HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, KAFKA EDITION: UCLA fired a conservative professor last year. It’s still refusing to tell him why.

Today marks the one-year anniversary of professor Keith Fink’s filing of a grievance over his ousting from UCLA—an ousting UCLA remains silent about despite multiple requests for an explanation.

Signs of friction emerged between the communication studies lecturer and his department chair a year and half ago, when the chair effectively blocked students from enrolling in Fink’s “Free Speech on Campus” class.

Since then, UCLA has been uncooperative with the conservative professor’s attempts to receive the documents relating to his termination.

“In all instances, UCLA is stonewalling at every juncture,” Andrew Litt, Fink’s former teaching assistant of two years, wrote in an email to The College Fix, speaking on the professor’s behalf. “They don’t want us to uncover the discussions held amongst administrators about Fink’s speech, political beliefs, and advocacy for students.”

I have a pretty good idea why.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, ADMINISTRATIVE BLOAT EDITION: UC Berkeley offers six-figure salary for ‘diversity’ recruiter.

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WHY ARE DEMOCRAT-RUN STATES SO CLASS-BOUND AND STAGNANT? Joel Kotkin: The Hollowing-Out of the California Dream. For minorities in the Golden State, opportunity and upward mobility are hard to come by.

Progressives praise California as the harbinger of the political future, the home of a new, enlightened, multicultural America. Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill has identified California Senator Kamala Harris as the party leader on issues of immigration and race. Harris wants a moratorium on construction of new immigration-detention facilities in favor of the old “catch and release” policy for illegal aliens, and has urged a shutdown of the government rather than compromise on mass amnesty.

Its political leaders and a credulous national media present California as the “woke” state, creating an economically just, post-racial reality. Yet in terms of opportunity, California is evolving into something more like apartheid South Africa or the pre-civil rights South. California simply does not measure up in delivering educational attainment, income growth, homeownership, and social mobility for traditionally disadvantaged minorities. All this bodes ill for a state already three-fifths non-white and trending further in that direction in the years ahead. In the past decade, the state has added 1.8 million Latinos, who will account by 2060 for almost half the state’s population. The black population has plateaued, while the number of white Californians is down some 700,000 over the past decade.
Minorities and immigrants have brought much entrepreneurial energy and a powerful work ethic to California. Yet, to a remarkable extent, their efforts have reaped only meager returns during California’s recent boom. California, suggests gubernatorial candidate and environmental activist Michael Shellenberger, is not “the most progressive state” but “the most racist” one. Chapman University reports that 28 percent of California’s blacks are impoverished, compared with 22 percent nationally. Fully one-third of California Latinos—now the state’s largest ethnic group—live in poverty, compared with 21 percent outside the state. Half of Latino households earn under $50,000 annually, which, in a high-cost state, means that they barely make enough to make ends meet. Over two-thirds of non-citizen Latinos, the group most loudly defended by the state’s progressive leadership, live at or below the poverty line, according to a recent United Way study.

This stagnation reflects the reality of the most recent California “miracle.” Historically, economic growth extended throughout the state, and produced many high-paying blue-collar jobs. In contrast, the post-2010 boom has been inordinately dependent on the high valuations of a handful of tech firms and coastal real estate speculation. Relatively few blacks or Latinos participate at the upper reaches of the tech economy—and a recent study suggests that their percentages in that sector are declining—and generally lack the family resources to compete in the real estate market. Instead, many are stuck with rents they can’t afford.

Even as incomes soared in the Silicon Valley and San Francisco after 2010, wages for African-Americans and Latinos in the Bay Area declined.

All the woke-talk is just a cover for a fundamentally exploitative system.

21ST CENTURY PROBLEMS: Burned-out millennials are quitting lucrative jobs.

Sarah Solomon had a pretty sweet life. The 20-something publicist was always out at fashion events, dinners and parties — and even hung out with John Legend during Fashion Week.

“It was definitely New York glamourous — the black dress, leather pants and high heels, and an hour putting on my makeup,” says Solomon. “Anyone would think I had a really fun life, meeting cool people and celebrities.”

But she yearned for something more and resented only having two weeks of vacation a year. So, last August, she quit her seemingly great job at a plum downtown p.r. firm.

“I wanted to travel more — I didn’t want to have to ask for time off and grovel for extra days, you know?” says Solomon, now 25 and living in a rental house in Kauai, Hawaii, overlooking the beach.

Over the past 10 months, she’s scaled volcanoes in Guatemala, soaked up the waterfalls of Bali, Indonesia, and basked on glorious beaches halfway around the world. She gets by doing freelance p.r. work on the road, so long as she can get decent Wi-Fi in paradise.

Well, there you are.

Related: Stark images show people around the world toiling in deadly conditions from mines to volcanoes for as little as $1 a day.

GOOD: After 25 years, military told to move from “expendable” to “reusable” rockets.

TAKEAWAY: YOU DON’T WANT TO WORK FOR, OR HIRE, A GUTLESS LAZY LAW FIRM LIKE SHOOK & HARDY. The Outrage Machine Claims a Victim: A Play in Seven Acts.

INTERESTING FT PIECE FROM THE DIRECTOR OF THE EUROPEAN COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS: The Chinese are wary of Donald Trump’s creative destruction: The president is the first US leader in decades to challenge China on multiple fronts.

Donald Trump is leading a double life. In the west, most foreign policy experts see him as reckless, unpredictable and self-defeating. But though many in Asia dislike him as much as the Europeans do, they see him as a more substantial figure. I have just spent a week in Beijing talking to officials and intellectuals, many of whom are awed by his skill as a strategist and tactician. . . .

Few Chinese think that Mr Trump’s primary concern is to rebalance the bilateral trade deficit. If it were, they say, he would have aligned with the EU, Japan and Canada against China rather than scooping up America’s allies in his tariff dragnet. They think the US president’s goal is nothing less than remaking the global order.

They think Mr Trump feels he is presiding over the relative decline of his great nation. It is not that the current order does not benefit the US. The problem is that it benefits others more in relative terms. To make things worse the US is investing billions of dollars and a fair amount of blood in supporting the very alliances and international institutions that are constraining America and facilitating China’s rise.

In Chinese eyes, Mr Trump’s response is a form of “creative destruction”. He is systematically destroying the existing institutions — from the World Trade Organization and the North American Free Trade Agreement to Nato and the Iran nuclear deal — as a first step towards renegotiating the world order on terms more favourable to Washington.

Once the order is destroyed, the Chinese elite believes, Mr Trump will move to stage two: renegotiating America’s relationship with other powers. Because the US is still the most powerful country in the world, it will be able to negotiate with other countries from a position of strength if it deals with them one at a time rather than through multilateral institutions that empower the weak at the expense of the strong.

My interlocutors say that Mr Trump is the US first president for more than 40 years to bash China on three fronts simultaneously: trade, military and ideology. They describe him as a master tactician, focusing on one issue at a time, and extracting as many concessions as he can. They speak of the skilful way Mr Trump has treated President Xi Jinping. “Look at how he handled North Korea,” one says. “He got Xi Jinping to agree to UN sanctions [half a dozen] times, creating an economic stranglehold on the country. China almost turned North Korea into a sworn enemy of the country.” But they also see him as a strategist, willing to declare a truce in each area when there are no more concessions to be had, and then start again with a new front.

For the Chinese, even Mr Trump’s sycophantic press conference with Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, in Helsinki had a strategic purpose. They see it as Henry Kissinger in reverse. In 1972, the US nudged China off the Soviet axis in order to put pressure on its real rival, the Soviet Union. Today Mr Trump is reaching out to Russia in order to isolate China.

Hmm. Is Trump really that smart? Read the whole thing.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO NASA:  On this day in 1958, President Dwight Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act into law, thus creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

DOES THE 13TH AMENDMENT’S BAN ON SLAVERY AND INVOLUNTARY SERVITUDE GIVE CONGRESS THE POWER TO BAN HATE CRIMES?:  Here is a quick version of the argument that it does not.

HOMICIDE RATES ARE STARTING TO RISE AGAIN:  Beginning just a few years ago, I started regularly hearing arguments about crime and punishment that I hadn’t heard much of since the 1960s and 70s.  Lessons learned then have evidently been forgotten.  Prediction: This won’t end well.  

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A MAN’S GOT TO HAVE HIS PRIORITIES IN ORDER: Pro gamer dumps ‘world’s sexiest weathergirl’ to focus on playing ‘Call of Duty.’

$3.99 ON KINDLE: Stephen Ambrose’s Band of Brothers.

MORE JUDGES NEED TO DO THIS: Judge Questions School’s Sex Assault Training After Male Student Sues.

ROGER SIMON: Voting Early But Not Often In Nashville.

I cast my first primary vote early as a Tennessee resident today and I think my PJ Media colleague and friend Christian Adams of the Election Law Center would approve not only of my choices, but, more importantly, how it was done.

What stood out for me was, unlike in my former state of California where they don’t ask for identification of any kind when you vote, Tennessee is one of only eight states to require a photo ID. (It also requires a voter registration card.)

Forget that such photo IDs are mandatory for all US citizens and foreigners when they get on a plane, among literally dozens of activities, when it comes to voting this requirement is regarded as racist by our supposedly progressive friends.

Actually, as with so many “politically correct” assertions, the reverse is true.

Indeed. Plus:

Watching the candidate ads on TV you feel as if you’ve gone through a time-warp. The gubernatorial candidates are all competing with each other in a contest for who backs Trump the most. Even Phil Bredesen, the Democrat ex-governor running against Marsha Blackburn for the Senate, doesn’t entirely separate himself from the president in his ads, saying he agrees on North Korea but opposes the tariffs. (Wonder if that’s changed since the EU announcement.)

A lot of local folks like Bredesen, especially since he’s credited with bringing the Titans to Nashville, but I’m definitely sticking with Marsha. Bredesen may be a centrist but he would be caucusing with Maxine and Company and that’s enough to turn the Buddha into a homicidal maniac. Today’s Democratic Party seems headed off to the left of the Labor Party of Albania.

So true.

OPEN THREAD: Live on InstaPundit, it’s Saturday night!

FASTER, PLEASE: Senate introduces bill to streamline commercial space regulations.

The Space Frontier Act, S. 3277, primarily focuses on reforms to regulation of commercial launches and remote sensing. It includes language calling for streamlining of processes for licensing launches and reentries as well as for licensing remote sensing spacecraft. It also includes language authorizing an extension of the International Space Station to 2030. . . . Many of the bill’s provisions are in line both with Space Policy Directive (SPD) 2, signed by President Trump in May, and the American Space Commerce Free Enterprise Act, a bill that the House approved in April. The Senate bill would allow the Federal Aviation Administration to issue a single launch license valid for multiple sites, a reform included in SPD-2. Its remote sensing streamlining language is somewhat similar to the House bill, including reforms to the interagency review process that has slowed down some application reviews in the past.

The Senate, though, differs with the House and the White House in one area, authorization of so-called “non-traditional” commercial space activities, ranging from satellite servicing to lunar landers, that not explicitly regulated today. The House bill gives that authority to the Commerce Department while SPD-2 endorsed more generally the creation of a “one-stop shop” for most commercial space regulations in that department.

The Senate bill, though, would give that authority to the FAA.

Hmm. The FAA’s regulatory history isn’t entirely impressive.

THEY HAD A TIME MACHINE AND THEY STILL LOST THE COLD WAR? Article in The Root claims “Soviet” hackers changed votes in 2016 election.

THIS IS JUST MORE LOW-KEY PREPARATION FOR THE ALIEN INVASION, AS I’M SURE INSTAPUNDIT READERS UNDERSTAND: These Gun-Toting, Weight-Lifting Russian Robots Might Fly to Space in 2019.

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INTERESTING OBSERVATION:

21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: This man is pleading people to stop ‘having sex’ with his hedge.

WELL, THAT’S PROGRESS: New Alzheimer’s Drug Slows Memory Loss in Early Trial Results.