The Right Coast

In Arizona, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris Battle for McCain Wing of GOP - WSJ

PRESCOTT VALLEY, Ariz.—Once a bastion of the Republican establishment and the home of the late Sen. John McCain, Arizona is on the verge of returning to former President Donald Trump’s fold—or dealing a massive blow to Trumpism. 

Voters in this state, which more recently was at the heart of Trump’s 2020 election fraud claims, will help determine whether Trump and members of his MAGA movement gain the vindication they have sought, or if the voters will once again side with Democrats to elect Vice President Kamala Harris.

With three weeks before the election, the two campaigns are staging a fierce ground game centered on Phoenix and the rest of Maricopa County, which accounts for more than half of the state’s electorate. They are spending millions of dollars in advertising in an effort to discredit each other before voters.

Trump is attempting to flip the state back into the Republican column after it slipped away from him in the 2020 election. Harris has lined up support from many Republicans, including McCain’s son Jimmy McCain, in hopes of replicating President Biden’s success. 

On Sunday, Trump staged a rally in central Arizona, days after Harris spent parts of two days in the Phoenix area seeking to highlight her bipartisan credentials. 

via www.wsj.com

I've watched so many YouTube videos about Prescott and Prescott Valley I feel like I know the place even though I've never been there. It looks nice on camera at least.

Why This California Liberal is Voting for Donald Trump

For many of us, 2020 was like Devil’s Tower in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. We all had the same idea all at once, but we didn’t understand it. We might have come from everywhere, but we all ended up in the same place.

For some, it was the government’s authoritarian crackdown on masks and lockdowns. For others, it was the lies about COVID. But for me, it was suddenly seeing that unseen hands were manipulating us as a form of social control.

It sounds paranoid. I’ll grant you that. I don’t know how else to explain it. I was very much inside the insular feedback loop of the Left. I genuinely believed everything they said on CNN, MSNBC, and the New York Times.

They turned on a dime from COVID hysteria to “systemic racism,” which allowed millions to pour into the streets - the largest protest in American history - amid a global pandemic that had closed schools, churches, and businesses. What was going on?

None of us knew. They wouldn’t tell us anything they did not think we needed to know. As I was crying out on Twitter about how crazy things were getting on the Left, Neera Tanden DM’d me. “You’ve changed,” she said.

via sashastone.substack.com

Well, I can imagine. It must be hard. Poor woman. But Covid put the zap on my brain as well, as Captain Willard said in Apocalypse Now. I realized that I was wrong about what country I lived in and had been living in my whole life. The lying was a big part of it. My brother getting cancer and dying under mysterious circumstances was another part. Sure, cancer is always a mystery, but his hitting him so hard after his awful case of Covid really made me, and him, wonder. The was also the behavior of some of my colleagues. The hits taken by the First Amendment. The mass censorship. I was already a libertarian, but gosh, I mean, going after parents who object to trans- policies for kids as domestic terrorists? Really? I mean, I could see that happening in Canada, and maybe Oregon, but here in Californeyeay?

Anyway, you know all this. You've heard all this before. Then there was getting the Red Guard treatment at my university for using a crude term to describe the behavior of the CCP. You're allowed to say rude things about the Chinese communists I thought. You know they cut out their subjects' livers and kidneys and sell them for profits, don't you? But it turns out you can't say this sort of thing when they are paying big bucks for tuition. But this is America, isn't it? Evidently America is not the place I thought it was, unless you can get a top notch lawyer (I did) and get lucky too (which I also did).

We learned, to my horror at least, that a lot of things we took for granted are actually bullshit, to use the technical term. It was like being told when your cabinets aren't fitting right that the ruler you've been using to build them was all wrong all along. An inch is not an inch, you fool -- you knew that, didn't you? Well, I didn't in fact. I felt like the Italian peasant who was called with his fellows before the village priest, who said "It turns out there is no God. But do not worry! I am still your priest!" I don't know how I would have faced my students. All this law stuff is just a suggestion? There is no law! But don't worry! I am still your Professor of Law!

The UFO types have a term for this feeling. They call it "ontological shock" -- and that's a pretty good phrase. It's that feeling when you realize, like really realize because the evidence is slapping you in the face, that we are in fact animals in a galactic zoo or whatever. Of course I knew there were plenty of people who paid no attention to the law and some of them were even lawyers -- but I thought they were few and losing. I didn't realize they are many, and many in government and they're winning, and they were probably right, at least in the sense of might making right, or "right" anyway.

One of my boys says I'd like Mexico. For a little bit of money you can live well, and everybody knows the government is the enemy. He might be right.

It's not just on the left that things are crazy.

Liberals are losing their minds over Elon Musk

This week, the California Coastal Commission rejected a request from the Air Force for additional launches from Vandenberg Air Force Base. It is not because the military agency did not need the launches. It was not because the nation and the community would not benefit from them. Rather, it was reportedly because, according to one commissioner, Musk has “aggressively injected himself into the presidential race.”

By a 6-4 vote, the California Coastal Commission rejected the military’s plan to let SpaceX launch up to 50 rockets per year from the base in Santa Barbara County. 

Musk’s SpaceX is becoming a critical part of national security programs. It will even be launching a rescue mission for two astronauts stranded in space. The advances of SpaceX under Musk are legendary. The Air Force wanted to waive the requirement for separate permits for SpaceX in carrying out these critical missions.

To the disappointment of many, SpaceX is now valued at over $200 billion and just signed a new $1 billion contract with NASA. Yet neither the national security value nor the demands for SpaceX services appear to hold much interest for officials like Commissioner Gretchen Newsom (no relation to California’s governor, Gavin Newsom): “Elon Musk is hopping about the country, spewing and tweeting political falsehoods and attacking FEMA while claiming his desire to help the hurricane victims with free Starlink access to the internet.”

via thehill.com

Jonathan Turley.

Elon is a remarkable fellow. I'm reading Walter Isaacson's biography of him. His background is classic. A rags to riches story, contrary to the nonsense you may have heard about his father's emerald mine, which turned out to be merely another of his father's ill-advised investments.
Elon escaped his abusive home in South Africa and came to Canada, where he scraped by on the kindness of distant relatives for a while. By nature and nurture, the guy has grit to spare. He has needed and will need all of it.

On twitter/X this morning, Elon said he'll be filing suit against the Coastal Commission tomorrow. He will get a TRO right away, I should think. Eugene Volokh should be all over this. The Coastal Commission should stick to plaguing billionaires who close off public beach access. Elon's not doing that, is he?

“Egregious” and “Unprecedented,” Says Former RNC Chairman and Vatican Ambassador About Dems’ Anti-Catholicism

When he says “existential,” he means it literally. “Between the economy and all the international danger we are seeing, voting for Trump is an act of national survival.” But as a Catholic, he’s also both horrified and offended by the fact that the Democratic Party seems now to condone the most brazen acts of disrespect to his Church: “How does the first party to nominate a Catholic for the presidency and then elect a Catholic president end up having one of its most prominent governors mocking the Eucharist?” He was referring to Michigan Governor Christine Whitmer’s bizarre ad depicting her putting a Dorito on the tongue of a kneeling young girl in the manner of a Catholic priest giving Holy Communion.

Nicholson’s worries didn’t begin with a viral Tik-Tok, however. The reason he is so outraged now is that Whitmer’s mockery comes at the end of a string of actions over the last fifteen years. “And before that, you have 23 States Attorneys General (including Kamala Harris at the time) persecuting the Little Sisters of the Poor and then Democratic senators (including Harris at the time) suggest in a hearing on a federal judgeship the Knights of Columbus were an extremist group and then try to establish a religious test for federal office in violation of Article V of the Constitution—a step that brought protests from the Presidents of Princeton, Notre Dame and the Anti-Defamation League.”

These subjects might seem old hat to some, but Nicholson sees them as precursors to today’s blatant Democratic attacks on human life—attacks that make clear that Christianity is the enemy: “And what about the Democratic Party extremist position on abortion that Senator Vance mentioned in the VP debate? Or the Biden administration deliberately sending out a Transgender message in place of an Easter Sunday proclamation.”

“And then,” he adds, “Kamala Harris turns down the Al Smith dinner.” One might say that this action, though less egregious than the others, was symbolic of the dark turn Democrats and Harris have taken. The Al Smith Dinner, begun in 1945 to raise money for needy children in the Catholic Archdiocese of New York and honor the one-time Catholic governor of New York and presidential candidate for whom it is named, was described already in 1960 by historian Theodore H. White as “a ritual of American politics.”

via amac.us

I haven't heard the hierarchy speaking out on Communion-gate however. Probably because they're too far in the tank for the Dems. And who can blame them? They must, or most of them anyway, be feeling pretty confused. There has been a big shift in whom the parties represent.

‘Stunning’ silence: Padres blanked in Game 5 of NL Division Series, ending their season – San Diego Union-Tribune

LOS ANGELES — The night needed a hero.

The Dodgers got two.

And in a season in which they could so often count on so many heroes, the Padres did not get one on the night it mattered most.

“I’m sad for this team,” Jurickson Profar said. “We had everything to go all the way. But, you know, baseball. They played better than we did the past two games. We’re going home.”

via www.sandiegouniontribune.com

Yeah, baseball. And football. And basketball too when you think about it. It's not just San Diego. You could live in Seattle. Or Chicago. At least the weather here is nice. You could live in New York or Boston, but who wants to do that? And I hardly even need to mention LA. Have fun partying with the Sisters.

House fire in Lemon Grove displaces family of six and 10 dogs

LEMON GROVE, Calif. (FOX 5/KUSI) — A Saturday night house fire in Lemon Grove displaced a family of six and their 10 dogs.

Heartland Fire posted on X at 8 p.m. Saturday crews were at the scene of a fire in the area of El Prado Avenue and Beryl Street in Lemon Grove and asked the public to avoid the area until at least 10 p.m. Saturday.

Vegetation fire in Poway prompts road closures, evacuations

Smoke could be seen as firefighters arrived at the home in the 2000 block of El Prado Ave at 7:30 p.m.

According to Heartland Fire, a family with three adults, three children and 10 dogs were evacuated from the home. One person was taken to the hospital for smoke inhalation. The fire department said the family could not account for all of their dogs and animal control was at the scene assisting in the search.

via fox5sandiego.com

Man, I feel their pain. I hope they find their dogs.

The Hurricane Speech Panic is Here - by Matt Taibbi

We learned with Covid that health officials issuing wrong or contradictory dictates about everything from masking to social distancing to mortality rates to vaccine efficacy inspired enormous distrust in the population. Officials decided the fastest route to regaining the public’s confidence was to deprive people of alternative sources of information, claiming a health emergency as their censorship casus belli. Now, weeks before an election, they’re trying to use hurricanes to shut down critics of the White House again.

It’s been clear for a while that the goal of the anti-disinformation crew is an American version of the Digital Services Act, which conceptually is just what yesterday’s congressional letter asks for. Keep the quasi-monopolistic platforms private, so they can “legally” violate rights, but make companies de facto subordinates to state guidance. Officials will keep drumming up panics, and keep asking for the same review power. Sooner or later — and it might be sooner, sadly — they’ll get it.

via www.racket.news

If the First Amendment is, uh, substantially modified (i.e., gutted), it obviously won't be in a Constitutional amendment. It may not even be by a SCOTUS opinion. It will probably just be by a bunch of uninterpretable word gunk in the Federal Register. Legions of young law professors will step bravely forward to interpret them anyway, mostly to say, as the song goes, Hooray for Our Side. When words aren't speech, but action. When incitement means that some yahoo might have heard you say something intemperate. The First Amendment says "Congress shall make no law . . ."-- well, we're not Congress are we? Nobody elected us! And so on. One hopes it won't happen this way. Everybody hope real hard.

Whitmer: I'm Sorry You Failed to Appreciate My Genius, Catholics – HotAir

After participating in a weird submissive-porn version of Catholic communion, or just a demonstration of how Kamalites operate, the governor of Michigan has gotten a deluge of outrage and criticism. Catholic bishops in all seven dioceses in the state issued a statement demanding an explanation and apology for Whitmer's campaign video for Kamala Harris and its "offensive impact" in mocking the Eucharist. Clearly, the bishops recognized the imagery Whitmer and Liz Plank used, since they see it every day in their own parishes:

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The Bishops of Michigan have expressed their “profound disappointment and offense taken” with Governor Gretchen Whitmer for posting a video skit on social media showing the state's Governor feeding a Dorito corn chip to a kneeling podcaster in a manner that is widely being perceived as a mockery of the Holy Eucharist.

“The skit goes further than the viral online trend that inspired it, specifically imitating the posture and gestures of Catholics receiving the Holy Eucharist, in which we believe that Jesus Christ is truly present,” said Paul A. Long, President and CEO of the Michigan Catholic Conference which represents the seven dioceses of the state, October 11.

“It is not just distasteful or ‘strange;’ it is an all-too-familiar example of an elected official mocking religious persons and their practices. While dialogue on this issue with the governor’s office is appreciated, whether or not insulting Catholics and the Eucharist was the intent, it has had an offensive impact.”

Indeed, although as I wrote earlier, that's not all the video did, either. Whitmer role-played a priestess in a cult setting rather than make an argument for her preferred policy. Even without the trappings of Catholic practice, the video makes progressives and Democrats into a cult and its elected officials as idols to be worshipped, as Plank clearly demonstrated, rather than public officials to be held accountable. 

via hotair.com

Ed Morrissey.

I'm not commenting on this too much because I fear I'll just say terrible things. But I'm honestly not that easy to offend, but this offended me pretty deeply. As it was intended to, I'm sure. Nasty, nasty woman.

DOJ’s New Indictment of Whistleblower Eithan Haim Is Even More Outrageous | National Review

DOJ’s original indictment propagated the false, but incendiary, notion that Dr. Haim disclosed HIPAA-protected information about pediatric patients and that journalist Christopher Rufo “published [that] HIPAA protected information.” It further misled the world into thinking that Dr. Haim sneakily obtained access to Texas Children’s Hospital’s electronic medical patient files more than two years after his work at the hospital had ended. And it alleged that Dr. Haim “caused malicious harm to TCH, pediatric patients at TCH and its physicians by contacting” Rufo.

DOJ’s superseding indictment implicitly concedes the major point that I spelled out in my first post on its persecution of Dr. Haim: Dr. Haim did not disclose HIPAA-protected information to Rufo, and Rufo did not publish HIPAA-protected information.

Paragraph 18 of the original indictment alleged that Rufo (“Person1”) “published HIPAA protected information obtained by Haim.” Paragraph 14 of the superseding indictment drops the mistaken claim that the information that Rufo published was HIPAA-protected. It now contends only that Rufo “published personal information.” That information, I’ll emphasize, did not remotely identify the patients, and DOJ has never contended otherwise. As I’ve pointed out, DOJ discloses far more revealing information about the patients, as it identifies them by their initials.

via www.nationalreview.com

Ed Whelan.

This is something I would expect of an underqualified prosecutor from some burgh way out in the country, not the DOJ. I'd ask what is wrong with these people, but we all know what it is.

Why Bill Ackman is voting for Trump

From X:

While the 33 actions I describe below are those of the Democratic Party and the Biden/Harris administration, they are also the actions and policies that unfortunately our most aggressive adversaries would likely implement if they wanted to destroy America from within, and had the ability to take control of our leadership. These are the 33: (1) open the borders to millions of immigrants who were not screened for their risk to the country, dumping them into communities where the new immigrants overwhelm existing communities and the infrastructure to support the new entrants, at the expense of the historic residents, (2) introduce economic policies and massively increase spending without regard to their impact on inflation and the consequences for low-income Americans and the increase in our deficit and national debt, (3) withdraw from Afghanistan, abandoning our local partners and the civilians who worked alongside us in an unprepared, overnight withdrawal that led to American casualties and destroyed the lives of Afghani women and girls for generations, against the strong advice of our military leadership, and thereafter not showing appropriate respect for their loss at a memorial ceremony in their honor, (4) introduce thousands of new and unnecessary regulations in light of the existing regulatory regime that interfere with our businesses’ ability to compete, restraining the development of desperately needed housing, infrastructure, and energy production with the associated inflationary effects, (5) modify the bail system so that violent criminals are released without bail, (6) destroy our street retailers and communities and promote lawlessness by making shoplifting (except above large thresholds) no longer a criminal offense, (7) limit and/or attempt to limit or ban fracking and LNG so that U.S. energy costs increase substantially and the U.S. loses its energy independence, (8) promote DEI ideologies that award jobs, awards, and university admissions on the basis of race, sexual identity and gender criteria, and teach our students and citizens that the world can only be understood as an unfair battle between oppressors and the oppressed, where the oppressors are only successful due to structural racism or a rigged system and the oppressed are simply victims of an unfair system and world, (9) educate our elementary children that gender is fluid, something to be chosen by a child, and promote hormone blockers and gender reassignment surgeries to our youth without regard to the longer-term consequences to their mental and physical health, and allow biological boys and men to compete in girls and women's sports, depriving girls and women of scholarships, awards, and other opportunities that they would have rightly earned otherwise, (10) encourage and celebrate massive protests and riots that lead to the burning and destruction of local retail and business establishments while at the same time requiring schools to be shuttered because of the risk of Covid-19 spreading during large gatherings, (11) encourage and celebrate anti-American and anti-Israel protests and flag burning on campuses around the country with no consequences for the protesters who violate laws or university codes and policies, (12) allow antisemitism to explode with no serious efforts from the administration to quell this hatred, (13) mandate vaccines that have not been adequately tested nor have their risks been properly considered compared with the potential benefits adjusted for the age and health of the individual, censoring the contrary advice of top scientists around the world, (14) shut down free speech in media and on social media platforms that is inconsistent with government policies and objectives, (15) use the U.S., state, and local legal systems to attack and attempt to jail, take off the campaign trail, and/or massively fine candidates for the presidency without regard to the merits or precedential issues of the case, (16) seek to defund the police and promote anti-police rhetoric causing a loss of confidence in those who are charged with protecting us, (17) use government funds to subsidize auto companies and internet providers with vastly more expensive, dated and/or lower-quality technology when greatly superior and cheaper alternatives are available from companies that are owned and/or managed by individuals not favored by the current administration, (18) mandate in legislation and otherwise government solutions to problems when the private sector can do a vastly better, faster, and cheaper job, (19) seek to ban gas-powered cars and stoves without regard to the economic and practical consequences of doing so, (20) take no serious actions when 45 American citizens are killed by terrorists and 12 are taken hostage, (21) hold back armaments and weaponry from our most important ally in the Middle East in the midst of their hostage negotiations, hostages who include American citizens who have now been held for more than one year, (22) eliminate sanctions on one of our most dangerous enemies enabling them to generate $150 billion+ of cash reserves from oil sales, which they can then use to fund terrorist proxy organizations who attack us and our allies. Exchange five American hostages held by Iran for five Iranians plus $6 billion of cash in the worst hostage negotiation in history setting a disastrous and dangerous precedent, (23) remove known terrorist organizations from the terrorist list so we can provide aid to their people, and allow them to shoot rockets at U.S. assets and military bases with little if any military response from us, (24) lie to the American people about the cognitive health of the president and accuse those who provide video evidence of his decline of sharing doctored videos and being right wing conspirators, (25) do nothing about the deteriorating health of our citizens driven by the food industrial complex, the fraudulent USDA food pyramid, and the inclusion of ingredients in our food that are banned by other countries around the world which are more protective of their citizens, (26) do nothing about the proliferation of new vaccines that are not properly analyzed for their risk versus the potential benefit for healthy children who are mandated to receive them, (27) do nothing about the continued exemption from liability for the pharma industry that has led to a proliferation of mandatory vaccines for children without considering the potential cumulative effects of the now mandated 72-shot regime, (28) convince our minority youth that they are victims of a rigged system and that the American dream is not available to them, (29) fail to provide adequate Secret Service protection for alternative presidential candidates, (30) litigate to prevent alternative candidates from getting on the ballot, and take other anti-competitive steps including threatening political consultants who wish to work for alternative candidates for the presidency, and limit the potential media access for other candidates by threatening the networks' future access to the administration and access to 'scoops' if they platform an alternative candidate, (31) select the Democratic nominee for president in a backroom process by undisclosed party leaders without allowing Americans to choose between candidates in an open primary, (32) choose an inferior candidate for the presidency when other much more qualified candidates are available and interested to serve, (33) litigate to make it illegal for states to require proof of citizenship, voter ID, and/or residence in order to vote at a time when many Americans have lost confidence in the accuracy and trustworthiness of our voting system. I welcome your thoughts.

My thoughts are that this is a pretty good list. I'll probably vote for Trump/Vance even though as (currently) a Californian, it hardly matters. But then a marginal vote usually means just a marginally little bit, even in Pennsylvania. Even in Plato's Athens, a marginal vote to execute the old philosopher didn't amount to much.

RFK Jr. reacts to his ‘fearless’ mother Ethel’s passing: ‘Invented tough love’ | Fox News

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took to social media on Thursday evening to honor his mother, Ethel Kennedy, after she died at the age of 96.

"My mom, Ethel Skakel Kennedy, passed peacefully into Heaven this morning. She was 96. She died in Boston surrounded by many of her nine surviving children and her friends," RFK Jr. wrote on X.

His lengthy tribute had nearly 100,000 likes as of Thursday evening.

Ethel Kennedy had 11 children with her late husband, Robert F. Kennedy, before his assassination in 1968. She was pregnant at the time of his death with their 11th child, a daughter named Rory.

via www.foxnews.com

She was one tough old broad. I remember moving furniture into the big house at the Kennedy compound one summer in 1981. I will leave to math experts figure out how long age that was. I was attached at the time to a member of the staff at friends of the Kennedys who lived next door, so obviously I was an important person. I did get to see the famous bust of JFK and the rest of the downstairs family room and kitchen, which looked like that of an old fraternity house. She was intense, frowning and not at all averse to bossing us around. We were volunteers of course. Being of tender feelings, I left feeling rather offended at my treatment. I would have made a terrible Roman slave, at least until I'd received a few good lashings, if I was lucky. Now that I'm older I can see she had to be this way, unless she was a saint, but then just about everyone in Massachusetts is this way, whether they have to be or not. I don't envy St. Peter if he dares try to keep her out of heaven, where for better or worse I hope to meet RFK someday, God's mercy being what it is. If he's there, she will be too.

‘Shoot’ men who won’t vote for female president: U. Kansas lecturer | The College Fix

‘I don’t want the deans hearing that I said that,’ professor says

Men who won’t vote for a female president should be “line[d] up” and shot, according to a University of Kansas professor.

The lecturer, subsequently identified by the university as Phillip Lowcock, says “what frustrates” him is men who think females are not “smart enough to be president.”

“We can line up all those guys and shoot ‘em, they clearly don’t understand the way the world works,” Lowcock says. He teaches in the health sport and exercise department according to his university bio.

“Did I say that? Scratch that from the recording I don’t want the deans hearing that I said that,” the lecturer says on the video clip.

The university said the instructor has been “placed on administrative leave” according to a post on X today.

He reportedly apologized and “deeply regrets the situation.”

via www.thecollegefix.com

I bet he does.

Virginia Tech academic: Stop sending humans into space — it’s ‘imperialist’ | The College Fix

Yet another university academic is warning about continued human space exploration due to its “imperialist mindset.”

Savannah Mandel, a PhD candidate at Virginia Tech and an “outer space anthropologist,” adds to what seems to be a trendy argument about investigations into outer space.

According to Virginia Tech News, Mandel’s book “Ground Control: An Argument for the End of Human Space Exploration” argues that “rushing to send more humans to space […] mirrors an imperialist mindset that harms Earth’s humanity and environment.”

Mandel (pictured) said the space industry is “highly bureaucratic, highly politicized, and highly technical,” and the more she learned the more she began to question the utility of continued manned space operations.

She said she wants a “systemic change” in human-led space efforts, one of which is “the inclusion of more social scientists” at NASA and elsewhere.

Mandel noted that when she worked at Spaceport America she would “list all the pop stars going on Virgin Galactic flights,” but would also note the “poverty statistics for the local area.”

“It was such a stark contrast,” she said. “When I went to [Washington] D.C., and started working in space policy and science writing, I saw how militarized space exploration was and how colonial the rhetoric was around it.”

via www.thecollegefix.com

This raises the question of whether it's still colonialism if there's nobody there to colonize. I suspect the answer is yes, indeed it is. Before you say it's not, be sure to carefully investigate your university's free speech policies, such as they may be. Somebody should also inform Elon. If there's room, perhaps he could include a DEI commissar on the first Mars mission. In any event, there is I suppose the chance that the alien bacteria or whatever it might turn out to be, could be naturalized and so vote Democratic wherever is most needful. Lots of deep issues here for tenured professors to explore.

Professors at Texas university rally to save family of feral campus cats | The College Fix

A history professor at Prairie View A&M University is leading an effort among his peers to save a family of feral cats that have caught the ire of administrators.

Professor Ian Abbey is working to raise funds to implement a trap, neuter, and release program for a community of about 12 cats that have captured his heart and others on campus, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported.

In particular a tuxedo cat named “Daisy” has become a furry friend to several faculty members.

After a kitten was found dead, likely from poison set out by administrative fiat, Abbey sought funds for his suggested program, which he dubbed the Catness Project, from the Faculty Senate — which was receptive and supportive of the idea — according to the article:

via www.thecollegefix.com

Poisoned?! Good lord. This is really unacceptably cruel, even for Texas. I mean, you're much kinder just shooting them. And it is not that difficult to trap, neuter and release them after all.

Exclusive: Iran’s Secret Warning to U.S. Allies: Don’t Help Israel, or You’re Next - WSJ

DUBAI—Tehran is threatening in secret diplomatic backchannels to target the oil-rich Arab Gulf states and other American allies in the Middle East if their territories or airspace are used for an attack on Iran, said Arab officials.

Israel has threatened Tehran with a severe reprisal after Iran fired about 180 ballistic missiles at Israel earlier this month, with some Israeli officials and commentators pushing for damaging strikes on Tehran’s nuclear facilities or oil infrastructure. In that event, Iran has warned it would respond with devastating hits on Israel’s civilian infrastructure, and would retaliate against any Arab state that facilitated the attack, the officials said.

The Arab officials said the countries that Iran has threatened include Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, all of which host U.S. troops. These states have told the Biden administration that they don’t want their military infrastructure or airspace to be used by the U.S. or Israel for any offensive operations against Iran, the officials said. 

While the Iranian threats are vague, they have raised concerns in energy-rich Persian Gulf states that their oil facilities—long viewed as protected by an American security umbrella—could be hit, the Arab officials said. U.S. military installations and forces in the region could also be at risk in a region with one of the highest concentrations of American troops in the world, they added.

via www.wsj.com

Empress Kamala’s New Clothes - WSJ

This week’s political headlines were eerily similar in feel to those of early July, following that momentous Joe Biden-Donald Trump debate. It’s the feel of a Democratic Party realizing (again) that the looms really were without thread, that their nominee—exposed to the nation—is looking a bit bare.

“Democrats start to hit the panic button.” “Kamala Harris Is Making the Same Mistakes She Made in 2019.” “Democrats grow anxious.” Ms. Harris “struggling to break through with working class” and “struggles to differentiate herself from Biden” and “struggles to answer questions” and generally . . . struggles. “Kamala Harris Could Be in Trouble.”

Pray tell, how? Weeks ago, Ms. Harris was the standard-bearer of “joy,” “freedom” and “opportunity,” the “juggernaut” who exudes “quiet prowess” and “humiliates” her opponent and delivers a “debate knockout” and runs a “brilliant campaign” and “dominates” among voters. The “Gen Z Meme Queen” whose party had woefully “underestimated” her “raw talent.”

These superlatives came from the same partisan press corps that insisted Mr. Biden was fine—until it couldn’t. The same media that before the Biden debate warned against Ms. Harris’s enormous liabilities—until it got stuck with her. The same press corps that is now discovering that even unrelenting hagiography can’t make up for those Harris weaknesses.

Her problem—like Mr. Biden’s—comes from finally being seen. She outperformed Mr. Trump in their debate a month ago, though she did it by saying nothing of consequence. She’s since embarked on a “media blitz,” and in doing so confirmed the wisdom of all those advisers who fought never to let that happen. Recent weeks have shown a candidate whose answer to every question is canned, memorized, substance-free. Twice this week alone she flubbed softballs designed to let her discreetly break with the unpopular current president. “The View”: “Would you have done something differently than President Biden?” Ms. Harris: “There is not a thing that comes to mind.”

via www.wsj.com

Kimberley Strassel.

Univision's Kamala Harris "town hall" for "undecided Latino Voters" was actually filled with avowed Kamala supporters

The audience members I spoke to were selected with the help of a company called FansOnQ, according to the company’s founder, Conny Quintanilla, whose title for yesterday’s event was “Audience Manager.” The company puts out “casting calls” for events like the Latin Grammy Awards, which have been previously held in Las Vegas. It’s a type of company that you might not be consciously aware exists, but once you’re told of its existence, it makes perfect intuitive sense: people who want to dance at award shows are “vetted” by this particular company, perhaps for good looks and rhythmic skills. That’s the same company which filled the seats at Kamala’s town hall.

Another person told me he was able to attend because he “knows people” at an unnamed “progressive organization,” which somehow granted him the ability to get in the town hall audience. The person said he works as an intern for Rep. Steven Horsford, Democrat of Nevada. I’m not naming the person because he was wary of attribution. Others quoted here also didn’t want to be identified.

These aforementioned attendees were essentially just “seat fillers” — they were not the audience members who were called on to ask pre-selected questions. Those audience members were flown in from around the country at Univision’s expense. Which is a bit odd, because there would certainly have been plenty of genuine “undecided Latino voters” in Clark County, Nevada who I’m sure would’ve been more than happy to ask Kamala Harris a question.

via www.mtracey.net

Michael Tracey.

Why, this is just dishonest!

Obama’s Ugly Closing Argument - WSJ

Worried that the presidential race may be slipping away from them, Democrats now express contempt for the people whose votes they need to win in November. Especially annoying to the party’s leadership is that they have to try to persuade Pennsylvanians. On Tuesday vice presidential candidate Gov. Tim Walz (D., Minn.) lamented to wealthy California donors that their party has to win votes in Western Pennsylvania’s Beaver County, and also persuade people in York, in the eastern half of the Keystone State. To diminish the power of such voters, Mr. Walz wants to get rid of the Constitution’s Electoral College. Now former President Barack Obama has arrived in Pittsburgh to scold some of the locals for not supporting current Vice President Kamala Harris.

Mr. Obama is now employing the rhetorical tactics he once used against congressional Republicans to attempt to shame voters into obeying his political instruction. Mr. Obama’s oratory has always been much more refined than that of either of his presidential successors—but at least as nasty. The standard Obama approach is to assume that no one could possibly have an informed and honest disagreement with him and therefore his opponents must be ignorant or driven by concealed base motives.

via www.wsj.com

Yes, former President Barack Obama is a nasty piece of work. A tall, elegant and handsome piece of work, but nasty nonetheless. Judging more by his actions than words, he's also an anti-Semite and doesn't care for white folks that much. I'm not sure how deep his affection for Black folks is either. I don't think "Americans" enters his graceful head at all. I think what Barack cares most about is Barack. Just look at his life post-Presidency. Not exactly hanging out at his Georgia peanut farm except when he goes off to pitch in building housing for poor folks. Barack might as well be Bill, but without the triangulated policy. Just sayin'.

This is James Freeman BTW.

Chicago's Incredible Shrinking Mayor | City Journal

Brandon Johnson is rapidly establishing himself as one of the worst mayors in Chicago’s history. In just over a year and a half in office, his approval rating has plummeted to an abysmal 25 percent. This decline highlights broad-based discontent, not only among the civic and business communities but also in a significant portion of the mayor’s progressive base.

Johnson’s tenure has been marked by a troubling blend of cronyism and incompetence. At the heart of his administration is an overt alignment with the teachers’ union, for which he once worked as an organizer. This relationship has also led him to surround himself with untested leftists, whose extreme views have alienated many members of the city council.

Johnson is currently embroiled in three self-inflicted crises, the most pressing of which revolves around his attempts to oust Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez. Johnson wants Martinez to secure a $300 million, high-interest loan to help finance an exorbitant contract for the teachers’ union, which is pushing for a staggering 9 percent annual raise in teachers’ salaries and the hiring of nearly 5,000 new teachers, despite declining public school enrollment. The union’s demands extend beyond traditional  concerns about compensation and working conditions for its employees—they include building public housing for homeless families. With a former teachers’ union organizer in the mayor’s office, the union now controls the commanding heights of city politics. But even Johnson’s hand-picked members of the Chicago Board of Education balked at his fiscally irresponsible idea and declined to fire the CEO.

via www.city-journal.org

John O. McGinnis

Under the low bar, with room to spare.

Report: DEI Is Transforming the National Science Foundation | The Free Press

If you thought the august National Science Foundation focused only on string theory or the origins of life, you haven’t spent much time in a university lab lately. Thanks to a major shift endorsed by the Biden administration, recent grants have gone to researchers seeking to identify “hegemonic narratives” and their effect on “non-normative forms of gender and sexuality,” plus “systematic racism” in the education of math teachers and “sex/gender narratives in undergraduate biology and their impacts on transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming students.” 

via www.thefp.com

If find this both discouraging and puzzling. But then it probably should not be puzzling, as all endeavors in which a government is involved are sure to be politicized.

Chemistry Nobel goes to developers of AlphaFold AI that predicts protein structures

For the first time — and probably not the last — a scientific breakthrough enabled by artificial intelligence (AI) has been recognized with a Nobel prize. The 2024 chemistry Nobel was awarded to John Jumper and Demis Hassabis at Google DeepMind in London, for developing a game-changing AI tool for predicting protein structures called AlphaFold, and David Baker, at the University of Washington in Seattle, for his work on computational protein design, which has been bolstered by Al in recent years.

“I hope when we look back on AlphaFold, it will be the first proof point of AI's incredible potential to accelerate scientific discovery,” Hassabis said at a press briefing at DeepMind on 9 October. “It’s so unreal at this moment.”

via www.nature.com

Very well deserved, it seems to me.

Violent ‘Megalomaniac’ Sinwar Takes Hamas on Even More Radical Path - WSJ

After Yahya Sinwar, the man responsible for launching the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, took full control of Hamas over the summer, Arab intelligence officials say he sent a directive to a senior operative: Now is the time to revive suicide bombings.

A few days later, a bespectacled Palestinian entered Tel Aviv with a blue backpack loaded with explosives. Although the bomb exploded before the man reached his target, killing only him, the attack sent an unmistakable message.

“What a blessing it is that my bones become shrapnel that blow apart the usurping Zionist Jews,” said the attacker, Ja’far Sa’d Saeed Muna, a member of Hamas’s armed wing, in a video released later by the group.

The U.S.-designated terrorist organization has long embraced militancy, but Hamas largely discontinued suicide attacks two decades ago. At the time, a spate of them had spread terror in Israel’s streets but failed to extract concessions from its government, and some Hamas leaders feared such attacks would make the group a political pariah.

Despite misgivings within Hamas, no one was willing to speak out against the practice once Sinwar was at the helm of the group, according to the Arab intelligence officials, who said they communicate regularly with Hamas leaders, including Sinwar.

via www.wsj.com

Truly, someone for whom the bunker buster was made. There's a place in Hell with Sinwar's name on it.

The Battle Over Robots at U.S. Ports Is On - WSJ

At the annual convention of the International Longshoremen’s Association last year, two large screens played a TikTok video from a crane operator over the docks of Los Angeles. 

“Aaaall of this, man, is all automated,” he said, pointing toward acres of stacked containers stretching to the Pacific. He marveled at the automated vehicles driving amid the containers: “No drivers in any of those machines…. They’re no joke, man.”

From the podium, Harold Daggett, the union’s pugnacious leader, was having none of it. “They say that’s the future,” he bellowed to the thousands of gathered workers. “Over my dead body.”

Tens of thousands of dockworkers last week returned to their jobs on East Coast ports after a three-day strike that threatened to snarl trade and hobble the economy. Workers won a 62% pay increase. But a much larger, thornier issue remains—one that’s playing out in other businesses as well, from factories to grocery stores to Hollywood: How much, and how quickly, are humans willing to concede to machines?

via www.wsj.com

Nearly 50% of researchers quit science within a decade, huge study reveals

A study of nearly 400,000 scientists across 38 countries finds that one-third of them quit science within five years of authoring their first paper, and almost half leave within a decade.

The analysis, published in Higher Education¹, used data from the citation database Scopus to track scientists’ scholarly publishing careers — a proxy for how active they are in research. It found that, overall, women were more likely than men to stop publishing, but the size of this difference varied between disciplines.

via www.nature.com

Kamala Harris Is Eyeing Your 401(k) - WSJ

Kamala Harris keeps changing her tax plan, but her latest proposal is to raise the corporate tax rate to 28%. She would also raise the top capital-gains tax to roughly 32%, the highest since the 1970s.

Extracting money from those big and faceless corporations with profits in the tens of billions of dollars has populist appeal. But the more accurate way to think of the corporate income tax is that it puts Uncle Sam first in line to take a share of all the profits an American corporation earns. Only after the government takes its pound of flesh does anyone else get a return on his money.

At a 28% federal corporate tax and an average of roughly a 5% state and local tax, the government would snatch away roughly 33 cents of every dollar of profit. This leaves 67 cents to the shareholders. Those include the more than 100 million Americans who own stock directly or through pension and other retirement funds. Every percentage point that Congress and Ms. Harris raise the tax would dilute the value of the stock owned by the rest of us.

via www.wsj.com

Jeff Yass and Stephen Moore.

I have a better idea. Let's give Elon extraordinary powers to sift through the swamp and roust out all those unproductive amphibians and reptiles. It's working pretty well for X/twitter. Ok, it's not my idea, but it's a good one.

Biden-Harris Mismanaged Hurricane Helene - WSJ

While Ms. Harris and Mr. Biden flouted their duties, a bureaucratic bottleneck was delaying the deployment of active-duty military personnel to the western mountains of North Carolina. On Oct. 2, six days after the storm made landfall, the Defense Department announced that 1,000 troops had been authorized to deploy to the hurricane-response zone, including elements of the 82nd Airborne Division from Fort Liberty, N.C. These troops bring with them debris-clearing and water-purification equipment—critical resources for communities with blocked roads and orders to boil drinking water. As evening fell on Friday, Oct. 4, fewer than half of the 1,000 troops were conducting operations and deployed to Western North Carolina.

Deployment delays became severe enough that North Carolina Sens. Ted Budd and Thom Tillis issued a joint statement on Oct. 4 calling for “an active-duty military leader who has extensive experience with operations of this magnitude to lead moving forward.” The statement seemed to have an effect: The rest of the active-duty forces were deployed by the evening of Oct. 6, and the Pentagon authorized an additional 500, including advanced command-and-control resources.

In disaster response, every second counts. A week went by while the citizens of North Carolina suffered without the equipment and soldiers needed to save lives and begin recovery. This is the sort of bureaucratic hiccup that engaged political leaders solve. A competent leader would have ordered those men and women into motion earlier, bureaucracy be damned. Ms. Harris and Mr. Biden treated the situation like a public-relations disaster instead of a real one.

via www.wsj.com

Senator J.D. Vance.

Elon to the Rescue. Plus. . . | The Free Press

In the U.S.—the “Wild West” of gender medicine—healthcare is decentralized and geographically sprawling, so it’s difficult to keep track. But today, Do No Harm, a medical watchdog, is hoping to help fix that with the launch of their “Stop The Harm” database. 

The database compiles medical insurance claims related to gender-affirming care for minors aged 17.5 and younger across all 50 states. They weren’t able to include patients who aren’t insured or anyone insured by Kaiser, a major provider on the West Coast, which does not make its data public.

The estimates are conservative, but these numbers show that in the U.S., between 2019 and 2023, at least:

• 13,944 minors were given “gender-affirming” puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries. 

• 5,747 minors underwent “gender-affirming” facial, breast, and genital surgeries. 

• 8,579 minors were prescribed cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers. And those nearly 9,000 youths received a total of 62,682 prescriptions. To be clear, that’s more than seven separate prescriptions per patient.

This amounts to a total of $119,791,202 in charges that private insurance companies and public Medicare/Medicaid funds—a.k.a. your taxes—were billed by gender-affirming clinicians over a four-year period. 

via www.thefp.com

Yikes. That's a lot of kids.

Biden admits Obama 'f***ed up' with Putin and 'didn't take him 'seriously' | Daily Mail Online

Nowhere is that sharper than his fury at Obama for failing to check Putin when he first moved into Ukraine. 

'We did nothing. We gave Putin a license to continue,' Biden said, according to excerpts of the 'War' published by CNN. 'Well, I'm revoking his f***ing license!'

Russian troops, in plain uniforms without insignia, moved into Crimea in February and March 2014 after the ousting of Ukraine's pro-Russian president.

It came after Obama had dispatched Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on a mission to 'reset' relations with Moscow.

And in 2012, when his election opponent Sen. Mitt Romney described Russia as 'our number-one geopolitical foe,' Obama responded with mockery. 

via www.dailymail.co.uk

Nobody's laughing now.

Why Substack is so much more powerful than old media - in two emails

Michael:

Thanks for your note. I already know what you think of the conference. Your previous column about it was headlined "Stanford throws a party for purveyors of misinformation and disinformation about COVID." So I don't see much need to walk you through what I said. Mostly I discussed government censorship and Berenson v Biden, as the efficacy and safety of the mRNAs were not the topic of my panel. I think the panel is or will be publicly available, and you are welcome to watch it.

But this does seem like a great chance to answer your second question. Yes, my opinion on the mRNA Covid vaccines has changed since 2021.

It has worsened considerably.

The shots proved completely ineffective against Covid infection and transmission within months. The argument that they prevent serious cases or death is based on observational data that is effectively worthless because of healthy vaccinee bias.

They produce lasting immunological changes - notably the IgG4 class switch and their failure to produce long-lived plasma cells - which were unanticipated and problematic and may have long-term negative effects. Even Yale's Akiko Iwasaki expressed her concern about the recent study on long-lived plasma cells.

https://x.com/VirusesImmunity/status/1839739442300424382

It is now clear the mRNAs should never have been offered to children, teenagers, or healthy young adults, who were at essentially zero risk of death from Covid and very low risk of serious outcomes. That they caused myocarditis in young people far in excess of Covid's risk of doing so is incontrovertible. The efforts to say otherwise rely on whatever risks of myocarditis Covid may present to older people, and many cardiologists think those risks are overstated.

They caused sudden cardiac deaths in young adults in rare instances; again, this fact is incontrovertible, and I can send you the studies proving it. More recent studies have shown other potential health problems, including a very large study showing that the shots are associated with a significant increase in new-onset asthma in children.

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/very-urgent-covid-19-mrna-vaccines

These realities are widely understood outside the tiny community of mRNA jab fanatics, which is why almost no one will take the shots anymore. Moderna has had to repeatedly reduce its sales estimates, and its shares are LOWER than they were before the shots were authorized and down over 85 percent from their mandate- and booster-driven August 2021 peak.

I would not be surprised if there is NEVER another successful mRNA jab for wide use (I can't speak to the anti-cancer mRNA shots).

I am quite sure nothing I say will make any difference to you, so I'll stop there. Go ahead and quote Peter Hotez and Angela Rassmussen and all the usual suspects while writing that I "refused to comment on your questions," or whatever. I don't mind. I have a larger and more important audience than you and my readers trust me more than yours trust you, so I'll just post this now, while you wait for Monday.

Oh, wait, turns out I do have one question for you. Do you still think "mocking anti-vaxxers’ deaths is ghoulish, yes - but necessary"? My readers would love to know.

All best

Alex

via alexberenson.substack.com

That a reporter would have the chutzpah to criticize the *existence* of a scientific conference at a university, especially a major university such as Stanford -- well, it gives one pause. But Alex is right: it hardly matters now that there is Substack. No wonder Hillary and Bill Gates and John Kerry and the rest of the usual suspects want to shut it all down. Not to mention Peter Hotez and Angela Rassmussen. If you don't want to reply to arguments, but just want to say "this must not be heard!", we know all we need to know.

You won't be surprised to learn I'm alarmed by the news that the Covid jab not only doesn't work to prevent Covid but actually increases substantially the occurrence of myocarditis in young people and even rarely causes sudden death. And in these otherwise young, healthy people the risk posed by Covid itself was practically nil. This is a major scandal, one of many sadly that are now coming to light, notwithstanding the efforts of many to suppress them.

A Troubled Place | City Journal

Former president Donald Trump, echoing the sentiments of some of Charleroi’s native citizens, has cast the change in a sinister light. As he told the crowd at a recent rally in Indiana, Pennsylvania, “it takes centuries to build the unique character of each state. . . . But reckless migration policy can change it quickly and permanently.” Progressives, as expected, countered with the usual arguments, claiming that Trump was stoking fear, inciting nativist resentment, and even putting the Haitian migrants in danger.

Neither side, however, seems to have grappled with the mechanics of Charleroi’s abrupt transformation. How did thousands of Haitians end up in a tiny borough in Western Pennsylvania? What are they doing there? And cui bono—who benefits?

The answers to these questions have ramifications not only for Charleroi, but for the general trajectory of mass migration under the Biden administration, which has allowed more than 7 million migrants to enter the United States, either illegally, or, as with some 309,000 Haitians, under ad hoc asylum rules.

The basic pattern in Charleroi has been replicated in thousands of cities and towns across America: the federal government has opened the borders to all comers; a web of publicly funded NGOs has facilitated the flow of migrants within the country; local industries have welcomed the arrival of cheap, pliant labor. And, under these enormous pressures, places like Charleroi often revert to an older form: that of the company town, in which an open conspiracy of government, charity, and industry reshapes the society to its advantage—whether the citizens want it or not.

via www.city-journal.org

Christopher F. Rufo and Christina Buttons.

The Harris Broadband Rollout Has Been a Fiasco - WSJ

The 2021 infrastructure law included $42.5 billion for states to expand broadband to “unserved,” mostly rural, communities. Three years later, ground hasn’t been broken on a single project. The Administration recently said construction won’t start until next year at the earliest, meaning many projects won’t be up and running until the end of the decade.

Blame the Administration’s political regulations. States must submit plans to the Commerce Department about how they’ll use the funds and their bidding process for providers. Commerce has piled on mandates that are nowhere in the law and has rejected state plans that don’t advance progressive goals.

via www.wsj.com

This is why we can't have nice things. It's going to be a wake up call for Elon if Trump wins. I think Musk will find it an enormous challenge to fix government and I bet he fails -- but here's hoping. It's one thing to send colonizers to Mars. It's another to push a project through thousands of lawyers.

San Diego flight catches fire during emergency landing in Las Vegas – NBC 7 San Diego

Aviation officials have launched an investigation after a flight from San Diego caught fire amid an emergency landing in Las Vegas Saturday afternoon.

Frontier Airlines Flight 1326 made a hard landing around 4:20 p.m. at Harry Reid International Airport, its scheduled arrival point, after the aircraft's pilots reported smoke in the cockpit, the airline said in a statement.

24/7 San Diego news stream: Watch NBC 7 free wherever you are

Investigators said radio calls went out and tower officials said no communication with the pilot during the emergency landing.

Passengers told TODAY there was severe turbulence as the Airbus 321 approached the runway.

Get top local stories in San Diego delivered to you every morning. Sign up for NBC San Diego's News Headlines newsletter.

"We landed, and it was so hard. I felt it through my body, and she felt it too," passenger Lucas Shook told TODAY. "And just seconds after that, I told her, I think it's on fire. And then that's when I saw the flame. I was like, Yeah, our plane's on fire."

Video shared on social media shows flames pouring from the plane upon arrival. Once stopped on the tarmac, firefighters doused the plane while passengers waited on board for nearly an hour with no air conditioning, they said.

The passengers were evacuated via airstairs and bussed to the terminal. When the passengers evacuated, they said they saw a tire had blown out.

via www.nbcsandiego.com

Yeah, with Frontier Air you're taking your chances. Maybe about as risky as using a men's room at the Vegas airport. Using slots must ruin your eyes and aim or something.

Hillary Clinton Is Worried - WSJ

A federal law known as Section 230 has enabled the rise of social media by letting tech platforms make good-faith efforts to remove objectionable content without becoming liable for everything that individual users post. Take away Section 230 and, for example, the business model of Elon Musk’s X is destroyed. Social media platforms would be sued into oblivion by trial lawyers. Here’s what Mrs. Clinton said, according to CNN’s Saturday transcript:

We should be, in my view, repealing something called Section 230, which gave, you know, platforms on the internet immunity because they were thought to be just pass-throughs. That they shouldn’t be judged for the content that is posted.

But we now know that that was an overly simple view… if they don’t moderate and monitor the content we lose total control…

We need to remove the immunity from liability and we need to have guardrails. We need regulation.

We need guardrails against political actors seeking more control over our speech, even—perhaps especially—in cases in which they claim to be acting on behalf of our kids.

via www.wsj.com

James Freeman.

Some people mellow as they age, and some just grow more odious.

Medicine Nobel awarded for gene-regulating ‘microRNAs’

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to two geneticists who discovered microRNAs, a class of tiny RNA molecules that help to control how genes are expressed in multicellular organisms.

Victor Ambros, who works at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, and Gary Ruvkun at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston share the prize pot of 11 million Swedish kroner (US$1 million), awarded by the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.

MicroRNAs perform a multitude of tasks in complex organisms, from embryonic development to cell physiology. Researchers have speculated that they were involved in evolutionary leaps, such as humans’ bulging brains, and they have been implicated in the onset of cancers and other diseases.

Speaking at a press conference on 7 October, Ruvkun said he is looking forward to receiving his Nobel at the official ceremony later this year. He got a preview of the raucous celebration when he joined MGH biochemist Jack Szostack, who shared the 2009 medicine Nobel, on the trip to Stockholm. “They know how to party,” Ruvkun said.

via www.nature.com

And this is after Ambros was denied tenure at Harvard. Oh ho ho. Maybe you were wrong, O Harvard? Maybe Harvard will invite him to speak now? Rich indeed.

Censorship Is THE Biggest Issue in This Election – HotAir

There is a lot at stake in this election cycle, as you all know. But in my mind, the make-or-break issue is protecting the First Amendment and, by extension, the Constitution and our freedoms. 

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Yes, the border matters immensely. Yes, the US is embroiled in wars abroad that should never have broken out. 

But without freedom of speech and the ability to break the near monopoly on information distribution, our country will be gone. We won't even have a fighting chance. 

via hotair.com

Yeah, me too, David.

David Strom.

Why Do the Young Vote Left? - WSJ

It’s the gifts. The progressive vibe is that big government will take care of you. It knows what’s best for you. It will redistribute money how it pleases. You need to put a smile on your face while it takes away your laurels, guns and money. “We believe in the collective,” Ms. Harris declared, much like Hillary Clinton’s “it takes a village.” Equity in Schenectady. Handouts for all.

You want proof? Ms. Harris’s Senate voting record is leftward of socialist Bernie Sanders. Vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz fawns over China, saying “everyone is the same and everyone shares.” Viva la revolución and Che Guevara T-shirts for all.

This is antifreedom. Too many of today’s youth fall in line with progressives because they’re undereducated and overindoctrinated with someone else’s agenda. I watched in horror as local high-school biology classes spent weeks on the science of recycling centers and only a short afternoon on mitochondria and mitosis. Profit is a bad word. It’s gimme, gimme, whether it’s student loan forgiveness, free healthcare or tax credits.

Who’s to blame? Misguided capitalism-hating social-studies teachers to start, with Tim Walzian thinking: “One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness.” Who is he, Mr. Rogers? Add like-minded college professors. Work ethic and ambition are evaporating.

Worse, Pew Research notes almost a third of currently childless 18- to 34-year-olds aren’t sure if they ever want children. Why? The Harris campaign’s “climate engagement director,” Camila Thorndike, is among the hesitant, telling the Washington Post, “I want to protect them from suffering.” Perpetually pessimistic progressive prognostications induce fear. No wonder U.S. fertility rates are at historic lows.

OK, I know I’m asking for trouble. Every time I write about youth, I get a chorus of comments and tweets telling me I’m an old man screaming, “Hey you kids, get off my lawn.” Yeah, yeah. Very clever. I’m not that old. But in the Kamala collective—as California attempted—private “ornamental” lawns are out, and drought-resistant vegetation is in. Progressives literally want you off your own lawn.

via www.wsj.com

Me, I don't even have a lawn. I did but the rabbits ate all the grass.

Andy Kessler.

A Year That Will Live in Infamy | RealClearDefense

Iran’s attack on October 7^th – for Hamas is a member of Iran’s Axis of Resistance, not an independent actor sui generis – opened up another front in the world crisis. Iran sought to have Hamas break through to the West Bank, triggering an intifada against Israel. With the IDF overstretched, Hezbollah would have assaulted from the north, a situation forestalled only by rapid Israeli mobilization and stout defense against Hamas’ initial incursion. Since that point, Iran has hoped to tie Israel down in a ring of conflicts. Hamas kidnapped over 240 hostages, placing in opposition Israel’s strategic imperative to eliminate the threat from Gaza with the political demand to recover Israel, and lest we forget, American, citizens. It then activated its proxy network across the Middle East, attacking U.S. bases in the Levant, harassing international shipping in the Bab-el-Mandeb, and threatening Israel from Lebanon. For the past year, Israel has been engaged in a delicate strategic balancing act, seeking to deter Hezbollah in the north as it grinds down Hamas in Gaza. But all the while, international pressure on Israel has mounted, as Iran leverages the Islamist-Leftist partnership to question the Jewish State’s basic right to national security.

Initially, the Biden administration’s response seemed robust. It deployed an American carrier group to deter further Iranian intervention and gave Israel full-throated rhetorical support. This position evaporated by the end of 2023. Since December last year, the U.S. has accused Israel of obstructing ceasefire talks – never mind that a ceasefire on Hamas and Iran’s terms would amount to Israeli capitulation. It has restrained any Israeli attempt to impose cost on Iran in Lebanon. It has accused Israel of reckless escalation for any strategically creative offensive action. It has lifted sanctions on Iran and threatened to impose them on Israel. Most egregiously, it has insisted upon a fantastical two-state solution, ignoring the reality that the structure of Palestinian sovereignty the U.S. sponsored through the Oslo Accords, and the subsequent decay of Palestinian political authority into corrupt mafia-esque autocracy, guarantees a Hamas takeover of the West Bank if a State of Palestine is created today.

It is almost as if senior American policymakers see Iran as a reasonable actor drawn into a crisis beyond its control, and Israel as a bloodthirsty tyrannical regime. Never mind that the former country executes citizens for homosexuality and beats women to death for refusing to wear the hijab, while the latter holds regular elections and has a quintessentially democratic domestic political debate.

At this point, Israel has eliminated the threat from Hamas, while Ukraine has fought Russia to a bloody standstill. Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah—destroy communications, decapitate leadership, and neutralize enemy offensive capability—is working despite the Biden administration’s opposition. There is still time for the U.S. to recover strategically.

via www.realcleardefense.com

Seth Cropsey.

The Truth About Amber Thurman’s Death - WSJ

Gov. Tim Walz dodged a question about Minnesota’s permissive abortion statute at last week’s debate by repeating a story about Georgia’s restrictive one. He brought up the case of Amber Thurman, 28, of Atlanta, who “had to travel a long distance to North Carolina to try and get her care” because Georgia prohibits abortion after six weeks. “Amber Thurman died in that journey back and forth,” Mr. Walz said.

His source was an article by Kavitha Surana of ProPublica. Ms. Surana reports that in August 2022, nine weeks pregnant with twins, Thurman made an appointment at a North Carolina clinic for a dilation-and-curettage procedure, or D&C, a surgical abortion. She drove there, arrived late, and was given mifepristone and misoprostol instead. After taking the first pill, she “insisted on driving home before any symptoms started.”

Days later, after vomiting and passing out at home, Thurman was taken to a suburban Atlanta hospital, where she reported a tender abdomen. Doctors noted a foul odor during a pelvic exam, and an ultrasound showed possible tissue in her uterus. Thurman needed a D&C, but according to Ms. Surana, the state had “criminalized” that procedure, “with few exceptions,” and practitioners who performed it risked “up to a decade in prison.” Physicians operated some 20 hours after her admission, after diagnosing her with acute severe sepsis. She died.

In the 56th paragraph of the story, Ms. Surana acknowledges: “It is not clear from the records available why doctors waited to provide a D&C to Thurman.” Mr. Walz obviously didn’t read that far, and the article’s title is meant to give the opposite impression: “Abortion Bans Have Delayed Emergency Medical Care. In Georgia, Experts Say This Mother’s Death Was Preventable.”

via www.wsj.com

Nicholas Tomaino.

A Year Ago Today, Terrorists Stole My Son | The Free Press

My son Alon lives in an apartment in Tel Aviv with his friends. It’s not fancy, but it’s charming and warm; sometimes his little brother, Ronen, will stay there if he doesn’t want to make the journey late at night to our home north of Haifa. For more than a decade Alon has played piano, and he has an acceptance letter to Rimon School of Music. He loves to grill, but always complains to his dad that ours doesn’t work, so we bought a brand-new one a few months ago. For his twenty-third birthday this past February, everyone from around our small community came together to play music and eat hot dogs, his favorite. It’s a pretty good life.

The only problem is that my son is missing from it. We haven’t seen him for a year. 

On the morning of October 7, 2023, my son was at the Nova Music Festival. When Hamas terrorists invaded Israel, he hid in a bomb shelter with 27 people. Sixteen of them were murdered. Seven survived after hiding for six hours under a pile of bodies. Four were taken hostage: Or Levy, Eliya Cohen, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, and my son, Alon Ohel. 

via www.thefp.com

Read this if you can bear to. Stand with Israel.

Should the Tijuana River Valley be the next Superfund site in Southern California? – San Diego Union-Tribune

Christopher Harris still remembers the melted rubber soles of a Border Patrol officer’s work boots from a few years ago.

“They were brand new,” Harris, a retired Border Patrol agent who worked in San Diego for more than two decades, said Thursday. “He brought me his boots (after chasing illegal crossers somewhere in the Tijuana River Valley) and said, ‘I just went into this puddle of sludge and water and immediately noticed my feet were burning.’”

Other agents reported suffering blisters, red splotches and chemical burns after coming in contact with cross-border pollution. But these reports aren’t new. More than six years ago, water-quality testing conducted by U.S. Customs and Border Protection in the canyons that empty into the river valley found all sorts of hazardous chemicals, such as the banned pesticide DDT and hexavalent chromium, the most toxic form of the metal chromium.

“It’s not just sewage; it’s horrendous chemicals, too,” Harris said.

He and others think something big needs to be done to cleanse the river valley of years of pollution flowing from Mexico into the U.S. through the lower Tijuana River: designating the area a Superfund site.

Should it be named one? Would it qualify? The San Diego County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday is expected to consider whether to petition the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to inspect the Tijuana River Valley and determine if it qualifies for federal assistance to clean it.

via www.sandiegouniontribune.com

Long overdue, I'd say.

Anti-Israel Professor’s Firing Sets ‘Very Dangerous Precedent’ | The Free Press

But in the end, it was what Finkelstein shared on her Instagram Stories account—not what she actually said or wrote—that led to her termination: a seven-line tweet from January by Palestinian American performance poet Remi Kanazi that bashed Zionists. “Why should those genocide loving fascists be treated any different than any other flat out racist,” Kanazi wrote. “Don’t normalize Zionism. Don’t normalize Zionists taking up space.”

After an anonymous student screenshotted Finkelstein’s temporary post, alumni renewed their effort to remove Finkelstein. In January, Muhlenberg suspended her, and in May she was fired. 

It was the first time since Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, as The Intercept reported last week, that a tenured professor had been fired for “pro-Palestine speech.” (Finkelstein has appealed her firing and is still being paid by the college, although she’s not teaching.)

The Kanazi tweet was misleading and histrionic: The death and destruction in Gaza, however horrible they may be, do not amount to “genocide.” Since 1967, when Israel took the strip from Egypt—which previously occupied it—the population has jumped from 117,000 to 801,000 today. And the multiracial, multiethnic Israelis—with a democratically elected Knesset and independent judiciary and media—are hardly “fascists.” 

But that is beside the point. It was a social media post, an opinion, and Finkelstein had every right to broadcast it to her 4,000 or so followers.

Muhlenberg firing her was “about controlling speech and shutting down dissent, and it sets a very dangerous precedent,” Finkelstein told me when we spoke earlier this week.

via www.thefp.com

It is a dangerous precedent. I wonder if Finkelstein was represented by a lawyer and if so who she was. In any event, she should sue Muhlenberg College if possible. She's young -- 45 -- and could secure a substantial settlement.

NotebookLM is scary good if limited for now

You should check out Google's NotebookLM, in particular its podcast creation feature. I gave it two assignments, the first a general discussion of Schopenhauer's philosophy, and the second, my wildly popular and earth-shattering, and in all fairness mildly interesting article The Web of Law, to summarize and discuss in a podcast format. The language model chews over the documents you provide (including any podcasts, videos, etc. as well as docs and pdfs you have uploaded) and then spits out an 8 minute or so discussion by two articulate, artificial Gen X or Z types of the topics. For Schopenhauer I gave it his Wikipedia page and two long internet encyclopedia articles, and for my article I gave it my article.

The results were remarkable though not terribly thorough analyses of both. The psychological impact of hearing your thoughts discussed by two smart sounding individuals, even though they don't really exist, was striking to me. It was a new way to get a dopamine hit. On reflection, however, I thought its discussion of my article missed some of its profound insights (or if you insist, its fair points). Still, their discussion was brief, kinda funny, and made at least some of the points I made in the article. There was a fair amount of verbal padding to keep the discussion moving, but it did actually, you know, keep the discussion moving.

The discussion of Schopenhauer focused on the key point of the Will in S's philosophy, which is fair enough. It began with a discussion of how S was a big supporter of animal rights and loved his poodles, as well as neglecting some notorious examples of S's misanthropy, as if in an attempt to convince a young, skeptical audience that it was ok to learn something of this philosopher. There was little about S's relationship to Kant or to later thinkers or artists. A lot of emphasis on S's love of music and the legitimacy of aesthetic experience, which is fair. All in all, a decent 8 minute introduction for non-major undergraduates, I'd say.

But remember, this is just a machine doing this! And it's new. If students did these podcasts as an assignment, I'd give them a B, which is not bad. These applications will get better over coming years. Heck, over coming months, the way things are going. Presumably, NotebookLM could produce an equally informed discussion about whatever horribly complicated topic in fluid mechanics or plant genetics you are qualified to judge and not just the soft social sciencey topics I came up with. If we don't blow ourselves up or go full socialist, this sort of model or whatever you want to call it, will likely become a powerful tool and imaginably even intelligent companions in years to come.

Are the Gospels Mythical? by Rene Girard | Articles | First Things

From the earliest days of Christianity, the Gospels’ resemblance to certain myths has been used as an argument against Christian faith. When pagan apologists for the official pantheism of the Roman empire denied that the death-and-resurrection myth of Jesus differed in any significant way from the myths of Dionysus, Osiris, Adonis, Attis, etc., they failed to stem the rising Christian tide. In the last two hundred years, however, as anthropologists have discovered all over the world foundational myths that similarly resemble Jesus’s Passion and Resurrection, the notion of Christianity as a myth seems at last to have taken hold—even among Christian believers.

Beginning with some violent cosmic or social crisis, and culminating in the suffering of a mysterious victim (often at the hands of a furious mob), all these myths conclude with the triumphal return of the sufferer, thereby revealed as a divinity. The kind of anthropological research undertaken before World War II—in which theorists struggled to account for resemblances among myths—is regarded as a hopeless “metaphysical” failure by most anthropologists nowadays. Its failure seems, however, not to have weakened anthropology’s skeptical scientific spirit, but only to have weakened further, in some mysterious way, the plausibility of the dogmatic claims of religion that the earlier theorists had hoped to supersede: if science itself cannot formulate universal truths of human nature, then religion—as manifestly inferior to science—must be even more devalued than we had supposed.

This is the contemporary intellectual situation Christian thinkers face as they read the Scriptures. The Cross is incomparable insofar as its victim is the Son of God, but in every other respect it is a human event. An analysis of that event—exploring the anthropological aspects of the Passion that we cannot neglect if we take the dogma of the Incarnation seriously—not only reveals the falsity of contemporary anthropology’s skepticism about human nature. It also utterly discredits the notion that Christianity is in any sense mythological. The world’s myths do not reveal a way to interpret the Gospels, but exactly the reverse: the Gospels reveal to us the way to interpret myth.

via www.firstthings.com

A classic magazine essay from 1996. Rene Girard has always seemed one of those inaccessible French intellectuals, interesting but obscure. Both are evident here. But Girard is far more intelligible than many of his contemporaries and his analysis of mimesis is insightful and disturbing. He has influenced the likes of Peter Thiel and J.D. Vance FWIW.

Clint Eastwood’s Law by Matthew Schmitz | Articles | First Things

Eastwood’s rejection of liberal sentimentalism and hatred of bureaucracy have led conservatives to celebrate his work and to overestimate his agreements with them. In an essay on Eastwood published in Commentary in 1984, the film critic Richard Grenier connected “the extraordinary reluctance of many on the Left to use U.S. military power anywhere in the world, even in self-defense,” with liberal opposition to “harsh penalties” for criminals. Eastwood’s films, he went on to say, suggested that the star “has never had the slightest doubt as to the legitimacy of the use of force in the service of justice.”

Writing in the same magazine ten years later, Grenier concluded that somewhere along the line, Eastwood had succumbed to political correctness. One of his complaints was that Eastwood’s character in In the Line of Fire (1993) had spoken to a CIA agent insultingly: “What are you up to now? Running coke for the Contras? Running arms for Iran?”

But Eastwood had not changed. His suspicion of large institutions had always been directed not only against those staffed by liberal lawyers, but also against the police, the military, and the intelligence agencies. Police malfeasance was a prominent theme in Magnum Force (1973) and The Gauntlet (1977). The Eiger Sanction (1975), a cynical espionage thriller, presented the U.S. as no better than its unnamed opponent. The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), one of Eastwood’s finest films, presents men in uniform as villains, except insofar as they disregard orders.

via www.firstthings.com

This is a good, brief essay. Read the whole thing if you've got time.

Tropical Storm Milton expected to make landfall in Florida as major hurricane

Tropical Storm Milton is likely to make landfall as a major hurricane on Florida’s already storm-battered west coast by midweek, federal forecasters said Sunday.

The National Hurricane Center said Milton was rapidly evolving into “an intense hurricane with multiple life-threatening hazards” for the coastline.

Gov. Ron DeSantis said in a news briefing Sunday that Milton is expected to make landfall in Hillsborough or Pinellas counties Wednesday evening.

via www.nbcnews.com

Well this is not good.

Overlooked Debate Moment: Vance Sets Fuse to Anti-Catholic Bigotry Issue | @amacforamerica

In an obviously planned and shrewd political maneuver in front of a national primetime audience of more than 43 million, Vance was capping off a series of events from the prior week such as the startling news that Harris would not attend the legendary Al Smith charity dinner hosted by the Archdiocese of New York (which led to talk of a staff shakeup over the campaign’s blunder), social media posts from Donald Trump detailing several anti-Catholic allegations against Harris, a widely-viewed interview in which House Speaker Newt Gingrich charged that Harris is the most anti-Catholic presidential candidate in 150 years, and a TV ad shown in five crucial Senate races that actually takes two minutes of airtime to catalogue a series of moves by Senate Democrat candidates against Catholics.

The explosiveness of the issue—although it has never been understood by the GOP consultant class—is obvious enough from a mere look at the number of Catholics in battleground states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia, a state whose city of Savannah has the largest St. Patrick’s Day parade nationally outside of New York and Chicago, and that is not to mention the size of the Hispanic population in those states, more than one million in Pennsylvania and Georgia, 550,000 in Michigan, 430,000 in Wisconsin, and 2.3 million in Arizona.

The play here is starkly obvious. Many Hispanics, who are devout churchgoers, are also voters, but are unaware of the Democrat Party’s record on anti-Catholicism. For that reason, for example, the Super PAC ad against Democrat Senate candidates played a Spanish language version on Latino television in Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Even more pointedly, the ads mention at the end how Hispanics have a strong recollection of the persecution of the church by socialist governments. “Latino American families remember—Latino Americans remember—how evil governments in Mexico, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela hated the Church and Catholics, and how they persecuted priests, nuns, and laypeople,” the ad states. “Latino Americans know from history that this must not happen here in America.”

via amac.us

This seems right to me.

Schrodinger's Election - by Glenn Harlan Reynolds

We’re not hearing much about the urgency or sanctity of voting, weirdly, with less than a month until the election.  If people aren’t able to vote in large areas, will the North Carolina legislature fail to certify its results?  Might a Republican House refuse to certify North Carolina results if large areas of the state were disenfranchised?  There’s real potential for drama there.

Or maybe voters elsewhere in North Carolina or Georgia, angry that their state seems to have been shortchanged by federal relief efforts, will vote for Trump as a response.  It’s even possible that Virginia, a likely-Harris state that’s adjacent to North Carolina and has had some damage itself, will respond unfavorably to the lousy treatment of their neighboring state.

On the other hand, there will be an uncertain, but possibly large, amount of cheating, almost entirely in favor of Harris, in a number of swing states.  That could swing the balance too.

It's possible to build up all sorts of entirely plausible stories leading to a Trump or Harris victory.  It’s also impossible to tell which ones are right at this point.  And with a month to go, who knows what will happen next in this crazy season that might tip the balance?  Aliens?

Well, pundits and pollsters make their livings by predicting things – and pay little price for being wrong – which encourages them to make predictions, even wrong ones, to satisfy their audiences.  But for the rest of us, none of the stories really matter.

If you’re a Trump supporter and you expect Trump to win, that’s no reason to slack off.  If it’s not close, they can’t cheat, as Hugh Hewitt once said in a book by the same title.  And the bigger the margin, the more Trump can do when in office.  If you expect Trump to lose, though,  that’s still no reason to slack off.  The closer the margin the better, even if he loses, and the more down-ticket candidates elected the better in terms of restraining whatever nightmarish policies the Harris administration produces.  We’ll know soon enough.

via instapundit.substack.com

I feel Glenn's pain. It's time to practice stoicism overtime, me thinks. Anything can indeed happen and many of the possible consequences are bad, and some of them dire. Time to focus on the things you can control.

Nvidia CEO: Demand for Blackwell AI chip is 'insane'

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in an interview with CNBC’s “Closing Bell Overtime” that demand for the company’s next-generation artificial intelligence chip Blackwell is “insane.”

“Everybody wants to have the most and everybody wants to be first,” Huang said during the interview, which aired on Wednesday. Shares of Nvidia were up about 3% on Thursday morning.

Blackwell, expected to cost between $30,000 and $40,000 per unit, is in hot demand from companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta and other firms building AI data centers to power products like ChatGPT and Copilot.

via www.cnbc.com

I still believe in Nvidia and I'm a Huang fan boy. So sue me. Everything could fall apart and we could all end up nursing our radiation poisoning until we die miserably, but somewhat more likely I hope is prospering in the future AI, well, not utopia but pretty-good-topia. If it's the latter, I bet Nvidia will have provided a lot of the chips.

There’s a New Hit Podcast That Will Blow Your Mind - WSJ

This experimental audio feature released last month by Google is not just some toy or another tantalizing piece of technology with approximately zero practical value. 

It’s one of the most compelling and completely flabbergasting demonstrations of AI’s potential yet. 

“A lot of the feedback we get from users and businesses for AI products is basically: That’s cool, but is it useful, and is it easy to use?” said Kelly Schaefer, a product director in Google Labs. 

This one is definitely cool, but it’s also useful and easy to use. All you need to do is drag a file, drop a link or dump text into a free tool called NotebookLM, which can take any chunk of information and make it an entertaining, accessible conversation. 

Google calls it an “audio overview.” You would just call it a podcast. 

One of the coolest, most useful parts is that it makes podcasts out of stuff that nobody would ever confuse for scintillating podcast material. 

via www.wsj.com

The American Guns That Mexican Cartels Covet: A Visual Guide - WSJ

Mexico is engulfed in a wave of criminal violence and disputes between rival drug gangs. U.S. weapons are fueling the bloodbath, Mexican authorities say. 

Cartels are increasingly arming themselves with more powerful weapons, as they push to outgun rivals and Mexican police, according to U.S. military estimates and security experts. In the northwestern Mexican state of Sinaloa, two factions of the Sinaloa Cartel are using heavy weapons in a turf war for control of the smuggling of fentanyl and other drugs to the U.S., Mexican authorities say. More than 100 people have been killed in the conflict sparked by the abduction of Sinaloa Cartel patriarch Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada. He is now awaiting trial in the U.S. on drug-trafficking charges.  

via www.wsj.com

Some nice drawings of some cool guns. But they're bad.