis of public data by Duke economist Peter S. Arcidiacono, whom the plaintiffs hired as an expert witness, reinforces the suspicion that the school manipulates subjective criteria to maintain the same student-body composition regardless of shifts in the pool of qualified applicants. If the admissions office admits what it deems to be “too many” or “too few” students of any race it reshapes the next class as a remedy. The plaintiffs conclude that “Harvard has a desired racial balance and aims for that target”—an approach the Supreme Court has consistently said is improper since it first approved the limited use of race in admissions in 1978.

Related: Racism is wrong, even when Harvard does it.

Plus: Asians Get The Ivy League’s Jewish Treatment.

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: The Enlightenment’s Cynical Critics.

BETTER DEAD THAN RUDE? Hmmmm: Pentagon Covering Up Fact That Female Officers Nearly Sank Navy Ship.

(Classical reference in headline.)

GET WOKE, GO BROKE: Starbucks also plans to close about 150 company-operated American stores over its next fiscal year. And note this:

The closing stores are often in “major metro areas where increases in wage and occupancy and other regulatory requirements” are making them unprofitable, Johnson said. “Now, in a lot of ways, it’s middle America and the South that presents an opportunity.”

Huh – all the best people told me that #fightfor15 would have no deleterious effect on the food and beverage industry.

IT’S NATIONAL MARTINI DAY: You know what to do.

SO LIKE THE OTHER NUTRITION STUDIES, THEN: Buried in a new N.I.H. report are disturbing examples of coordination between scientists and the alcohol industry on a study that could have changed America’s drinking habits.

RAYMOND IBRAHIM ON THE FOLLY OF MULTICULTURALISM.

Read the whole thing.

YOUR DAILY TREACHER: No, Not Everybody You Hate Is a Nazi.