Thursday, February 13, 2025

Senate Confirms RFKj

I'm not wild about this.

But what do I know?

Lawrence Kraus: Another Blow to DEI--DoE Ends PIER Requirements for Grants

link
I thought the academic DEI juggernaut was unstoppable. Then, a week after President Trump’s inauguration, I got an email with an announcement from the Department of Energy: “The Office of Science is immediately ending the requirement for Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research (PIER) Plans in any proposal submitted. . . . Reviewers will not be asked to read or comment on PIER Plans. Selection decisions will not take into consideration the content of PIER Plans or any reviewer comments on PIER Plans.”
PIER plans, which the Biden administration instituted in 2022, required every grant application to “describe the activities and strategies of the applicant to promote equity and inclusion as an intrinsic element to advancing scientific excellence.” In the words of the announcement, “The complexity and detail of a PIER Plan is expected to increase with the size of the research team and the number of personnel to be supported.”
The end of the PIER Plan and other DEI-related requirements is seismic. The major source of physical science research support in the country has sent a message to universities: Stick to science. It may be the death knell of what appeared to be an invulnerable academic bureaucracy that has been impeding the progress of higher education and research for at least a decade.
The massive, expensive and overwhelming DEI infrastructure at universities is motivated in large part by the need to respond to and comply with regulations associated with federal support of research and education. The DOE’s Office of Science is the single biggest funder of physical sciences in the U.S. It provides support for university programs and oversees the 10 U.S. National Laboratories, which provide facilities used by university faculty across many disciplines.
Last year a colleague of mine and I used ChatGPT to examine all 12,065 awards made by the National Science Foundation and classified more than 1,000 of them, accounting for more than $675 million, as focused on DEI rather than science. And under Biden decrees, even science-focused grants were evaluated on DEI grounds.

Monday, February 10, 2025

Steven Levitsky: Trump and the New Authoritarianism

link

1. I wonder, ad hominem, whether Dr. Levitsky raised such objections against the leftist soft totalitarian madness that's reigned in country for the last decade?

2. Seems like an overreaction, but it's important. Needless to say, we can't allow Trump to exercise autocratic power. The mere fact that the left is worse/crazier shouldn't deter us from objecting to any Trumpian overreach. Of course, most of us aren't too clear on what counts as overreach here... So that's a complication.

Saturday, February 08, 2025

Rufo / Stepman: How Trump Can Make Universities Great Again

Most importantly: force them to refocus on knowledge rather than activism.
That basically entails getting rid of DEI, since DEI is, in actual fact, a kind of totalitarian catspaw for implementing leftist ideas.

Sullum: Trump is Flat-Out Lying About the 60 Minutes Interview with Harris

I haven't watched nor compared the raw footage/transcripts to the broadcast version.
Mostly because Trump's accusations sound loony to me, almost no matter how bad the discrepancy.
They frankly sound about as nutty as the Letitia James case against Trump.
sigh
Well, this won't be the dumbest case he pushes over the next four years, I'm sure.
If only the guy were 15% less Trumpy, he'd be a force of nature.

VA Dems Fire Stanley Goldfarb from ODU BoV for Asking Questions About DEI

link
To answer the question Goldfarb was fired for asking: DEI almost certainly permeates ODU's medical curriculum.
So far as I can tell, my own institution is trying to allow many of the crazy leftist excesses (DEI being only one part of them) of the last ten years to quietly fade away.

But the deep academy will not give this stuff up. They may hide it, rename it, withdraw temporarily, even give up some prominent bits...at least temporarily...
But we've been through this before. The commitment to postpostmodern irrationalism--which includes hard-left politics as a prominent component--is not going away.
Probably not, anyway.
I'll be happy to be wrong.
But e.g. the absolute obsession with race, sex-or-gender, and "power"...those have ruled the humanities and qualitative social sciences for something like 50 years now. And they've expanded into STEM. It's a seductive ideology.
I predict we'll be fighting this battle again before most of us exit this scholarly vale of tears...

Trump and Radical Change

Incidentally, I expect this stuff not to work.
Radical changes are typically big gambles.
Which is why I'm generally against them.
To roll the dice on ideas like this, you basically have to think that the bureaucracy / deep state is such a clear and present danger that it's better to roll the dice for something very different.
I don't understand it all well enough to be confident that that's right.

But I think the Trump team's view is:
It can't be reformed slowly.
That's the nature of this beast.
It only allows itself to be ratcheted in one direction: bigger and bluer.
Counterpoint: that's two directions, dumbass.
Countercounterpoint: blue is not a direction.
...

So: if there's any hope of mitigating the slow-motion train wreck (as they see it), it lies in sudden change.

In some cases, the change is clearly warranted--e.g. mystical gender pseudoscience, DEI, etc.
But those hardly count, because they're just a matter of undoing radical, obviously crazy changes imposed by the blue team.

Firing everybody at USAID...that's a whole different kind of thing.
I expect it to turn out to be a mostly bad idea--though a mostly bad idea with at least some benefits, to whatever extent that matters.

Just my WAG.

Was Trump Right to Ax USAID?

I have no idea.
Forced to bet, I'd bet not.

Friday, February 07, 2025

Robbie Soave: USAID Sucks, and Politico Sucks, but the USAID Money to Politico Isn't a Scandal

He makes a more-or-less conclusive case.
    USAID was subscribing to a hot-shot legislative update feature; many Republican legislators subscribe to the same feature. The money in question was actually more like $44k, and that seems to be since 2016.
    The strangest part of this story is that Soave thought it was worth responding to Benny Johnson, a prominent YouTube righty bullshitter.

Lefty Freakout: Elie Mystal, PARENTING MY BLACK SONS IN THE AGE OF TRUMP MAKES ME SARAH CONNOR AND TRUMP IS THE TERMINATOR...OR MAYBE SKYNET...IDK

Or: REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

I know--Elie Mystal and the Nation. What next? Jeet Heer and Jacobin?

Well, write your own stupid blog and you can make fun of a higher class of idiot.

But look, you gotta admit, this is gold:

It is easy to get caught up in the day-to-day atrocities committed by the Trump administration. Every hour brings a new crisis, every day something precious or useful gets smashed. That’s on purpose. The torrent of Trump lawlessness is designed to keep us forever focused on what’s happening right now, constantly defending ourselves against the latest unhinged pronouncement. 
I would have fallen deep into this myopic trap these past two weeks, but there has been one thing keeping me focused on the long horizon: my children. I have two boys, ages 12 and 9. Every day I look at them, I am forced to contemplate the future—to worry about the future Trump is stealing from them, and the terrible suffering that awaits them in the world Trump seeks to create.
Like any parent worthy of the title, I don’t give a damn about what happens to me. I’ve had my chances. Born in 1978, I had the opportunity to grow up during a brief window where this country seemed genuinely interested in becoming the multi-racial, multi-ethnic democratic polity that it always promised to be but never once achieved. I benefited from the heroic efforts of my parents and ancestors.
...
For inspiration, I’ve looked to a fictional parent who knows what it’s like to be raising a child on the cusp of the apocalypse: the heroine of the Terminator movies, Sarah Connor. For people unfamiliar with this 40-year-old movie, allow me to regale you with a brief synopsis. On August 29, 1997 “Skynet,” a military artificial intelligence, became self-aware and unleashed a nuclear holocaust. It created a race of sentient robots, Terminators, to crush the remaining human opposition. In 2029, one such Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is sent back to 1984 Los Angeles to kill Sarah Connor, who is the mother of the future human resistance leader, John Connor. Future John Connor is able to send one soldier back in time to protect his mother. 
When we meet Sarah Connor (played by Linda Hamilton) in 1984, she is weak. She’s a classic Hollywood “damsel in distress” updated for the 1980s with big hair and spunkiness. She spends most of the first movie running and hiding, and nearly ensures her doom by calling her mother. She and the soldier bang, and the soldier sacrifices himself to try to destroy the Terminator. He fails to kill it, but Sarah is able to lure the robot into a hydraulic press and… terminate it. The movie ends with her visibly pregnant with the soldier’s baby, who will become John Connor, and is leaving audio tapes for him about what the world was like before the tragedy she now knows is coming. Little does she know that Schwarzenegger will be back, more or less as a good guy. 
Fast forward to Terminator 2: John Connor is now 10-years-old, but he’s living with foster parents because his mother has been sent to a prison psychiatric institution because she has (entirely reasonably) become a bit of a terrorist trying to stop the people building Skynet from bringing about the end of the world. When we first see Sarah Connor in T2 she is ripped. She’s changed her physique from Olivia Newton John to something approaching Rambo. She is hardened. She can kill. When she breaks out of prison, we find out that she’s been stashing guns and ammo all throughout the Southwest, and has been training her son in military strategy and computer hacking. She has transformed herself, body and soul, from a victim of forces beyond her control, into John-the-Baptist of badasses. 
I believe that every liberal parent is now in the position of Sarah Connor after the first Terminator movie. We can see the future awaiting our children, and it is bleak. Our mission, our only mission, is to prepare our kids for what is coming, and maybe see if there’s anything we can do to stop Trump’s future from happening. We’re going to need to teach our children skills that we never had, to face a future different from anything we ourselves experienced. We’re going to need to get in shape and learn how to fight for them in ways that disregard what others may think of our methods.
Gold, baby.
Gold.

Lefty Freakout: Ed Kilgore "The Day 'Democrats Must Work With Trump'" Died

What an abject tool.

And, gosh, they were so looking forward to working with him. For the good of the country or whatever.

Thursday, February 06, 2025

Anne Applebaum is Retarded

Is there any kind of coherent argument in here?
I honestly couldn't pay attention all the way through.

Steven Malanga: How The Catholic Church Became a Champion of Democrats' Open Borders

Yeah, the Catholic Church is a big problem with respect to immigration. Some groups even openly help illegals get across the border.
Immigrants from south of the border are also helping to prop up failing churches.
I mean, I kind of admire them in that this does seem to me to be the proper Christian response...
But, then: I'm not a Christian and this isn't a theocracy.

USAID Was Funding GamerGate??????

I...I can't...I can't even........WTFF????

I'm so freaking outraged right now that I'd better stick with:  big if true.

Audrey Fahlberg: Democrats Struggle to Unite Behind a Coherent Anti-Trump Message

"He's a Nazi" isn't coherent?

Besides...when has the progressive left ever cared about coherence?
I thought all that stuff was white supremacy or something.

Eric-Clifford Graf: The Kirkpatrick Doctrine Applied to Domestic Policy

As my Morpheus (i.e. redpill-father) McCarthy likes to say: The right just wants you to behave; the left wants your soul.

Betsy DeVos: Shut Down the Department of Education

link
Could be wrong, but I'm inclined to agree, FWIW.

Executive Order: No Men in Women's Sports

Yet another win for sanity.
Fox News link rather than e.g. AP because they accurately title their story, rather than using progressive Newspeak like 'trans women.'

Wikipedia: Bias re: Approved Sources?

Wikipedia is extremely left-biased--there's no doubt about that.
But this NYP story contains no links.
The "De Facto Deprecated sources" page on Wikipedia does not list the NYP, but it does list a lot of righty sources. (It does, e.g., list the Daily Mail, but not, e.g., the Guardian.)
I've seen Quillette rejected as a source on Wikipedia.
Anyway. If the NYP story is accurate--which I can't confirm--it would be substantial.
One might, of course, reasonably judge that the NYT is generally more reliable than NYP, despite the great and many failures of the former, and the many good stories run by the latter.
However, I don't see any way to reasonably argue that Vox is reliable but NYP isn't. Not to mention Jacobin...

Wednesday, February 05, 2025

Lee Jussim at Unsafe Science: The Last 4 Years Were the Most Repressive of My Life

National Review: USAID is a Failure

Worse than a failure: an organization positively promoting harmful, crackpot, radical-left ideas.
If it were merely a failure, it would merely fail to accomplish (presumably good) goals.
As it stands, it actively seeks to accomplish bad goals.

It must be some sign of how far over the edge these agencies have gone that they thought what they were doing might be ok.
But the fact that they tried to conceal a lot of this is evidence of consciousness of guilt.

WSJ: Hurricane Musk and the USAID Panic

link
The agency in the Biden years supported electric vehicles in Vietnam and a “transgender clinic” in India. A Serbian LGBTQ group called ‘Grupa Izadji,’ received $1.5 million to ‘advance diversity equity and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities.” There are many other examples.
There's just no excuse for spending tax dollars on such projects. If leftists want to contribute to those projects, there are plenty of organizations they can contribute to.



Tuesday, February 04, 2025

David Samuels: "Rapid-Onset Political Enlightenment"

The first half of this is very interesting, IMO.
But it's a bit long, and about 3/4 of the way through it gets pretty speculative and I have a hard time following--much less assessing--the argument.
But I've only read it once.
Needless to say, I don't know whether these claims about Obama are true.

Why Is the Trump Admin Relying on the "Criminal Aliens" Excuse?

If you're in the country illegally, you should be kicked out. We don't need any other excuse. We're enforcing the law.
   As I've said for years, the progressive left's position is becoming more and more difficult to distinguish from open borders. They basically flung open the border, and now their position is: you can't send them back. Let them in and don't send them back is, basically an open borders position.
   We might make exceptions for good residents who have been here for decades--but that case has to be made separately. The burden of proof is not on the right for enforcing immigration laws. Enforcing immigration laws gets presumption. We don't have to explain to you why we're deporting illegal aliens. The burden of proof is on the left to prove that we are obligated to allow illegal aliens to stay.
   This is why it concerns me that the administration is basically saying that it's going to deport only criminals (ignoring the fact that illegal entry is a criminal offense) and people consorting with criminals. It's like the left has, again, managed to swing presumption over to its side--as if, again, we needed an excuse for deporting people who entered the country illegally.
   But we don't.

Rich Lowry: Trump's Win in Panema

Lee Jussim: "Burn Academia Down?"

Notes from the USC censorship conference.

Gerard Baker: "Pray for Surrender in Trump's Dumb Trade War"

I don't understand anything about this.