NOW THERE’S A NAME I HAVEN’T HEARD IN A WHILE:  Sirhan Sirhan stabbed in prison by fellow inmate.  

p.s.  Next thing you know somebody is going to try to attack Lee Harvey Oswald … no … wait.

THE 8^TH CIRCUIT COURT OF APPEALS HELD THAT CHRISTIAN VIDEOGRAPHERS DON’T HAVE TO VIDEO SAME-SEX MARRIAGE, JUST BECAUSE THEY WOULD VIDEO A TRADITIONAL MARRIAGE: The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights took a very different view on this general subject a couple of years ago. Here is my dissenting statement.

SEPARATE AND UNEQUAL: Stanford University has a separate physics course for students from under-represented minorities. Plus two course physics courses focusing on diversity and inclusion.

It should try this instead.

FAKE NEWS ISN’T NEW:  On this day in 1835, the New York Sun began the Great Moon Hoax.  The pictures are great.

WHAT COULD GO WRONG?:  The California Legislature is close to prohibiting schools from suspending students for willful disobedience.

Alas, much of the effort by federal and state authorities to control local discipline policy is based on serious misunderstandings of the facts.  I try to help correct that here. But there are many people out there who aren’t interested in getting the facts straight.

HATE CRIMES:  The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights just voted to adopt a mammoth report on hate crimes that liberally cites the Southern Poverty Law Center.  I voted against it for several reasons.  One of those reasons is that the federal hates crimes statute, which purports, in part, to be an exercise of Congress’s authority to ban slavery, is unconstitutional, as explained here.

ON THIS DAY IN 1959, HAWAII OFFICIALLY BECAME A STATE: There was dancing in the streets that day.

Some members of Congress were especially keen to bring Hawaii into the union, because it was seen as a successful multi-racial society. Alas, things haven’t looked quite as good on that front in the last 15 years or so.  The link is to some testimony I gave 10 years ago.  There have been some twists and turns since then, but the basic story discussed in the testimony is still worth knowing about.

ON THIS DAY IN 1996: The Inter-Ethnic Adoption Act was signed into law.   That statute prohibited federally-funded adoption agencies from requiring that the race of adoptive parents match the child they wish to adopt. This was particularly significant in speeding up the adoption of African American children who otherwise tended to languish in foster care longer than white children. Curiously, it was the National Association of Black Social Workers who most opposed this approach. A few years before the statute was passed the NABSW president testified before Congress that its members viewed “placement of Black children in white homes” as “a blatant form of racial and cultural genocide.”

ON THIS DAY IN 1919, RODDIE EDMONDS WAS BORN NEAR KNOXVILLE, TENNESSEE:  Almost a century later, in 2015, he was posthumously recognized as “Righteous Among the Nations,” Israel’s highest honor for non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.

He never told his story to his friends or family. His son learned about it only after his father’s death.

Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds’ unit was surrounded by the Nazis during the Battle of Bulge. While they held out as long as they could, they eventually surrendered on December 19, 1944. On January 27, 1945, Edmonds arrived at Stalag IX-A along with well over a thousand fellow POWs, all of them exhausted, dirty, half-starved, cold, and no doubt frightened. As the highest-ranking non-commissioned officer among them, he was in charge.

For reasons I cannot begin to understand, the camp commandant’s first priority was to separate the Jewish from the non-Jewish POWs. Germany’s defeat was all but certain by then; you’d think he’d have given it a rest. Nevertheless, as soon as Edmonds arrived with his men, the commandant ordered Edmonds to assemble all Jewish soldiers the next day so that they could be dealt with separately.

“We are not doing that. We are all falling out,” Edmonds’ men remember him saying to them. So instead, all of the American POWs assembled that morning. The irate commandant held a pistol to Edmond’s head and ordered him to identify the Jews: “They cannot all be Jews!”

“We are all Jews,” Edmonds replied.

Edmonds told him that if he wanted to kill the Jewish POWs, he was going to have to kill them all. He reminded him that there is such a thing as a war crime and that under the Geneva Conventions name, rank, and serial number are all you get, not religion.

Miraculously, the commandant relented.

The Jewish-American prisoners at the other camp—Stalag IX-B—were not as lucky. It’s not clear what the facts were there. By some accounts, Jewish prisoners were asked to identify themselves and the senior officers there urged cooperation. By other accounts, the Nazis picked out the prisoners who looked Jewish (along with prisoners who were identified as troublemakers). Both stories may be true. In any event, those selected were sent to a slave labor camp where the death rate was horrifically high, despite the fact that the war in Europe lasted only another 3 ½ months.

Jews were only about 2 or 3% of the American population at the time, but they were a higher percentage of the prisoners at Stalag IX-A.  Edmonds’ courage is thought to have saved about 200 lives that cold, winter morning. He was then, now, and forever an American hero.

JOHN ROSENBERG AT MINDING THE CAMPUS:  Intimidation produces silence at Stanford.

HAPPY 88^th BIRTHDAY TO ARTHUR FRY, CO-INVENTOR OF THE POST-IT NOTE: Fry didn’t actually invent the not-so-sticky adhesive used in post-it notes. That was his fellow 3M employee chemist Spencer Silver.  But Silver wasn’t sure what to do with it.  Fry’s contribution was to come up with a use.

The story goes that Fry sang in his church choir, where he would frequently use pieces of paper as bookmarks, which would sometimes fall out. One Sunday in 1973, it occurred to him that Silver’s adhesive used on a small piece of paper would make a great bookmark.

Yes, it does.  And sometimes invention is the mother of necessity rather than the other way around.

Here’s George Jones to sing about it.

(Full disclosure:  There is also another person who claims he, not 3M’s team, was the true inventor.  3M disagrees, and happily it’s not my job to sort this out.)

REMEMBERING THE CHINESE CULTURAL REVOLUTION’S RED AUGUST (ADDENDUM): Last week I did a post about August of 1966, the month in which the Red Guard student gangs started going on the rampage. But where did these students come from? And what made them so angry?

I can give you only partial answers: During this early stage of the Cultural Revolution, they were very disproportionately the sons and daughters of privileged party members.  (Surprised?  I suspect not.)

Red Guard students also tended to be the beneficiaries of preferential treatment in admissions. All during the 1950s and 1960s, the children of party members and at least in theory the children of peasants and workers received a kind of “affirmative action” in admission both to elite schools and to colleges and universities. Frequently a revolutionary pedigree was a more important credential than a good academic record. Early on, a popular meme (if not exactly a Shakespearean couplet) was “If the father is a hero [of the Revolution], the son is a good fellow; if the father is a reactionary, the son is a good-for-nothing—it is basically like this.”

Like students who receive preferential treatment here in the USA—diversity students, legacy students, and athletes—on average the Chinese recipients of preferential treatment got poorer grades than other students. Mao is reported to have acknowledged this: “The political performance of the children of revolutionary cadres in schools can only be rated as second-class, but students with bad family backgrounds [i.e. the children of alleged capitalists, landlords, rich peasants, and counter-revolutionaries] have performed very well. However, no matter how well they have performed, revolutionary tasks cannot be put on their shoulders.”

Loyal Instapundit readers know that I have written extensively about the problem of affirmative action “mismatch” in this country. (If you haven’t already read one of my essays, they are here and here. Please take a look.) Alas, large gaps in academic performance between identifiable groups tend to cause resentments. Perversely, a group that has been given preferential treatment may come to believe, against all evidence, that the system is rigged against them, when in fact the problem is that the system was rigged in their favor.

In China, the myth that the “Born-Reds” (as they sometimes called themselves) had been mistreated by the educational system prior to the Cultural Revolution was a strong one. “We Born-Reds gasped for breath under the suppression of the cow ghosts and snake demons [i.e. the teachers and school administrators], and bourgeois bastards [i.e. children with “bad” family backgrounds] in schools,” wrote several of the Red Guard crybullies. In fact, in the years leading up to Red August, school administrators were often far too inclined to indulge the “Born-Reds,” in part out of fear of their political clout.

Mao pandered to these students. For him, poor academic performance was not really a problem. He was contemptuous of the Chinese system of education anyway. And he was especially contemptuous of its examination methods: I am in favor of publishing the questions in advance and letting the students study them and answer them with the aid of books.” He seemed not to be troubled by cheating. “If you answer is good and I copy it, then mine too should be counted as good.”

Mao complained about too much emphasis on “foreign dead people” much the same way that leftists today complain about about “dead white males.” And he sympathized with students who dozed off during lectures. “You don’t have to listen to nonsense, you can rest your brain instead.” He accused the schools of favoring students from “bad” family backgrounds.

No wonder the Born-Reds loved him (and weren’t too fond of their teachers).

KAMALA HARRIS & ELIZABETH WARREN GET 4 PINOCCHIOS FROM WAPO FOR CLAIMING MICHAEL BROWN WAS MURDERED BY OFFICER WILSON:   All these efforts to make it sound like the police are the source of all the problems in inner city neighborhoods won’t end well.

SOME OF THE BEST-RUN MEDIUM-TERM IMMIGRATION DETENTION FACILITIES ARE PRIVATE: I’ve toured both a public and a privately-run medium-term* facility (and reported on them here). The private one was significantly nicer. I’ve also spoken to a federal official whose job it was to inspect both types. He told me that facilities dedicated to immigration detention tend to be well-run, whether public or private. It’s jails and prisons that do immigration detention as a sideline that tend to have problems, because they are not familiar with the special rules that apply to immigration detention. Yet a vastly disproportionate share of the energies of those who object to the conditions at detention facilities is aimed at privately-run facilities in particular.

This is true when the Left objects to conditions at regular jails and prisons too. It is apparently driven in significant part by unions that object to the lower wages at private prisons.

*I claim no familiarity with the holding tanks at which illegal immigrants are initially held, sometimes for a day or two, after being initially picked up. I have never visited one. The detainees I talked to had no complaints concerning the longer-term facilities I toured, but some did complain about the place they were initially taken. The most common complaint was that they were too cold.

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY, the State of Tennessee became the last necessary state to ratify the 19th Amendment, thus guaranteeing women the vote.  Here is an essay I wrote a while ago with Nancy Gertner on the subject.  It tells a few interesting stories about the road to women’s suffrage that you may not know.

RICHARD EPSTEIN:  “Forced Migration to Wind and Solar Could Hamper Nevada Economy.”

OH, THE INTERSECTIONALITY OF IT ALL!:  The are many ways in which the Grand Progressive Coalition is jerrybuilt.  This is just one of them.  I don’t see how it can last.

“CLARENCE THOMAS AND THE LOST CONSTITUTION”:  Written by Myron Magnet.  Reviewed by Peter Wood.

COLLEGE FIX:  UVA receives an award for increasing its diversity in its engineering school, but won’t clarify how ….  Alas, we can guess.

A BIT OF WISDOM FROM ROBERT BOLT:  Bolt was the man who wrote A Man for All Seasons and the screenplays for Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago.  Today would have been his 95th birthday.

REMEMBERING THE HORRIFIC RED AUGUST: In August of 1966, the Chinese Cultural Revolution was shifting into high gear. Egged on by Chairman Mao, student groups calling themselves the “Red Guard” had been popping up at schools, colleges, and universities all over the country. They were drunk with power and convinced of their own victimhood (rather like our Antifa).

“To rebel is justified!” Mao told them.

At an August mass rally in Tiananmen Square attended by over a million, Mao’s right-hand man, Lin Biao, instructed his young audience on what to do. Standing next to Mao, Lin Biao exhorted them to destroy “all the old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits of the exploiting classes.”

Yes, all of them.

Destroy they did. According to historian Frank Dikötter in The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History 1962-1976, the first death occurred in a school for girls run by Beijing Normal University. On the afternoon of August 5th, self-appointed Red Guard students accused five of the school’s administrators of disloyalty to the Revolution. Forcing them to kneel, the students hit them with nail-spiked clubs. When the vice principal, Bian Zhongyun, after hours of torture, lost consciousness, her body was stuffed into a garbage can.

The students had no need to fear retaliation. Mao had ensured that no measures would be taken against them. At Beijing’s 101^st Middle School, where powerful party leaders sent their own children, more than 10 teachers were forced to crawl on their hands and knees through hot coals. In the same city, at the Third Middle School for Girls, the principal was beaten to death and the dean hanged herself. At another Beijing middle school, the principal was forced to stand in the summer heat while students poured boiling water on him. And at yet another, a biology teacher was tortured and dragged to her death. Her colleagues were then forced to take turns beating her dead body.

Fellow students were not exempt. Students from so-called “bad backgrounds” (i.e. the sons and daughters of alleged capitalists, landlords, rich peasants and counter-revolutionaries) were forced to engage in heavy labor, locked up, and sometimes tortured to death.

Beijing was the epicenter of the most extreme varieties of violence during that month. But in Shanghai, things were nevertheless out of control. More than 150 faculty members were arrested at their homes and paraded around the campus of Huadong Teachers University in dunce caps with heavy signs around their necks identifying them as “Reactionary Academic Authorities.”   Rampaging Red Guard students destroyed everything they viewed as “bourgeois luxuries”—things made of silk or velvet, cosmetics, fashionable clothes and curio shops. Flower shops were a particular target. On August 23, 36 such shops were attacked.

In Xiamen, Red Guard gangs destroyed anything thought to be old and bourgeois or foreign—from ornamental brass doorknockers to antique signs to decorative elements on buildings. Shoes with pointed toes were confiscated, and high heels were sliced off. Wearing foreign or bourgeois fashions or hair styles could get one attacked. Passersby with long braids or foreign hairstyles were forcibly shorn. Stove-pipe pants—a style thought to be foreign—were ripped up.

The Liberation Army Daily, which was directly under the control of Lin Biao (and hence of Mao), continued to support—even rhapsodize—the actions of the Red Guard. On August 23^rd, it cheered them on: “What you did was right, and you did it well!” The following day, it promised the students the support of the army and declared to its readers: “Learn from the Red Guards! Respect the Red Guards!”

As the month wore on, massive book burnings took place in several cities. Temples, churches and public monuments were attacked.  Staggering numbers of homes were ransacked in search of evidence of the occupants’ disloyalty or a piece of porcelain to smash.

August of 1966 was a ghastly month in China. But then again the Cultural Revolution was just getting started.

By the end, according to Dikötter, “between 1.5 and 2 million people were killed, but many more lives were ruined through endless denunciations, false confessions, struggle meetings and persecution campaigns.”

(By the way, Lin Biao himself was dead under mysterious circumstances before it was over.)

VOTING RIGHTS FOR EX-OFFENDERS:  Tell me again why you think this ought to be a priority ….

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION SOUNDS LIKE THE CARTER ADMINISTRATION HERE:  Trump’s EEOC is filing disparate impact cases that sound a lot the kind of cases the Carter Administration used to file.  (I’m working on article about the history of disparate impact liability and why it’s a terrible idea.  I’ll post it when I’m done.)

I HATE IT WHEN WEB SITES PARROT RIDICULOUS REPORTS OF THE U.S. COMMISSION ON CIVIL RIGHTS W/O POINTING OUT THERE WERE DISSENTS AND THAT THE DISSENTS MADE A LOT MORE SENSE THAN THE REPORT ITSELF:  But that’s what this web site has done.

My dissent is here.  (Sorry to be grumpy, but this is serious ….)

WHO HIRES THESE REPORTERS? THIS IS REALLY INCOMPETENT: “Washington Post Glibly Dismisses Mental Illness as Cause of Mass Shootings.”