Trump Pardons Two FL Divers Who Were Innocent and Maliciously Prosecuted

link

" 'Banal Horror' Asylum Case Deals Trump Yet Another Loss on Due Process"

link

Jenkins: "Why Is Policymaking So Bad?"

link

Eisenhower Warned Us About a "Scientific-Technological Elite;" And: Could Cutting Funding for University Research Improve Science?

Trump Pardons Right-Wing Crooks Todd and Julie Chrisley, Who Defrauded Community Banks Out of $Tens of Millions

When he's dumb, he's very, very dumb.

WhatIfAltHist: We Live in a Totalitarian Society

 

CO Passes Another Crazy "Gender" Law: "Misgendering" and "Deadnaming" Both Illegal

Abject insanity.

Even if "gender" (in the leftist senses of the term) made any sense--which, not to put too fine a point on it, it does not--the state can't compel to you say this sort of thing. I can't change my name and then insist that no one else ever use my old name again--and, contrary to progressive dogma, transes are not special.

   The court would have to be insane to uphold such a law.

WhatIfAltHist: "WTF is The Left Even Doing?" aka "Is the Left OK?"

Most of this is old news to readers of this blogtastic blog. But it is, IMO, interesting, enjoyable, and even comforting to listen to someone who so has the left's number:

"Trump's War on Gender is Also a War on Government:" Transanity by Paisley Currah. Also: Anti-Transanity by Noah Rothman

This was just too flat-out stupid for me to finish.

But Noah Rothman's gotcher back: "The Addled Activist Mind."

NRO: Tariff Power Lies With Congress, Not the President

The decisive argument, IMO:

We have been frequent critics of Donald Trump’s tariffs, but we understand that there is a case to be made for reconsidering some of our trade policies. The place to make that case is Congress — not by unilateral presidential declaration of open-ended worldwide “emergencies.” The Founders rebelled against taxation without representation; they did not mean for the executive to control the duties on all imports by daily whim.
It is Congress that was granted power by the Constitution to “lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises” and to “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations,” and for good reason. It is Congress that can set policies that are stable and predictable for business, our allies, and our adversaries. The representative branch’s policymaking may not be pretty, but it includes the greatest number of people in the most deliberative fashion in balancing competing policy concerns and getting buy-in from people likely to face the voters again soon. That’s how we have always set tax policy, and tariffs are nothing if not taxes.
...
From here, the case likely goes to the federal circuit and, quite possibly, the Supreme Court. It would be better in all events for Trump to go to Congress instead, or for Congress to act on its own. But if the president persists in claiming worldwide, perpetual powers unconstrained by any specific rules, it will be the duty of the judiciary to stand against taxation without proper representation. It would be better still if the courts made clear that no Congress can give such powers away.

Free Speech Prevails Against the Loathsome Michael Mann / Global Warming Hysteria

But note how difficult it was, and how long it took.

I am, of course, not a lawyer, but Mann's case always seemed preposterous to me.

Lowry: The Woke Frenzy Isn't Coming Back

Contra Lowry: the woke frenzy isn't even gone.

The only reason someone might think it is is: it was a lot worse for a few years there.

But: Woketarianism still reigns at universities and in K-12, it's still got a grip on "journalism" and many or most other institutions, boys are still cosplaying girls and invading their sports, locker rooms and public restrooms, men are still cosplaying women and invading their sports, locker rooms and public restrooms, the influence of CRT and BLM on laws, policing, prosecution and imprisonment are still evident. Rabid pro-Hamasniks ravening through campuses and cities is a new phase of the madness.

As I've said many times: Woketarianism was Political Correctness 2.0--neo-PC. Paleo-PC reigned in universities--and began to invade "journalism"--in the late '80s. But by the late '90s it had faded away. Those of us who thought we'd won the war were wrong, wrong, wrong. It festered in the intellectually weakest parts of the academy, and burst forth into the wider culture ca. 2013. People older than me have said: it's the New Left 3.0...

Don't expect this madness to ever go away completely. Like extreme right-wing Christianity, it'll likely just come and go for a long, long time.

Daniel Buck: Woke Education is Going Strong, Even in Middle America

My prediction is that this is unlikely to completely go away. The left has moved the Overton Window. And this kind of prope-Marxist / postpostmodern, Orwellian irrationalism is likely to come and go for a long, long time. It never really went away after it seized control of campuses in the late '80s. It just waned...and then waxed...explosively.

Stanley Kurtz: Harvard IS Illegitimate; A Reply to Steven Pinker

I agree...but it's not just Harvard.

It's most of academia.

Gabe Kaminsky: Trump Family Business Dealings Test Ethical and Legal Boundaries

Sounds really damn bad.

   But, in Trump's case, you just about have to suspend judgment until you've heard a defense. The left spins absolutely everything Trump does in the worst possible direction. I don't see how the stuff referenced in the story can be ok...but that's the thing: over and over, the press reports on things Trump does in such a way as for them to sound utterly indefensible...but when you learn the actual facts, you see you've been duped.

   Which, again, isn't to say that I'm confident this stuff will turn out to be defensible in the end.

   I guess it's possible that he thinks he's justified in getting back the money that Democrats stole from him in those lawsuits. And honestly, that's not an abjectly stupid idea--though probably not legally defensible. He could also be building resources because he thinks he'll face another psychopathic effort to ruin him and his family when he leaves office again. A pretty slender thread of a justification...but I'm just spitballin' here...

Gabe Kaminsky: How Elon Musk Unleashed Chaos in the NIH

This stuff concerns me a lot--and, presumably, concerns a lot of people with my general kind of position.

   Cutting purchases of liquid nitrogen for cancer research: very, very bad. But, note: quickly and rightly reversed.

   As for "sex education for transgender youth:" cut it. Cut it all. This will obviously be largely an initiative to advance progressive-left dogmas about sex and transgenderism. Trangenderism is pseudoscience. So this is rather like studying sex education among UFO abductees or people with multiple personalities or repressed memories, or victims of Satanic Ritual Abuse. If you're going to study anything at all about transgenderism, study how this pseudoscientific, ideological bit of mass sociogenic illness can be combatted.

   And, as for worthy projects with DEI in their proposals: the main problem here is that organizations like NIH forced DEI to be injected into proposals in order for funding to be granted. And almost none of the researchers pushed back. Now they're paying a price. These will have to be addressed on a case-by-case basis. If the researchers are willing to affirm that it was just boilerplate, that it can be expunged without undermining the project, and that they did it just because they had to, then I say restore the funding. Generally, however, projects that do actually have DEI as an essential component should be defunded.

   In addition to cutting waste, we're combatting ideological capture. The main damage has already been done by Democrats. Trump et al. are trying to fix it. This isn't easy, and there will be mistakes. Emphasizing those mistakes without the relevant context distorts the situation.

   Look, if some health researcher wants to study, say, "structural racism," let him submit his proposal. Most of that stuff is bullshit and should be rejected. But not necessarily out of hand. DEI is a characteristically leftist idea, however, in that it isn't just offered up as an ordinary idea alongside other ideas. Rather, it is injected into everything. It's treated as a kind of axiom that must be injected into all research, regardless of what it's on. This is one of the main reasons such leftist nonsense is so dangerous. Even when people start coming to their senses, it's very difficult to disentangle and extract it. Also, of course, it's not a matter of a few stupid research projects--it's now a pervasive dogma that Democrats forced into everything--this stuff about NIH barely scratches the surface. Democrats refused to fund any projects that didn't include some reference to this dogma. Now, TFP and similar pubs did criticize this--but the MSM didn't. They ignored or defended the madness. Now they're doing everything in their power to emphasize the difficulties and downsides of undoing this particular bit of progressive Lysenkoism.

   Nevertheless: there is reason to be concerned about how the administration is going about this.

   Also nevertheless, however: they tried gentler, more ordinary methods last time, and were thwarted by the very institutions and organizations they were trying to fix.

   This time around, they've decided that they can either rip off the band-aid...or let this lunatic ideology fester in them and, eventually, destroy them.

Sullum: Trump's Mass Cancellation of Student Visas Illustrates the Lawlessness of His Immigration Crackdown

I'm skeptical about some bits of this, but, overall, it seems pretty plausible, and is exactly the kind of thing many of us are worrying about.

   So far as I can tell, these foreign students are just being used as pawns in the administration's effort to get Harvard--and thereby academia--to change its ways. In general, the changes that strike me as necessary--so far as I can tell, the administration is trying to release universities from leftist ideological capture. Given the left's iron grip on academia, this is likely to require extreme measures--measures that many of us would not ordinarily countenance.

   Similarly, it seems that the administration will have to use extraordinary measures to upset Democrat's thus-far-extremely effective commitment to de facto open borders. Currently, their strategy seems to be to allow mass illegal immigration when they are in power, and then use lawfare, propaganda, etc. to block any efforts to undo their handiwork when Republicans are in power. And: it seems to be a lot easier to let in ten million illegal aliens than it is to get rid of, say, 25% of them...

   In a sense, the Democrats are now saying: we'll disregard and mutilate the law to let in a tidal wave of illegals...and we'll do everything we can to force you to stick strictly to the law with respect to getting rid of even some of them. Nobody thinks we have any chance of getting rid of all of them.

   At any rate, I'm torn between:

[1] My inherent aversion to authoritarianism of any kind, bending rules, making excuses for my side, and applying double standards.

and

[2] My suspicion that the left can't be beaten on these issues without bending the rules.

Add to this that I think two of the most effective ways of destroying the country are (a) destroying our universities and (b) mass immigration--especially if it's unregulated, from the Third World, and from basically one area.

   Also, as I've said, I think that the vanguard of the left--though certainly not the average Democrat in the street--aims to completely control universities (more or less as an end in itself)--and to destroy the USA. The extreme left is quite explicit about aiming to destroy the USA. There's no question about that. And they now set the agenda for the less-extreme, more-centrist left...that's now the Democrats got into the fix they're currently in--they've become the trailing edge of the radical left.

   Needless to say: in the future, I may look back on my ambivalent support for Trump as the biggest mistake of my political life.

Sheena Michelle Mason on Ending Racism by "Ending" Race: The Same Old Progressive-Left Race Nonsense

I haven't read the book, but I can tell from the review that it's just the same old nonsense again. The left just repeats slight variations on the same arguments over and over. I'll probably go through the arguments yet again. Most of it turns on:

[1] The mass of confusions called "social constructionism"

[2] Political correctness, the idea that facts/evidence/science should be subordinated to politics

[3] Confusions about natural kinds

[4] Some textbook fallacies including the continuum fallacy.

Races are real. They are natural biological kinds. That is: they are something roughly like generally phenotypically distinguishable groups with different most recent common ancestors than other such groups--or, maybe, something like homeostatic property clusters. They're clusters with fuzzy boundaries and borderline cases--so most of the alleged counterexamples (like Barack Obama) don't matter at all. And racism is irrelevant to the question. And, without a doubt, races do not depend on racism. In fact, the left's entire understanding of racism is as confused as its ideas about race...but I'm not going into that now.

   Anyway. The Left (i.e. the intellectual/cultural/political left) is radically confused about an astonishing number of things. None more than this stuff, I'd say.

   One last thing: note that Mason is a lit prof. She's not a biologist nor an anthropologist. She's not a philosopher of science. Her training is in a discipline known largely for two things: sloppy reasoning and intellectual capture (it should go without saying: by the left...) 

Dan McLaughlin: To Increase U.S. Manufacturing Jobs Use Defense Spending

I have long considered this to be inefficient...basically because I read somewhere once that defense jobs are too highly-skilled to efficiently do the relevant trick. But I have no real reason to think that's true. I'm for more defense spending and for more manufacturing jobs...so...maybe.

Turley: Nina Jankowicz, Back With (A) Vengeance, Bashing the USA in Europe

The Mary Poppins of Disinformation urges Europe to resist America's fascistic promotion of free speech.

The Trump Administration's Letter to Harvard

I don't have the necessary expertise to fully evaluate the Trump administration's actions against Harvard. But I can say a few things about it.

  The most important letter from the administration (from Ed., the GSA and HHS), the April 11th letter, is here.

   Needless to say, I'm a strong supporter of academic freedom and of Harvard's rights, as a private institution, to conduct its affairs as it sees fit. However, let me briefly state my take on what the administration is up to--it also seems to me to be the strongest case in support of their actions:

Universities have been ideologically captured by the Left (for brevity, I'll capitalize to indicate that here I mean not just the political left, but the political, intellectual and cultural left. These groups are basically coextensive, but I think the distinction is important). This constitutes a major violation of the scholarly and pedagogical obligations of a university--of its telos. It is becoming more and more common and reasonable to worry that universities cannot be saved--that is, that they cannot be preserved as universities, but are becoming instead something else--something akin to Leftist reeducation and idea-laundering operations. (See Boudry making this point in a recent Quillette interview.) This is a threat not only to perhaps the greatest institutional creation of Western Civilization, but thereby to the United States and Western Civilization itself. It is, in the fashionable phrase, an existential threat. This should concern all of us, and, in fact, I think the threat is so severe that it would, in and of itself, warrant extreme measures in response. However, the administration's case is more modest, hence stronger than that: all it is doing is threatening to withhold public funds from institutions--Harvard in particular--that will not address the problem and make efforts to fulfill their scholarly and pedagogical obligations and preserve their institutional telos.

   If universities had been ideologically captured by the right, the same people who are hysterically denouncing the administration's actions would be praising them. For the record, I oppose all ideological capture of universities--I don't care whether it's from the Left or the right. Not that it's even easy to plausibly imagine, currently, the right capturing them. Of course, back in Ye Olde Daye, universities were in the grip of religion and theology. Really, really in the grip.

   I've argued, at my own university, for committing ourselves to institutional neutrality. My department passed a version of the Chicago Statement unanimously years ago. I spoke in favor of it in our faculty senate, and it was clear that it didn't stand much of a chance.

   Anyway: I'm concerned. But I'm concerned about both things: the ideological capture and destruction of universities by the Left, and the administration's actions. But my tentative conclusion is that, given the former, the latter is not only non-terrible, but actually good.

Quillette Interview: Maarten Boudry: Ideological Capture of Universities and Israel/Palestine: "The Biggest Taboo in Academia"

I think Boudry is right on the money with almost everything he says. Most of it isn't unique to him--the same points have been made by many people, including me here. In my experience, supporting Israel / denying that it is committing genocide, is not the biggest taboo--but perhaps it is in Europe, or perhaps even, right now, at some "elite" American institutions. I'm not sure there is a biggest taboo--just about any denial of progressive-left positions is taboo. At any rate, I say this is worth watching:

Noem Botches Habeus Corpus

Turns out I didn't exactly know what Habeus Corpus was either...but, then, I'm not the secretary of homeland security...

What it is

Also

'AMBUSH' SUPERCUT

The talking points went out to the MSM about Trump's meeting with the president of South Africa in the Oval Office!

O.k., team! On three! 1...2...AMBUSH!!!!

(This tweet won't seem to embed properly. I had some luck with using the URL. You may have to click on it a couple of times to get it.)

Also here.

Trump Contra Griggs: Will Trump End Disparate Impact Madness?

[sry no sleep last night. Can't bring myself to edit this properly]

This is a good, clear, short account of this (in my opinion and that of many on the non-left) absolutely crucial subject--Griggs v. Duke Power and the disparate impact doctrine.

   Richard Hanania makes some similar points about disparate impact law, part of what he (and Caldwell) refer to as a second civil rights...something. Movement? Revolution? Both Caldwell and Hanania say it's the origin of Woketarianism.

   I've tended to disagree, thinking that the ground of all this stuff was, at least largely, two progressive-left theses:

[1] Social constructionism about race--or, more specifically, the view that there are no natural differences in abilities or tendencies between races

and

[2] What we might call the thesis of pervasive racism (which is one axiom of CRT).

   (Both of these have analogs about sex, too. The first thesis, applied to sex, struck the vast majority of reasonable people as ridiculous...until recently...)

   If you (foolishly) accept both these theses, then you are likely to think that any disparity you find between races (sexes) is due to racism (sexism).

   The best philosopher I ever knew, and the best historian of ideas, once said to me that Hegel was right when he wrote that the owl of Minerva takes flight only at dusk--that is: ideas show up in philosophy only after they've shown up elsewhere. We never actually come up with the important ideas that define eras. (Thou...how about Marx? I don't know enough to know. Sounds like the kind of stupid shit philosophers might actually have thought up on their own...)

   Anyway, I don't know, and there may be no clear, identifiable cause and effect here. Disparate impact theory in the law may exist in some kind of feedback loop with leftist race madness in philosophy. I'm simply not qualified to say anything about the history here.

   But, anyway: this is all extremely important.

   Imagine that you were trying to destroy country C. Well, it'd be best to just blow it all up...but that's generally not realistic. Suppose you could make the people of C systematically less talented. What a coup! You could hardly do better--if you want to destroy C. Well, that's basically what Griggs has done to the U.S. It's made companies and other organizations afraid to be meritocratic...among other things.

   Anyway.

   No sleep.

   But this is important. If Trump could nuke disparate impact doctrine--to get SCOTUS to strike down Griggs--he might just end up being the most consequential President of my life. That is, basically: the best.

Dozens of (Masketarian) NIH Employees Walk Out of Bhattacharya Talk in Which He Admits That the Lab-Leak Hypothesis is Plausible

Loons

Afrikaner Refugees

Not all that sure what's the right thing to do here, but I'm generally in favor of letting them in.

As usual, the lefties/MSM are lying about the situation. They're claiming that white South Afrikaners are like 17,000 times less likely to be murdered than black South Afrikaners. That's bullshit. First, it's only barely relevant. The point is that whites are commonly targeted for crime because of their race. Second, the question is: what's the rate among SA farmers? Third, the crimes are particularly horrific--whole families are being tortured to death. Fourth, this is happening despite the fact that white SA'ers--and especially farmers--basically have to live in armed encampments. The grisly, inhuman murders are happening despite the fact that the farmers live in virtual fortresses--they have guns, dogs, fences, barbed wire, electronic surveillance systems, professional security services, civilian patrols and mutual defense arrangements. Finally, other nations seem to have refused to let them in.

  One might, I suppose, argue that the average person in Venezuela has it worse...but I am unmoved by that consideration.

   Side argument of note, not original with me: leftists cheered when Biden let in ten million illegal immigrants, but started shrieking hysterically when Trump let in like fifty-nine white SA'ers. So STFU, idiots.

   Really finally, I'm basically just too fed up with progressive immigration bullshit to take their positions seriously.

   So sue me.

Now Democrats Can Admit That Biden Was A Disastrous President

Can they, though?

If more people had voted like I did, we wouldn't have suffered through the catastrophic Biden presidency...and the Trump era would be over by now.

The important point is: I was right.

FIRE on the Trump Administrations (Real and Imagined) Free Speech Violations

A lot of this is bullshit, but I'm more interested in the parts that aren't.

The left is still worse--a lot, lot worse. But the road to Hell is paved with comparative judgments. The Trump administration hasn't come anywhere close to the anti-free-speech "accomplishments" of the left...but that's setting the bar far too low. Being less godawful than the left isn't--nearly--enough.

Incidentally: the ACLU is not a pro-free-speech organization.

Democrats/Progressives Want Their Own Joe Rogan

As Robby Soave pointed out: they had their own Joe Rogan. His name was 'Joe Rogan.'

   But Rogan is a smart and intellectually honest guy. And such a person tends to be repelled by the contemporary left.

   Back in the day, Dems went through a phase of loudly pining for their own Rush Limbaugh. There was a, so far as I know, rather short-lived channel or broadcast or whatever called, I believe, "Air America." IIRC, Al Franken was on it, as was Janeane Garofalo. Anyway, it failed. At the time I leaned way Democrat, but I was still kinda glad it did fail. I remember saying: it's a good sign that we don't have our own Rush; Rush is a major-league bullshitter. Which he was.

   But Rogan isn't.

   He's a pretty smart, fair-minded, reasonable guy.

   And he was a Democrat.

   But then the Democrats went insane.

   This makes it much more difficult to get another smart, fair-minded, reasonable guy.

   First, they'd need some smart, fair-minded and reasonable policies and ideas.

   And those are nowhere on the horizon.

   If they suddenly become reasonable again, they'll likely get Rogan back. And this will eventually happen. The Trump administration is already trying the patience of a lot of people who voted for him.

   Note: the media is lying about "Trump regret." Their cooked polls are no more accurate on this issue than they are on elections. In fact, Trump's approval rating is high, and only a percent or two of Trump voters would change their vote were the election held today. Kamala was a joke. There's basically no choice between her and Trump. Which is faint praise...but it's a comparative choice.

   Nevertheless, he's trying our patience. Or, at least, he's trying mine. He's done a lot of good since taking office, but he seems to be doing a lot of pretty worrisome shit, too. In a lot of cases, it's just not clear what to think about what he's doing. But there's certainly significant prima facie reason for concern.

Lott: Crime Rates of Illegal Aliens Underreported

Pretty plausible.

Of course the progressive establishment bends over backwards to deny it. One of their favorite tactics--and not just with respect to this issue--is to blur the distinction between legal and illegal immigrants. See, e.g., its insistence that conservatives are "anti-immigration" or "anti-immigrant."

Niall Stanage: Trump Ratchets Up Battle With Harvard

This seems very, very bad.

   I don't understand anything about it other than the headline claims. I have no idea whether there's any vaguely plausible justification for what Trump is doing here. But, on the face of it, it seems utterly indefensible.

   I do think that extreme measures are warranted to break the ideological grip of the left on universities. So I suppose it might be possible to convince me that something like this is justified.

   But I doubt it.

Selectively Generalizing From Acts of Political Violence

It's tempting to generalize from acts of political violence (and other bad acts). If the bad actor is on your side, you're less likely to infer to conclusions about the badness of the actor's--i.e. your--political cause. If his cause is one you disagree with, however, it's tempting to accept such generalizations.

   In the case at hand--roughly the pro-Palestine/anti-Israel business--I'm already pretty inclined to do this. The violent, irrational, and just generally repulsive nature of the protests already makes it more difficult for me to be sufficiently objective about the issue. I mean, I am pretty sure I'm not very objective about it anyway. So the temptation to make poorly-justified generalizations is already pretty strong.

   That's all I've got.

Israeli "Genocide"

Not a genocide.

   The Allied bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan were more genocide-like than Israel's campaign in Gaza. And that wasn't genocidal.

   Now, I don't think genocide is the really important category. The really important category is mass murder. Genocide is, I think, somewhat worse than mass murder. But it's not the category that should be central to our thinking in such cases.

Intifada, Globalized: Hamas Supporter Murders Two Jews in Cold Blood in DC

link

DC would probably go easy on him. But the Feds, I guess, will come down him like the very fist of God.

And of that I approve.

For awhile there it seemed like the left couldn't realistically get any crazier.

But then they discovered hating Israel...which just happens to significantly coextend with hating Jews... Purely a coincidence, I'm sure...

But, then, I've admitted before that--though I'm not Jewish--I'm significantly philosemitic. What red-blooded American boy of my generation wasn't/isn't? WWII looms large, having been still very much in living memory in my youth. So, the Holocaust does too, of course.

As for the loss of these beautiful, smart talented young people...I can't think of anything I could say that would in any way add to what we already know.

Matt O'Brien: Deportation is Not Punishment, Ergo Due Process Need Not Be Observed

Big if true.

Palestine Sympathizer Murders Two Israeli Embassy Staffers in DC

Jesus Christ what the hell is happening??

30 and 26, apparently soon to be engaged.

Horrific.

Jonathan Kay: UWO Student Punished for Questioning "Decolonization" of Academia

I appreciate Kay's attempt to explain the actions of the UWO commissars...but I don't think it works. What they did was wrong and anti-scholarly. You can almost always come up with some kind of excuse for people...but not all such stories genuinely excuse. Kay may be right that there were institutional pressures leading the "indigenous" faculty-member to consider herself a prophet, immune from questioning. This may partially explain her soft totalitarian violations of her responsibilities as a professor--but it doesn't excuse them. Progressive totalitarians may be, to some extent, swept up by larger forces--but that might as well be the good Nazi excuse--she was basically just following orders...

Rufo, Thorpe: Harvard Researcher Sultan Haque: The University is Totally Corrupted

 "The University is Totally Corrupted"

This hits the nail right...y'know, where the nail should be hit.

All this could be said, perhaps to a somewhat lesser degree, of almost all American universities (with the exception, perhaps, of explicitly conservative or religious ones like Hillsdale and Liberty):

Omar Sultan Haque: Unlike many others at Harvard, I have no dramatic cancellation, or intellectual persecution, or struggle session to report. I stopped teaching at Harvard last year primarily because of its anti-truth-seeking culture, radical left-wing bias, racial and gender discrimination, and prevailing anti-intellectualism, which made continued participation a poor use of time. There are exceptions, but on the whole Harvard has strayed from its foundational mission of unbiased truth-seeking and has become ideologically driven, too often resembling a secular church or a partisan think tank. The university’s culture and practices prioritize ideological conformity over open inquiry and debate, suppressing dissenting viewpoints and compromising academic freedom. This shift undermines the core values of a secular university and poses a threat to the integrity of academia and broader society.

Also:

Haque: Per surveys, Harvard has become much more ideologically homogeneous than conservative and religious schools like Hillsdale. As a result, Harvard is too narrow-minded in scholarship, myopic, intolerant, and anti-intellectual. It favors progressive viewpoints to the detriment of open inquiry, especially on social, moral, and political topics in teaching and research. Courses, exams, research, trainings, grants, and campus life too often become predictable exercises in mouthing univariate explanations and dogmatic platitudes. Harvard’s institutional culture increasingly functions as a combined finishing school and seminary, not for a traditional religion, but for the progressive Left and the Democratic Party. It’s a totally corrupted institution.

 Also:

Haque: Outside of fields where people use equations, Harvard is a non-sectarian university only in name. It has been captured and subverted: from syllabi to exams, from admissions to graduation, from hiring to promotion. Harvard remains in denial of its own radicalism. It sneers and looks down on most of America and on American values like color-blind equality, meritocracy, free speech, hard work, and individual responsibility.

Mark Leibovich's Giant, Malodorous Red Herring: "Biden's Age Wasn't Covered Up; It Was an Observable Fact"

It's like these people just can't help themselves.

Not to put too fine a point on it: nobody doubted that Biden was old. And nobody is accusing anybody of covering up his age.

Jesus Christ.

Holman W. Jenkins Jr.: The Biden Coverup Coverup

Bad, obviously.

   I'm still not as outraged about this as I probably ought to be. 

But, I mean, compared to other outrages and injuries inflicted on the nation by the contemporary left...well...the lies about Biden's health don't seem to compare. Politicizing all our institutions, including our information-transmitting and knowledge-acquiring institutions, the racialization of everything, including the vilification of whites and the fomenting of racial strife, "trans" pseudoscience, the Lysenkoist denial of sex, the brainwashing and sexual mutilation of children, opening the borders to a flood of illegal aliens, undermining law enforcement generally...one could go on...

   So it's not that this isn't bad...but...by comparison...

Roger Pielke Jr.: The Politicization of Intelligence

 link

I think RPj is being too circumspect here.

Seems to me that the case for invoking the Alien Enemies Act is probably bullshit.

That is, going on the authority of the intelligence community, and given the moves we see happening there.

The Trump administration needs TdA to be under orders from the Maduro regime so that it can deport these scumbags more easily. Though I want them to be able to deport scumbags more easily, I just don't buy the bit about being under orders from Maduro.

   Incidentally, I also want them to be able to use the AEA just because it has such a freaking awesome name...

Tyler O'Neil on the Afrikaners and the Episcopalian Double Standard

link

I'm not religious, though I'm not the evangelical atheist I once was. I'm very skeptical of religion, though I now incline to suspect that it's best to have a reasonably beneficial or at least benign religion taking up that cultural space and soaking up people's religious inclinations. And I think we got very lucky that Christianity is our dominant religion. Or, rather: we wouldn't really be who we are, nor as successful, without Christianity. Judaism: also good.

   So anyway, I don't have a commitment to religion.

   So why does it freak me out so much that political correctness / Woketarianism has, allegedly, been taking over many churches and denominations? Because they ought to be unusually resistant to this sickness. So, though I don't have a commitment to them, their downfall is particularly alarming to me. If the mind virus can infect even them, who ought to be resistant, we're in even bigger trouble than I thought....

   Though, having now written that, I see you can also argue: they're already susceptible to (sorry, religious homies) superstition...so it's no big surprise that so many of them have swapped out their old superstition for the hot, trendy new superstition...

   shrug

   Could be.

Anti-Natalist Terrorism

This kind of shit really creeps me the hell out.

Blowing people up on account of at least vaguely normal reasons...e.g., you hate their politics or their religion...that's bad enough, obviously...but at least we're kinda sorta used to it in a way. Dragging in loony new kinds of utterly inhuman delusions...that's just over the line--according to my gut, that is.

Antinatalism.

What lunacy.

Perfectly legit nonsense for a philosophy seminar...but, like so much philosophy, not the sort of thing you want to escape containment...

Trump

 This is not the only such story I've heard about him.

If, say, Obama had ever done anything like this they'd make a miniseries out of it.

Former President Biden Diagnosed With Aggressive Form of Cancer

All best wishes to XPOTUS.

Does DEI Result in Race-Based / Sex-Based Hiring?

Yes.

100%.

Beyond any doubt.

I've seen it.

I know others who've seen it--other instances of it, not just the same ones I've seen.

Remember, academia was cheating before "diversity"/DEI even became a thing.

DEI--formerly "diversity"--is an expression of leftist biases in academia and an instrument for advancing them. It's not the source of the bias.

To repeat myself repeating myself: the very first search committee I was ever on was outright told by the dean (via the chair) that if we didn't hire a woman the position would be rescinded. 

(I strenuously objected, as you might imagine, but was begged not to make waves--the department was tiny (three philosophers, two religious scholars) at that point and considered itself in real--if not imminent--danger of being eliminated. A reasonable concern, especially given that the president of the university had recently announced the dissolution of the physics department (yes, the physics department)...and it was known by all parties, across the entire university, that this was because the chair of physics was also the president of the faculty senate, and he was a vocal opponent of the president. And president Stalin just got fed up with him. You can't fire a tenured professor like that...unless you eliminate the entire department. Which the president did. (Note: about a year later, after a nonstop fight, we were informed that none of this had ever happened--it was all a misunderstanding... Physics wasn't...and had never been!...eliminated. But I know. I was there for the announcement. I was the first person to boo...). So, if a university will eliminate a large and thriving physics department, it certainly won't hesitate to eliminate a tiny, non-thriving philosophy and religion department... Anyway, I gave in and agreed not to make a stink. Not proud of it. But that's what happened.)

In fact, our late provost illegally rewrote our hiring guidelines specifically to streamline demography-based hiring.

On this point, as on so many points, the left just lives in an alternate universe.

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.

Bessent: Trumps Tariffs, Tax Cuts, and Deregulation Constitute a Coherent Strategy for Economic Growth

Sounds plausible to me...but apparently I'm in the minority.

Also my understanding of economics is pretty weak.

Roger Kimball: The Politicized Mind: How The University Lost Its Way

Tenured Radicals was one of the first major books pushing back against paleo-PC back in the day. Still worth a read today.

Trump Signs Order Slashing Funding to NPR, PBS

Good.

NPR is a joke.

As I've recounted, fascinatingly, before, I walked to campus for a couple of years. When we moved a little ways farther away, walking wasn't practical anymore, so I started driving again, and tuning in to NPR. This was probably around 2015 or so. (?)  Anyway, it was absolutely appalling. Saturated with woke bullshit. I actually started listening to...and I want to stress that I'm not making this up...Rush Limbaugh instead. He was pretty awful--as I already knew. He got his start in broadcasting where I did my undergrad work, in Cape Girardeau, MO. I'd listened to him from time to time over the years on the theory that I should know the opposition--and at the time I was resolutely opposed to conservatism. As I've said before, Rush's method of reasoning, if you can call it that, is very much like that of the PC/woketards: basically free-association. Barely reasoning at all. But, as the tide of woketarianism crept higher and crazier, and every institution began to fall to it, I was happy just to hear a voice of opposition--desperate to find somebody who wasn't succumbing to the mind virus. The pod people were taking over, and I was grateful just to hear a human voice...loony though it was. And every now and then he'd hit on a decent point--though his "arguments" rarely supported it. Of course it wasn't sustainable. Me listening to him, that is. A little Rush goes a long way. He was probably less crazy than NPR--conservatism doesn't typically succumb to the kinds of wild flights of fancy that progressivism...well...not just succumbs to, but thrives on. Rush used to make up all sorts of wild, convoluted stories about how Hillary controls the UN or whatever...but he never came close to, e.g., women have penises. Which--and here I must regretfully add 'thus far'--remains the progressive left's flagship delusion.

   Anyhoo...the real point is that I lasted maybe a couple of weeks (months?) trying to listen to NPR after starting up again. Boy. Just insane. As is typical of the blues, e.g. at universities, they would just state--or presuppose--utterly loony shit, stating it in that breathy, matter-of-fact way they have, peppering their stories with trendy lefty terms--"code-switching," "identity," "gender," "systemic," blah blah blah.

   Perhaps NPR was good for me when I was younger. I don't know. I expect it was always biased. But I'm pretty sure it wasn't always that biased. At any rate, there's just too much leftist propaganda in it now. I don't want my money to go toward it. In fact, I think I've suggested in the past that, if funding isn't cut, we all do what the lefties used to do with the tax on their phone bills that went to paying off the Vietnam war: refuse to pay it. That's convoluted and ungrammatical, but I'm too lazy to change it. To be clear: we figure out how much of our taxes goes to funding NPR, and just all subtract that amount from our taxes.

   But three cheers for Trump: if this sticks that'd be unnecessary.

   NPR could, of course, be given a choice: adopt a commitment to institutional neutrality with respect to political issues, or lose funding. Obviously, though, there's no way they'd do the former thing.

   What the hell are the Pubs in Congress doing, anyway? A lot of the things Trump's doing are questionable or temporary. Congressional Pubs need to get to work--getting him in line and passing actual laws to make the good things he's done more permanent.

"Trump Regret"

LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL

LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL

no.

Does the left and the MSM (but I repeat myself) really think anybody's going to believe this nonsense?

Your polls always lie. You always lie, You've been wrong about Trump's popularity since he came down the golden escalator.

In fact, you're basically wrong about everything.

I guess this is propaganda to buck up their own base--which will believe anything.

I do regret that DeSantis didn't win...but I have not an ounce of regret that Trump won...despite the fact that I disagree with a lot of the things he's done over the first hundred days. The alternative was the Kamala/Timpon clown show. And another four years of crazy leftist soft totalitarianism, pseudoscience, and woketard patronage.

Compared to the contemporary American left, Trump is practically a Godsend.

McCarthy: Trump-Appointed TX Judge Voids Invocation of Alien Enemies Act

Ok.

I like getting rid of illegal alien gangsters...but I also like due process.

Also I don't like liking or not liking legal decisions on the basis of liking or not liking their conclusions...

McCarthy says it's a good, well-researched decision, and:

To repeat what I’ve argued before, the administration would be better off abandoning the AEA and deporting TdA members based on the State Department’s designation of TdA as a terrorist organization. The administration would still have to afford due process — that is an ineliminable part of the legal system. But the proceedings could be expedited.
Again, the problem with immigration enforcement is not that federal law is too burdensome for the government. It is that the government went too long failing to enforce the law, and Congress has not provided sufficient resources to deal with the resulting backlog, which has reached crisis levels.

John Daniel Davidson: Mass Immigration Without Assimilation is a Recipe for National Suicide

I think this is really right.

   The left reasons thusly all the time:

   

   x would be bad / make me sad

   Therefore:

   x is false

   And they think that anything other than unmitigated adulation for nonwhites, the Third World, etc. is racist. And racism is the worst thing in the universe. So, unless you want to be a racist, you have to embrace mass immigration from the Third World.

   Oh and: yeah, I realize the left has decreed the term 'Third World' racist. Which is basically why I insist on using it. If we let them issue perverse, loony, terminological diktats, they're halfway to winning.

   If we go along with them, that is...

   Conservatives say: import the Third World, become the Third World.

   Conservatives, as is so often the case, are much righter about this than the left is. Largely because they're willing to look at the facts and draw conclusions from them--rather than decreeing from the outset that certain propositions can't even be considered and honestly evaluated...because they're racist.

   I mean, that might hold for some very extreme and obviously racist propositions...

   But it doesn't come close to holding for propositions like We should have some controls on immigration.

   It's easy to say things like Everybody is welcome! Come on in!

   It makes you sound cool and laid back and liberal.

   It's not easy to say Yes, I realize that many people have shitty lives back in their shithole countries...but if we let all of them in, all at once, with no assimilation, our country will become a shithole, too. So sorry, but no.

   That makes you sound mean. And, of course, teh razizt!

   Not really--but you know the left.

   It's basically a lifeboat situation. We can save some people and we can help some people but we can't save or help everyone. And if we try to save or help too many, it will end us. That alone is sufficient for us to draw the line somewhere reasonable. There's no need to proceed to: And then we won't be able to help anyone. 

   Our own survival and flourishing matters, too.

   Contrary to what the left thinks.*

   As many conservatives have noted, many on the left would rather help make it likely that their nation and their people will be destroyed in the indefinite future than to be thought to be racist.

   Sadly, that seems to me to be true.

* And maybe remember: the vanguard of the left wants the destruction of the U.S. and the West. The relatively more centrist lefties just can't stand the thought that they might be mean. Let alone razizt! But the average Democrat in the street just wants to be nice...and to be seen as such.

Lowry: *Contra* Trump, We Need Cheap Stuff and Lots of It

I still, in my gut, don't see that Trump is obviously wrong about this sort of thing. I realize that I'm at odds with the vast majority of economists--the people who actually know about this stuff. So I'm perfectly willing to admit that I'm likely wrong. And if I could just push a button and make Trump change tracks, I'd probably do it.
   But, in my gut, I just don't see that he's wrong about short-term pain being worth the alleged long-term gain. I'm not saying I'm right. I'm willing to concede this one to the mass of experts. But I'm honest enough to admit that I don't really get it. I could see this one going either way--left to my own devices. So maybe that's something, at least.

   Needless to say, there are all sorts of things that are true but don't make sense to the layman.

   Kinda seems to me that most of the arguments I see are arguments to the effect that, if countries A and B don't have any tariffs on each other, country A is better off not imposing any on B. But that doesn't seem to be the situation we're in.

   Anyway. Not only could I be wrong on this one, I'm probably wrong.

   And so, then, is Trump.

Greg Ip: Forget GDP; It's the Jobs Report That Matters

I have no idea whether this is at all right:

The first-quarter decline in economic output tells us almost nothing about the economy’s actual performance which, through March, was actually fine.
It tells us even less about the broader impact of President Trump’s tariffs, federal cutbacks and immigration crackdown. For that, we’ll have to await April data, starting with jobs and unemployment to be released Friday.
This will provide the first “hard” data since Trump’s April 2 tariff announcements. Federal cuts by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency were also in full swing, as were deportations, while border crossings had plummeted. A weak jobs number could vindicate Trump’s critics, a strong number would shut them up, at least for now.
I suspect, though, that the April report—regardless of the number—won’t tell us much about Trump’s impact. Businesses are certainly talking a lot about tariffs, but aren’t doing much yet in terms of raising prices or altering production plans. Federal layoffs and deportations are also probably too small to have much macro impact.
But wait, wasn’t that 0.3% annualized drop in gross domestic product in the first quarter because of tariffs? No: it was affected by a couple of statistical quirks.

Matthew Petti: Court Frees Palestinian Student Who ICE Arrested at His Citizenship Hearing

We pretty much know each side will go to far when given a chance...but I didn't think Trump would go (so far as I can tell) this much too far this quickly.

   Not that I would think the other thing would be o.k., but it seems particularly notable that these students don't even seem to be promoting anti-U.S. views so much as they are promoting anti-Israel views. I tend to be pro-Israel...but not that pro-Israel...

Abigail Anthony: HHS Report Finds No Strong Evidence Supporting the Effectiveness of "Gender-Affirming Care"

Nothing could be less surprising.