KARL MENNINGER, PATRON SAINT OF THE DEINCARCERATION MOVEMENT: On this day in 1893, psychiatrist Karl Menninger was born. In his 1960s-era book The Crime of Punishment he argued that all punishment is cruel and useless and should cease. As Menninger saw it, those who asked us to spare a thought for crime victims were being “melodramatic” and “childish” and appealing only to the “unthinking.” Some saw Menninger’s kind of thinking as a bit of a joke right from the beginning. As crime rates soared over the next few decades, more and more Americans got the message.

It may well be that there are things that can be done to decrease our current incarceration rates without seriously raising crime. Some new technologies may make that possible. But, as I have written about here, I fear policy advocates are getting carried away. When urban neighborhoods are reasonably safe, its residents flourish.   When they aren’t, they don’t.

JOHN HASNAS:  “The Diversity Distortion.”  Why are the so-called “grievance studies” programs growing while other university departments are being cut back?

WE’RE DOOMED:  Math teachers go off the deep end.  (With my usual coda.)

ROBERT GEORGE CALLS ON CONSERVATIVES TO BE MORE COURAGEOUS:  May I add that this is especially needed in the area of race-, ethnicity-, and sex-based identity politics?  You’ve never seen terror until you’ve asked a Member of Congress or Congressional staff member to do some tiny thing to help stem the tide of this destructive trend.  “Deer in headlights” doesn’t do justice to the look.

The current identity-obsessed state of the nation isn’t just a cultural change.  It is the result of law and policy.  The left has passed federal laws and instituted policies that beg people to think of themselves as members of victim groups.  Perfectly sound laws have been interpreted by courts and agencies to mean to opposite of what they say.  All the while conservative leaders ignore it, because they haven’t thought enough about it to recognize the long-term consequences or because they understand completely, but are afraid to speak up.  Until something is done to change significant parts of that body of law and policy, things will not get better.

(Here is an extremely minor example.  This bill should have been a no-brainer, but when opposition was voiced from an ill-informed civil rights advocate, who clearly didn’t understand the bill at all, it died.)

MAYBE A HOSPITAL ISN’T THE BEST PLACE FOR ANTI-VAXXERS TO WORK (REGARDLESS OF THEIR REASON FOR BEING ANTI-VAXXERS): The EEOC just announced it reached another settlement (this one for $74K) with a hospital that had declined to hire a job applicant with religious objections to flu vaccines. The hospitals want workers who, in the event of a flu epidemic, will show up for work and won’t make other people sick.

I wrote sympathetically about religious accommodations here. But I was responding to my totalitarian colleagues on the Commission on Civil Rights who wanted to coerce people with sincere religious beliefs into doing things they didn’t want to do. Some of the stuff they were writing was pretty scary.  Now the EEOC is coercing hospitals into hiring someone that they don’t think is the best person for the job. And their reason doesn’t sound at all crazy to me.

In a few (but not all) of these cases the EEOC has argued that because the hospital accommodates people who have medical conditions that prevent them from getting flu shots, they must also accommodate religion too. Of course, the hospitals probably weren’t thrilled to have to accommodate the medical condition either.  But the Americans with Disabilities Act may require them to. Note that the legal standards are very different under Title VII (religion must be accommodated only if employer inconvenience would be de minimus) and under the American with Disabilities Act (“reasonable” accommodations to disability must be made).

One day there will be a serious epidemic that we are utterly unprepared to handle. Please God let us put it off for a few hundred years.

SPEAKING OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY:  I ran across this quote from Mr. Dooley (Finley Peter Dunne):  “Th’ dimmycratic party ain’t on speakin’ terms with itsilf ….”  (I am not sure of the date, but Dunne lived from 1867-1936.  In any event, history repeats …)

And apropos of nothing in particular, here is another of Mr. Dooley’s observations that seems rather modern:

“D’ ye think th’ colledges has much to do with th’ progress iv th’ wurrold?”  asked Mr. Hennessy.

“D’ ye think,” said Mr. Dooley, “’tis th’ mill that make th’ wather run?”

Alas, the modern world’s immense wealth allows us to buy a lot of … uh … stuff that we couldn’t otherwise afford.

BUTTIGIEG NAMES HIS SPENDING PROJECT AFTER THE WRONG GUY: FREDERICK DOUGLASS WANTED NOTHING TO DO WITH WHITE GUYS OFFERING “HELP”: Pete Buttigieg is earnestly trying to bail himself out of his troubles with African American voters by throwing large sums of money in their direction. It will be like a new Marshall Plan, he says.

He calls his initiative the “Douglass Plan” after the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass. But Buttigieg couldn’t have chosen a less likely person to name his spending program after. Douglass hated that sort of thing. He famously said:

The question is asked, and pressed with a great show of earnestness at this momentous crisis of our nation’s history, What shall be done with the four million slaves if they are emancipated?

… Our answer is, do nothing with them; mind your business, and let them mind theirs. Your doing with them is their greatest misfortune. They have been undone by your doings, and all they now ask, and really have need of at your hands, is just to let them alone. They suffer by every interference, and succeed best by being let alone. The Negro should have been let alone in Africa—let alone when the pirates and robbers offered him for sale in our Christian slave markets—(more cruel and inhuman than the Mohammedan slave markets)—let alone by courts, judges, politicians, legislators and slavedrivers—let alone altogether, and assured that they were thus to be let alone forever, and that they must now make their own way in the world, just the same as any and every other variety of the human family. As colored men, we only ask to be allowed to do with ourselves, subject only to the same great laws for the welfare of human society which apply to other men, Jew, Gentiles, Barbarian, Sythian. Let us stand upon our own legs, work with our own hands, and eat bread in the sweat of our own brows. When you, our white fellow countrymen, have attempted to do anything for us, it has generally been to deprive us of some right, power or privilege which you yourself would die before you would submit to have taken from you.

I always liked Douglass.

YEAH, I GET WHAT THAT’S ABOUT:  “TV Ignores Conservative Authors of #1 Book in the Country, While Putting Liberal Author of #3421 on Major Tour.”

A SOLUTION TO A UNIQUELY INSTAPUNDIT PROBLEM:  If you purchased Glenn’s insightful little book, The Social Media Upheaval, but haven’t yet read it because the bright orange and green cover is blinding you, I have a solution.  I accidentally left my copy on my patio in the sun for two days.  Presto! Change-o!  The cover is now pleasantly aged and easy to look at.

Of course, if you haven’t yet purchased Glenn’s book, it’s time that you do.  But wear sunglasses before you open up the package.

PURR: On this day in 1920, Ed Lowe, the inventor of kitty litter was born. I’m not kidding. “Kitty litter” wasn’t invented till 1947. Before that people used sand or dirt or they just let the cat outside.

Lowe and his father ran a business in Michigan that sold sand, sawdust, and clay in bulk to heavy industry. One cold January day, a neighbor, Mrs. Draper, asked him for some sand for her cat, since her own sand pile was frozen. Instead of sand, he gave her Fuller’s earth—a type of absorbent clay. She loved it. It worked much better than sand.

Ed got a bright idea—ultimately an idea worth hundreds of millions of dollars: Why not sell the stuff? The local pet store owner was dubious. He couldn’t see how anyone would be dumb enough to pay their hard-earned money for kitty litter when dirt and sand were essentially free. But Lowe persuaded him to give it away free so cat owners could see how great it was compared to what they were using. It worked! Like Mrs. Draper, customers loved it.

See how easy it can be to make hundreds of millions of dollars? I love America. And so does my little feline Leopold.

MICHAEL BOSKIN:  The Left’s agenda is scientifically, economically, and numerically illiterate.

BABYLON BEE:  “Dems Change Mind on Border Wall After Realizing It Will Keep People from Leaving When We Switch to Socialism.”

(Ask Snopes whether this is satire.  These days it’s hard for me to tell ….)

DID THE INFAMOUS D.B. COOPER JUST DIE A BLOCK OR SO FROM MY GENTLEMAN FRIEND’S HOME?:  I don’t know.  But it’s a good story.  And even if Robert Rackstraw was not D.B. Cooper, he seems to have led an astonishingly crazy life.

SIGNIFICANT EARTHQUAKE HITS SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA:  Fortunately, it happened in a relatively unpopulated area.  I didn’t feel it here in San Diego, but it has reminded me I need to update my preparations.

SOUNDS LIKE A VIOLATION OF TITLE VI:  Augsburg University pays non-whites to attend minority-only STEM workshop.

(If Augsburg is really interested in increasing the number of minority STEM majors, here’s a shocking simple (and legal!) way to do it.)

REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA v. BAKKE: On this day in 1978, aspiring physician Allan Bakke won his case in the Supreme Court and hence his right to attend UC Davis Medical School. Yet those who believed Bakke’s victory would spell the end of race-based admissions policies were disappointed. Four justices came down hard against preferential treatment; a different four were happy to tolerate such treatment. Justice Lewis Powell, a Nixon appointee, attempted to come down somewhere in between. Powell’s swing opinion worked for Bakke, but colleges and universities were able to drive a truck through the narrow “diversity” exception Powell thought he was drawing.

Ever since then, “diversity” (which had barely been argued as a justification for race-based admissions by the Regents) has been the watchword on campus.

The consequences of the Bakke decision have not at all been what Powell was hoping for.

HANS BADER:  “Prosecutor endorsed by AOC wants shorter sentences for violent crimes or no jail time at all.”  And hopes to reduce prison populations to “zero.”

JASON RILEY:  Political scientist finds 1 in 3 hate crimes claim is a hoax.  [Edit:  Whoops, that was supposed to say fewer than 1 in 3 is genuine. That sounds more like it. Sorry about that.]

(By the way, the federal statute is unconstitutional too.)

BLACK CRIME VICTIMS MATTER TOO: To Mayor Pete Buttigieg: If you really think Black Lives Matter, please don’t lose sight of the need for police presence in the neighborhoods that see the most crime.

Chicago may have lost sight of that in 2016 to the great detriment of its citizens.

THE BERLIN AIRLIFT: After WWII, Churchill declared that an “iron curtain” had descended across Europe, separating Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe from the free world.  Berlin, which had been reduced to rubble, was an anomaly. Located deep inside East Germany, it was nevertheless not wholly under Soviet control. Rather, under the agreement reached at Potsdam, it was divided into four sectors, with each under the control of one of the allied powers—France, Great Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States. The French, British and American sectors formed West Berlin, which was … well… the part you’d want to be in.

Westerners wondered how long could such an arrangement could last. How long would it be before the Soviet Union moved to gain full control? They got their answer in this day in 1948 when the Soviet Union blockaded the roads and railroads leading from West Germany to West Berlin. The Soviets were hoping to strangle this little enclave of freedom, which had only a few weeks worth of food and a month’s worth of coal.

Sensible people thought a city the size of Berlin couldn’t be supplied with food and necessities by air. That’s what freight trains and big trucks are for. But other than to surrender the city, the allies had no choice. Beginning on June 26, the air forces of France, Great Britain and the United States, along with those of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa executed the Berlin Airlift. According to Wikipedia, they flew 200,000 sorties in a single year. That works out to one every two or three minutes.

The Soviets did nothing to stop it. They knew they’d be risking war if they tried.

There were lots of heroes in this story. But the special hero was an American pilot named Gail Halvorsen. One day after flying a cargo plane into Tempelhof air field, he noticed a group of about 30 ragamuffin children watching from behind a barbed wire fence, so he went over to talk to them. They told him that if at some point the weather gets too bad to continue the airlift, they would be okay. “We can get by on a little food, but if we lose our freedom, we may never get it back.”

Lt. (later Col.) Halvorsen reached into his pocket and came up with two sticks of Wrigley’s gum, which the children excitedly broke into tiny pieces and shared as best they could. Some only got to smell the wrapper.

A light went on in Halvorsen’s head. Next time he and his crew would airdrop candy tied with handkerchiefs as tiny parachutes. The children were delighted. Each time he dropped a load of candy he noticed the crowd of children was larger than before.

The higher-ups in the Air Force noticed too. Soon Halvorsen’s project was made official and greatly expanded to include many pilots and their crews. All told, it is thought that more than 23 tons of candy—much of it contributed by candy manufacturers—were dropped from over 250,000 little parachutes to many thousands of children who needed a bright spot in their lives. Let freedom ring.

By the way, as far as I can tell, Gail Halvorsen is still alive, one of the last of the Greatest Generation.  Here’s to you, Colonel! You are a better Gail H. than I.

THE TRUMP ADMINSTIRATION HAS DONE THE RIGHT THING BY PUTTING LOCAL SCHOOL DISTRICTS BACK IN CHARGE OF THEIR DISCIPLINE POLICY:  But that doesn’t necessarily mean that New York City is going to do the right thing.

JOHANNES GUTENBERG:  On this day in 1400 (or thereabouts), arguably the most consequential man of the millennium was born.  Or at least the city of his birth, Mainz, so declared in the 1890s. The city needed an official day to celebrate (and so do I).  June 24 was chosen. Don’t argue.

WELL, IT’S EXACTLY THE WORD I WOULD USE:  “‘Hero is not a word I would use,’ says UPS driver who ran into a burning building.”

GRUTTER v. BOLLINGER DECIDED ON THE DAY IN 2003: In it, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, held it should defer to the judgment of colleges and universities on whether race discrimination in admissions is justified.

It was a decision that has turned out to have a bigger downside than the five justices anticipated.

UH OH:  “More than 100 cops in St. Louis and Philadelphia under investigation for offensive social media posts.”