Autumn Billings: Hasan Piker's CBP Detention is Another Trump-Era Attack on Free Speech

I'm inclined to agree.

But of course I don't know how such things normally go. For all I know, Piker might well have been questioned even when Biden was in office. And, of course, we don't know what CBP's motive was. I mean...it's during the "Trump era" alright...but that's a bit of a weasel phrase.

Jed Rubenfeld: It's a Terrible Idea, But Trump Probably Can Accept a Free Jet From Qatar

I can't even tell what's going on here.

Some conservatives say Trump's just trolling...but who(m)? Lefties, maybe. Boeing, maybe.

Needless to say, this is the kind of thing that exacerbates Trump fatigue.

Tyler Cowen: The Hidden Cruelty of Capping Drug Prices

Mostly pretty standard arguments, like this:

Pharma is more complicated, because the additional spending gets us more drugs through the channel of encouraging more research and development. But the basic mechanisms are the same, and there is strong evidence that additional market spending—which so many oppose—does lead to the invention of more new drugs. If a new drug is very profitable, companies will invest more in trying to discover new drugs.

But I'd never heard this put this way, which I think is enlightening:

That’s why trying to artificially force the prices of pharmaceuticals down can raise their prices, albeit in a somewhat invisible manner. Right now, properly understood, the prices of most drugs are infinite. That is, the drugs do not exist. That includes possible drugs for cancer, ALS, Parkinson’s, dementia, and many other maladies. Higher prices mean better incentives for discovery, and over time the prices of these would-be drugs will fall from infinity to something within the realm of human possibility.

Trump's Tariff Gambit Was Awesome...or Awful

Awesome

Awful

Peter Wood: Will DEI Madness Return to the University of Florida?

A DEI commissar is their new president.

So:  probably.

That's my prediction anyway.

Why the BoT would hire such a person is beyond me. They've all been installed by Republicans.

The left is not going to release its grip on academia easily.

UBC and Michigan may not be the absolutely worst pedigree an administrator might have with respect to DEI...I mean...I guess it could be Smith, Berkeley, Bryn Mawr and Portland State...but, realistically, UBC+UM is about as bad as it gets.

The academic left is just waiting and hoping for a Democrat win in '28. At that point, unless guardrails have been established, universities will quickly move back to the left. Or rather: back to the farther left. Indoctrination is not just a convenient tool for making more leftists, it's their epistemic ideal: leftist dogma transmitted straight to students as if it were fact. They're not going to give that sort of thing up easily.

Says me, anyway.

McCarthy: The $Trump Meme Coin Scheme

Not good.

McCarthy: Can We 86 '8647'?

Rational, as usual:

The term “86” is an old one and it just means to throw something away, to get rid of it because it has no useful purpose. In the glossary of words anti-Trumpers of the left and right have applied to the president, it is comparatively tame. It is tame, too, in comparison to the words and imagery Trump has applied to his political opponents. And that some lunatic fringe may invoke “86” to suggest assassination does not mean the term loses its familiar meaning — any more than the mafia’s use of “off” to refer to murder means the rest of us have to stop saying “off.”
Everybody knows Comey is deeply opposed to Trump and would like to see him impeached; nobody with a brain who is speaking honestly believes Comey wants Trump to be killed. It should not have been necessary to make this point, but in taking his foolish Instagram post down, Comey asserted that he opposes violence, had no thought that “86 47” was a call to violence, and had no intention of suggesting violence.
The people who are feigning great offense over this are the same people who staunchly defended Trump’s Ellipse speech and who bristled at the description of the January 6 riot as an insurrection.
Just as I think Comey should avoid using cyphers that others can easily misinterpret (intentionally or otherwise), I didn’t think, politically speaking, there was any defending Trump’s speech or the unrest at the Capitol. But legally speaking, it was utter distortion to portray Trump’s speech as criminal incitement, and what happened at the Capitol was clearly not an insurrection (a term Lincoln applied to the Civil War). That is why Trump, though indicted on scores of criminal counts, was never charged with incitement (the federal offense is called “solicitation to commit a crime of violence” — Section 373 of the penal code). And it’s why not a single one of the 1,600 people prosecuted over January 6 was charged with insurrection (Section 2383).
I made those points more times than I can count over the past four years... That said, Trump’s Ellipse speech — in particular, his urging his followers to “fight,” knowing he was also exhorting them to march on the Capitol — was closer to incitement than anything Comey said. And it still wasn’t incitement. And experienced prosecutors, investigators, and security officials know that.
What a stupid time to be alive.

Eighty-Six the Snowflake Right

Looks like 86gate is still a thing.

It really is astonishing how brainless and dishonest political argument makes people--myself included on more than one...or a hundred...or a thousand...occasions...

8645

So apparently there's a freakout because some people--e.g. the loathsome James Comey--have been "tweeting" (or "graming," or "tokking" or whatever you crazy kids are inging these days), the numeral:

8645

Or, alternatively 8647...but he'll always be 45 to me....*

Now, this isn't hard to figure out. '86' is early-mid 20th century slang for get rid of. So, using my uncanny, even Sherlockian, powers of deduction,** I conclude that these folks intend to say "get rid of Trump."
   So far nothing in any way surprising or notable about this.

   They hate Trump. They want to get rid of him. That's what the message says. Case closed, my dear Watson...

 Except for NOW ENTER THE RED TEAM....

 They claim that '8645' (or '7') is old-school gangland slang for KILL 45 (or 7).

 Very serious tones were adopted! Pearls were clutched! Panties were bunched!

 IT'S A DEATH THREAT AGAINST POTUS!!!!

   "Huh," I thought. "86 can mean kill...but only as a specific type of getting rid of... So that interpretation is severely strained..."

   I'm not a big fan of the "woke right" meme/trope...but that right there does look like the kind of thing that might reasonably be described as woke right--the sloppy, free-associative interpretation straining for some vague link to a desired/pre-ordained target interpretation...chosen because it accords with the writer's politics...

Yep. That's the PC method alright.

Classic.

   Oh but then: I realized that maybe my entirely casual understanding of '86' is based on basically nothing other than Buggs Bunny cartoons from my kidhood.

   So I went to look up the definition.

   Not paying attention, I clicked on the Merriam-Webster link--which confirmed my intuitive understanding of  '86' (and added bunch of context about soda fountains and whatnot).

   Then, of course, I realized that I couldn't trust Merriam-Webster--they who alter their definitions to remain au courant and compliant with the ever-shifting winds of progressive Newspeak...having changed one usage note actually, no-kidding on the fly, in the middle of Amy Coney Barrett's confirmation hearings, in order to bring it into compliance with Stupidest United States Senator Mazie Hiorno's proclamations and make it seem that ACB had committed the terrible crime of not speaking exactly as the left wanted her to speak on that particular day. As I'm sure you recall, this burning civil rights dispute concerned the phrases 'sexual preference' and 'sexual orientation.' Because of course it did. ACB had used the former phrase. Hirono "corrected" her, informing her that the latter was "correct" and the former was...whatever. White supremacist. Intersectional. Cisheteronormative. Some Woke bullshit. At the time of the dispute, MW's usage notes indicated that "sexual preference" was preferred--or at least acceptable. I can't remember which. Immediately after the disagreement unfolded, MW changed the entry to back up their leftard heroine. (Then they actually pled, basically, scheduled maintenance...  I'm not kidding. They just happened to change their entry right after this dispute arose...and that revision just happened to support the same witless, totalitarian political faction MW always supports...

   Anyhoo, the point of this was that I can't trust MW. They may have eighty-sixed all the now-politically-incorrect parts of their entry on 'eighty-six'/'86'. I glanced around for any citations that might reveal revision dates, but no joy. I guess I could check the Wayback...but I didn't...

   I'm going to guess that there's no institutional shenanigans in this case, and provisionally conclude that the right is being a bunch of whiney little bitches.

   This is really a generic bit of internet stupidity--though the left, given its love of victimhood--tends to deploy it most. That is: pretending that non-death-threats are death threats. The internet loooves that one... But the lefties really love it.

   But anyway, this time it's the wingnuts, not the moonbats, who are full of shit.

   Kinda reminds me of back during the GWOT when "regime change" in Iraq was all the rage among the Bushies. Kerry commented that what we really needed was regime change at home...and the right went nuts, pretending that this was a call for violence. Stupid. I thought it was a pretty good line, actually.

   Anyway, here's just one example, Jim Geraghty from the usually-more-sober National Review.

* I'm being lazy with the single-quotes here, leaving it to your brain to automatically sort out whatever use-mention problems there might be here.
** This, notably, does seem to be mostly deduction, whereat--notoriously--most of Holmes's "deductions" are actually abductions (or inferences to the best explanation, or whatever flavor of explanatory inference you prefer).

Drug Price Controls: Trump's Worst Idea Since Tariffs?

Since I'm still not sold on the view that tariffs are obviously stupid under prevailing conditions, this seems to me to be just about his worst idea.

Christopher Caldwell: Trump Takes on Disparate Impact

It's absolutely imperative that we kill disparate impact theory.

It's very unlikely we'll be able to do so.

TFP: Trump's Disgraceful "Palace in the Sky:" The Dubai 747

facepalm

He's probably constitutionally incapable of resisting a bribe present like this.

"What Is Becoming Of College Sports?"

A massive pile of shit, that's what.

College sports is basically dead is what.

Wesley J. Smith: Bioethics is Becoming Just Another "Social Justice" Political Movement

Which means: loony leftist.

Not much of a surprise, unfortunately.

Thing is, philosophical issues are usually so murky, and arguments so lame and easy to come by, that you can respectably argue for just about anything you want. In a discipline that is 17 to 1 leftists to conservatives, that means that the actual positions and arguments people propose and defend will probably lean left. Add to this that negative arguments, including skeptical ones, are easy and numerous in philosophy. So it's easier to argue against established positions. So, what you get is typically: leftists deploying skeptical arguments against established positions.

   Add to this that bioethics is one of the more disreputable subfields of philosophy. If you were to list the least-rigorous disciplinary backwaters, you'd just about have to include bioethics alongside applied ethics generally, race and gender blather...and the absolute weakest, least-rigorous subfield, feminist philosophy. You'd have to include a lot of recent Continental quasi-philosophy like Lacan and Deleuze, too. It's no accident that feminism is rotten with that stuff.

   At any rate: this stuff about bioethics comes as absolutely no surprise.

The Pulitzer for Fake News Goes to...

Pro-Publica...

If you can win 'em for Russiagate, I guess you can win 'em for anything.

Turley: Hypocritical Dem Law Firms Squeal About Trump Turning the Tables on Them

Turley seems right yet again: Trump shouldn't be doing this, but these law firms really do deserve it.

Washington Times: VA Dems Can't Seem To Give Up "Trans" Madness

Loudoun County, specifically.

NoVa is wrecking this state.

Trump's "Trans" Military Ban

Unsurprisingly, I'm in favor.

"Transgenderism" is a radioactive morass of mental disorders and mass sociogenic illness.

As I've said for a decade, no person is mystically the other sex "on the inside." So accepting such people into the military is like accepting any other mentally disordered person--or, a religious fanatic that demands unreasonable special treatment.

   Both men and women are eligible for the military--but not if they pretend to be the other sex--and especially not if they demand that others play along.

   This is really not a particularly complicated issue.

Bill Ackman: Harvard Losing Tax Exemption is Fair Game

I'm not sure.

   But the ideological capture of universities by the extremist left is a grave threat to the future of academia...and the nation.

   It does seem to me that the government is entitled to take fairly extreme steps to encourage some reasonable degree of institutional neutrality.

   I wish there were a FIRE-like organization working for institutional neutrality with respect to politics. The left will just continue to take over our institutions and bend them to its purposes unless something is done. There is no real doubt that a kind of low-grade political indoctrination is common at universities...punctuated by outright, egregious instances of indoctrination... Practically brainwashing in some cases. I continue to think that transparency is the best weapon here. A FIRE-like organization that would give universities politicization ratings would be great...but, of course, not at all easy.

   This bullshit starts in orientation--where the first thing our students here are their orientation facilitator's "preferred pronouns"...

NRO: "Trump's Detente With the Houthis"

link

A different perspective.

I don't even really understand why Obama's Iran deal was so bad, TBH. Is it really possible to keep up with all this stuff?

Not for me, apparently.

Matthew Petti: "Trump Gets Bored With The War In Yemen" (?)

I don't even know whether this is a fair assessment.

Trump Blocks Gain-Of-Function Research

My take on this hasn't changed. To wit:

I don't know.

It's a cost-benefit matter.

I am in no way qualified to say anything about how such calculations might come out.

But:

I'm pretty goddamn sure that we shouldn't pay shitty labs in the nation that is our biggest geopolitical enemy to do really dangerous kinds of GoFR...

Honestly, who ever thought that was a good idea?

I realize hindsight is 20/20...but how did foresight manage to end up being 20/400 in this matter?

Doesn't seem like rocket science...

TRUMP HATES TEH CONSTITUTION!!!!: Fifth Amendment / "I Don't Know" Edition

Again I ask: If he's so bad, why do you have to lie about and distort what he says?

At least this one is vaguely plausible. Unlike e.g. the "very fine people" hoax.