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.”

JOHN FUND:  “We Should Fear Free-Speech Curbs More Than Exposure to Racist Manifestos.”

I KEEP TELLING THESE GUYS THAT I CAN REALLY HELP FIX THIS:  “Colleges Vie for Resources to Address STEM Disparities.”  But the most effective thing they could do is cost-free:  Stop trying to “help” minority students by giving them an affirmative action leg up.  It’s backfiring.

SOCIALISM WORKS LIKE A CHARM:  The problem is that charms don’t work.

MY WASHINGTON TIMES OP-ED:  Threatening Teachers’ Ability to Control Their Classrooms.

(The full-length dissenting opinion here.  Update: It’s now the 3rd most downloaded article on SSRN for the week.)

HELP WANTED:  If you are a conservative or libertarian lawyer living in the DC area with a strong interest in civil rights issues, click here.  Yes, this is a paying job.

“CALIFORNIA WANTS TO TEACH YOUR KIDS THAT CAPITALISM IS RACIST”:  Bill Evers has an essay in the WSJ about the California Department of Education’s new “Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum.”  Yes, it’s bad, but I’m sure you figured that:

Begin with economics. Capitalism is described as a “form of power and oppression,” alongside “patriarchy,” “racism,” “white supremacy” and “ableism.” Capitalism and capitalists appear as villains several times in the document.

On politics, the model curriculum is similarly left-wing. One proposed course promises to explore the African-American experience “from the precolonial ancestral roots in Africa to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and enslaved people’s uprisings in the antebellum South, to the elements of Hip Hop and African cultural retentions.”

Teachers are encouraged to cite the biographies of “potentially significant figures” such as Angela Davis, Frantz Fanon and Bobby Seale. Convicted cop-killers Mumia Abu-Jamal and Assata Shakur are also on the list. Students are taught that the life of George Jackson matters “now more than ever.” Jackson, while in prison, became “a revolutionary warrior for Black liberation and prison reform.” The Latino section’s people of significance include Puerto Rican nationalists Oscar López Rivera, a member of a paramilitary group that carried out more than 130 bomb attacks, and Lolita Lebrón, who was convicted of attempted murder in a group assault that wounded five congressmen.

Housing policy gets the treatment. The curriculum describes subprime loans as an attack on home buyers with low incomes rather than a misguided attempt by the government to help such home buyers. Politicians—Republicans and Democrats—imposed lower underwriting standards on the home-loan industry. Republicans billed it as a way to expand the middle class, while Democrats crowed that it would aid the poor.

A friend of mine wrote this morning calling Bill “a brave man.”  But he didn’t mean Bill was brave to write the op-ed.  He meant that only a brave man could plow through the thousand pages of material Bill had to read in order to write his op-ed.  “Reading it all would be a fate worse than death,” wrote my friend.

The Republic won’t survive too much of this kind of stuff, you know. Yes, there’s a lot of ruin in a nation.  But it’s not infinite.  I may be a Cassandra. But never lose sight of the fact that Cassandra was right.

THE FATHER OF THE MODEL T: On this day in 1863, during the depths of the Civil War, future automaker Henry Ford was born.

Ford didn’t invent the automobile. Nor did he invent the assembly line. But he put those two ideas together and combined them with a relentless … and I really mean relentless … effort to make a product that was both functional and affordable. Said Ford:

I will build a motor car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will be so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one – and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God’s great open spaces.

Sounds like a good idea to me. Of course, as he acknowledged, he had great people working for him. When we pay tribute to Ford for putting ordinary Americans behind the wheel of a Model T and other early Ford automobiles, don’t forget Ford’s many bright boys–Clarence Avery, Gus Degner, Eugene Farkas, Jozsef A. Galamb, Henry Love, Peter E. Martin, Charles E. Sorensen, C.J. Smith, Childe Harold Wills and others–who supplied their share of that relentless effort.  I suspect Instapundit readers can fill in some names that I don’t know.

Yes, I know Ford was an anti-semite. And not your garden-variety turn-of-the-century anti-semite either. He was hardcore, feels-it-deep-in-his-gut kind.  I bet he had other bad qualities too. But the Model T was a marvel.

SAD BUT TRUE:  Max Eden:  “The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Embraces Alternative Facts.”

(My dissent is here.)

ISN’T THIS WHERE THE WORD “KOW TOW” COMES FROM?:  American movie studios appease Chinese censors.

“UC IMPOSES POLITICAL LITMUS TEST“:  Dan Walters reports on the University of California’s “loyalty oath”:

Although UC’s Board of Regents officially declares that “No political test shall ever be considered in the appointment and promotion of any faculty member or employee,” a new UC policy seems to be doing exactly that.