The Right Coast

‘This Has Been Going on for Years.’ Inside Boeing’s Manufacturing Mess. - WSJ

The Alaska accident is the latest in a string of quality problems at Boeing, whose engineering prowess created the 747 that helped usher in the global jet age. The company’s reputation has suffered from a pair of fatal 737 MAX 8 crashes in 2018 and 2019 that grounded hundreds of jets for nearly two years. More recently, Boeing has been dogged by issues with various models—misdrilled holes, loose rudder bolts, and this month’s MAX 9 door-plug blowout—lapses the company failed to catch.

via www.wsj.com

Behind the Turmoil in Ecuador | Compact Mag

A little more than a month into the presidency of Daniel Noboa, Ecuador has descended into chaos. The triggering event was the daring escape from prison of José Adolfo Macías Villamar, head of the Choneros, the country’s most notorious drug-trafficking gang. In response, the newly elected president declared a nationwide manhunt and a 60-day state of emergency. By the following day, firefights and prison riots had erupted around the country, with armed men kidnapping, live on air, the anchors of one of the most important television stations.

A peaceful country not long ago, Ecuador has taken a turn for the worse in recent years, with homicides surging to 26 per 100,000 last year, up from around 7 per 100,000 in 2020. Since the end of the pandemic, the country has fallen victim to a broader restructuring in the international drug trade. The collapse in the price of coca—the raw crop used to make cocaine—in neighboring Colombia has seemingly made exporting cocaine out of Ecuador more attractive. At the same time, the growing popularity in the United States of synthetic drugs like fentanyl has stoked competition among traffickers for routes to more lucrative cocaine markets across the Pacific.

via compactmag.com

Juan David Rojas.

Crime and History | City Journal

About 40 years ago, Michael Janofsky, a Miami-based newspaper reporter, was applying for a job at the New York Times. His final interview was with Abe Rosenthal, the paper’s legendary but imperious editor. Rosenthal asked the young man if he had any questions. Adam Nagourney, in his wonderful recent book The Times, picks up the story:

“I’m curious,” Janofsky responded. . . . “The paper has so many reporters filing stories from so many places around the world. How do you decide each day what readers are interested in reading on the front page?”

Rosenthal did not pause. “We tell them what they should be interested in,” he said.

Gallup has just released a poll showing that 63 percent of Americans regard our current crime problem as “serious” or “extremely serious.” Activist academics and mass incarceration scholars want to change that. They want the public to be interested, instead, in systemic racism, and in making the sacrifices they say are necessary for racial justice. Whether their stance is cynical or smug is up for interpretation; but it is certainly au courant.

via www.city-journal.org

John McMillian.

Middle Class Niceties Are Vanishing As Fast As The Middle Class

I grew up in an unspoiled little hamlet just north of Santa Monica called Pacific Palisades. In the mid-1970s, it was unfashionable, a vintage backwater frozen in time. The main drag was lined with mom-and-pop stores, greasy spoons, and geriatric clothing shops that sold frilly nightgowns and polyester golf pants. The hippest café in town was Baskin Robbins. It was Mayberry by the Sea. My parents had only been married a few years when they scraped together a down payment on a 1,300-square-foot, three-bedroom, single-story ranch house that cost something like $40,000 in mid-1970s dollars. 

Our next-door neighbor was a Mexican-American LAPD officer married to a white lady named Linda, who chain-smoked Pall Malls and barked at her kids from a Barcalounger.

My local preschool was run by kindly grandmas. They would make you open your mouth and say “ahhh” when you walked in the door and look in your throat with a flashlight each morning to make sure you weren’t sick. 

Once, the town was abuzz over the grand opening of a brand-new upscale grocery store. My mother, bless her heart, took me to the ribbon-cutting ceremony. What we didn’t know was that Gelson’s Market moving into town marked the beginning of the end. Now Ben Affleck sends his kids to my old preschool. The mom-and-pop stores on Main Street got torn down a few years ago, along with Baskin Robbins, so that billionaire developer Rick Caruso could build another gleaming Southern California outdoor mall like the Grove and the Americana. The old main drag is now filled with super-luxury stores I can’t afford to shop in or even park near. 

via thefederalist.com

Peachy Keenan.

You could try Boise, Idaho, but it's not the same. Parts of Utah surely, but the small towns are largely LDS. My wife grew up in New Canaan, CT. They sold her parents' house years ago. The buyers scraped it and build at 10,000 sq. ft. monstrosity on the lot. So yeah, it's going, going, gone I'm afraid.

The ‘Chicago Rat Hole’ Is the City’s Latest Tourist Spot - The New York Times

Winslow Dumaine was heading to a store on Chicago’s North Side when he saw it: a hole in the sidewalk on Roscoe Street with an uncanny resemblance to a rodent.

Mr. Dumaine, who is an artist and comedian, said the hole represented two themes often present in his work: morbidity and whimsy.

“Had to make a pilgrimage to the Chicago Rat Hole,” he wrote in a social media post this month, including a close-up photo of the concrete cutout.

The post, which has since been viewed five million times, inspired an untold number of Chicagoans to make their own excursions to a quiet residential area of Roscoe Village, a neighborhood known for its cozy taverns, independent boutiques and old-fashioned bakeries.

People have started making offerings to the mysterious, fat-rat-size crevice: candles, coins, flowers, a small tomb with a photo of a rat, and a bag of cinnamon rolls from Ann Sather, the beloved Chicago restaurant chain.

via www.nytimes.com

Alrighty then.

Employers’ Talking “About Race—Any Race—With a Constant Drumbeat of Essentialist, Deterministic, and Negative Language” Risks Racial Harassment Liability

An excerpt from De Piero v. Penn. State. Univ., decided Thursday by Judge Wendy Beetlestone (E.D. Pa.) (there are also other legal theories that the court rejects, which you can see discussed in the full opinion):

{De Piero{, a white man,} [argues] that his department's discussions of "antiracism," "white supremacy," "white privilege," and other concepts relating to discussions of race on campus, all of which "repeatedly singl[ed] out and demean[ed] faculty members on the basis of race," subjected him to a hostile work environment.} De Piero … began working at Penn State Abington as a non-tenure-track Assistant Teaching Professor of English and Composition in 2018. Penn State Abington holds itself out as "the most diverse campus within" the Penn State system "and the only majority minority campus." …

via reason.com

Eugene Volokh.

Lab Leak Is Not a Conspiracy Theory, Anthony Fauci Concedes

In recent months, Fauci has denied he ever categorically rejected the possibility that COVID-19 accidentally escaped from a laboratory. But he faces very serious allegations that he deterred scientific experts from considering it. At issue is "The Proximal Origin of Sars-CoV-2," a paper that appeared in Nature Medicine, a scientific journal, in March 2020 at the very start of the global pandemic. Fauci—who was then head of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID)—and Francis Collins—then director of the National Institutes of Health—participated in a conference call with the authors, whose initial openness to a lab leak explanation changed significantly prior to publication. The paper ultimately ruled out a lab leak as not just "unlikely"—the phrasing used in an early draft of the paper—but "improbable."

More recently, Fauci has contended that he always remained open to the idea, but was persuaded by scientific arguments—including those in the proximal origin paper—that a zoonotic spillover was more likely. This claim would be more persuasive if Fauci had not stated over and over and over and over again, in media interviews, that he "strongly favored" the zoonotic origin theory; his subsequent suggestion that he did not lean in either direction is flatly contradicted by his literal words.

via reason.com

Fauci isn't even funny anymore.

Robby Soave.

Local vs. National Politics in the Iowa Caucuses | City Journal

This year, many of Donald Trump’s challengers have gone the retail-politics route. Perhaps most prominently, Florida governor Ron DeSantis has focused his campaign on Iowa, completing the “full Grassley” (named after the state’s senior Republican senator) by holding an event in every county in the state. He has rallied the traditional kingmakers of Iowa politics, securing endorsements from many state legislators as well as prominent evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats, who has backed every Iowa winner since 2008. DeSantis has also won the coveted endorsement of the popular Republican governor, Kim Reynolds.

Conversely, Trump has spurned retail politics in Iowa and other states. He has often been absent from the campaign trail and has refused to participate in primary debates. The former president is instead betting on a national strategy. Though he often positions himself against “the swamp,” Trump enjoys the overwhelming support of Republicans elected to serve in Washington, D.C., including more than 100 Republican House members, and many senators, too. (DeSantis boasts a handful of endorsements in the House and none in the Senate; Nikki Haley has just one House endorsement.)

This asymmetry in endorsements highlights a difference in the temperament of state Republican politics compared with that of the national GOP. The national media’s incentives for florid drama count for less in many state and local races. In state capitols, Republican legislators and governors have compiled robust governing records, and they know that voters will punish them for paralysis. In Iowa, Reynolds signed ambitious bills expanding school choice, cutting taxes, and restricting abortion. In Florida, DeSantis has been the architect of transformative efforts on education, the environment, gun rights, taxes, and workforce development.

via www.city-journal.org

Fred Bauer.

China Failed to Sway Taiwan’s Election. What Happens Now? - The New York Times

China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has tied his country’s great power status to a singular promise: unifying the motherland with Taiwan, which the Chinese Communist Party sees as sacred, lost territory. A few weeks ago, Mr. Xi called this a “historical inevitability.”

But Taiwan’s election on Saturday, handing the presidency to a party that promotes the island’s separate identity for the third time in a row, confirmed that this boisterous democracy has moved even further away from China and its dream of unification.

After a campaign of festival-like rallies, where huge crowds shouted, danced and waved matching flags, Taiwan’s voters ignored China’s warnings that a vote for the Democratic Progressive Party was a vote for war. They made that choice anyway.

via www.nytimes.com

Those darn Taiwanese. Acting like they like democracy or something. As humans will do.

Where Does the Race Stand Now? - by William Otis

Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley are the two left now. In my view, either would make a fine President, certainly by recent standards. Both seem like traditional smaller government, law-and-order, fiscal sanity, control-the-border, pride-in-America conservatives. But one of the main arguments for nominating one of them instead of The Donald is strictly pragmatic: They don’t have anything like Trump’s gargantuan baggage and therefore offer a better chance of winning in November. Indeed, so the argument has often gone, Trump is the only serious potential candidate decrepit Joe has a realistic chance of beating.

Recent developments present good news and bad news. The good news is that Biden is indeed in big trouble. The bad news is that precisely this trouble undermines the pragmatic argument for someone other than Trump. Particularly noteworthy was this story from none other than CNN about how a Trump v. Biden race would come out today:

via ringsideatthereckoning.substack.com

Iowa caucuses: What to watch if Haley or DeSantis are to pull off upset over Trump - Washington Examiner

If Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley are to thwart former President Donald Trump in the Jan. 15 Iowa caucuses, they’ll have to win over key counties that Trump lost in his first White House run.

Republican pollsters and political experts told the Washington Examiner that a possible pathway to stop Trump runs through Johnson County, home to a more moderate wing of the Republican Party, the Des Moines and Cedar Rapids suburbs, along with the rural and evangelical counties in northwest and southeast Iowa. 

Those counties mostly bucked Trump during his 2016 presidential run when he wasn’t an incumbent president, handing Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) a win during the Iowa caucuses.

But Trump has learned from his past campaign and is banking on an overwhelming win that deters rivals from remaining in the race.

via www.washingtonexaminer.com

How the AHA Killed Viewpoint-Neutral Teaching — The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal

Historians—and, indeed, professors as a whole—have never in practice engaged in any substantial professional self-regulation. The AHA now has adopted in its professional standards a conception of history that makes it difficult or impossible even in theory to adopt any meaningful conception of professional self-regulation. For want of a better alternative, America’s citizens and policymakers must take on the job of regulating university professors’ conduct.

California has an electrical code, as it has a code for plumbing and for fire. It has a Contractors State License Board that can take complaints for misbehavior. We possess government means to regulate craftsmen for failing to follow the standards of their trade. A profession that refuses to engage in the basic professional task of self-regulation deserves to be treated no better. Let the states establish a University Faculty Code, with means of complaint to state authorities—and, ideally, recourse to private rights of action.

Mortal minds may not be able to aspire to omniscience, but they can aspire to minimum professional standards. If they refuse to do so, then they will have to accept regulation as craftsmen.

via www.jamesgmartin.center

Anthony Fauci Fesses Up - WSJ

It’s not news that the six-feet rule lacked scientific rhyme or reason. A BMJ article in August 2020 explained as much. It noted that the virus’s transmissibility depends on many factors, including ventilation, the host’s viral load and symptoms, and the duration of exposure, among other things.

Officials nonetheless promoted the arbitrary rule because they didn’t trust Americans to understand scientific nuance or, for that matter, anything. Businesses, churches and schools that weren’t forced to close had to spend money reconfiguring their operations to comply with these government guidelines.

It’s nice of Dr. Fauci to acknowledge now that the rule lacked a scientific basis. But at the time he and other officials didn’t want to acknowledge this lest the public question other Covid nostrums. Dr. Fauci had already undermined public trust by confessing that his advice not to wear a mask early in the pandemic was guided by political expedience.

Dr. Fauci also told the House that vaccine mandates “could increase vaccine hesitancy in the future,” according to Chairman Brad Wenstrup. Yes, it may, as we warned when President Biden imposed his vaccine mandates. Yet Dr. Fauci insisted that making life difficult for unvaccinated Americans would compel them to fall into line.

Making life difficult may have also been the point of the six-feet rule. Officials effectively forced businesses and schools to close by making it exceedingly burdensome to stay open, all the while dodging responsibility.

“Show me a school that I shut down and show me a factory that I shut down,” Dr. Fauci told the

New York Times

last April. “Never. I never did. I gave a public-health recommendation that echoed the C.D.C.’s recommendation, and people made a decision based on that.” He’s too modest. He knows his recommendations, backed by a conformist press, put pressure on politicians to agree with him.

Government lockdowns caused enormous economic and social damage that may never be made up. It will also be hard for health officials to recoup the public trust they squandered with their hubris and prevarications.

via www.wsj.com

Just because I repost something doesn't mean I agree with it. But in this case, I do.

Davos and the Rise of Mistrust - WSJ

Along the way, Mr. Schwab seems to have played a role in changing business behavior. One can make a strong case that the “stakeholder” nonsense he promotes helped inspire the insufferable corporate fad in which every product in your shopping cart had to express an opinion.

But what does Mr. Schwab actually know about serving markets? When it comes to understanding the needs of customers and building a business, let’s just say that Klaus Schwab is no

Charles Schwab

.

To be fair, Klaus Schwab’s official biography makes clear that he has managed to accumulate a wealth of honors, awards, titles and credentials along the way. What would we do without experts?

But one can’t help but wonder if the rise of mistrust in large institutions that he bemoans is directly related to big businesses taking on political and social agendas. Polling indeed shows a great deal of mistrust in large organizations, including government agencies. This is in contrast to the large degree of trust people continue to place in that great American institution known as small business.

Let’s hope that corporate CEOs resolve to run their companies less like politicians and more like proprietors.

via www.wsj.com

I wonder if Klaus's biography touches on his father's unique contribution to world history. The internet has been well-scrubbed, but you can find it.

This sensible op-ed is by James Freeman.

Why The Culture War Matters | Matthew Goodwin

via www.youtube.com

Mathew Goodwin is great.

New brain virus

via www.youtube.com

Well this is just great. I sure hope those pesky CCP boffins get some really interesting papers out of it. Of course if it leaks out, we can always pretend it was just a pangolin getting cozy with bat who turned up in a pot of soup or something. Please note: I am not criticizing Chinese people for putting the future of humanity at risk. We here in the US like to do that to, after all, as Fauci, Danzak, Baric, etc. show. Just sayin'.

Biden's "Targeted" Houthi Strikes Are Just Buying Time | Frontpage Mag

After delaying for as long as possible, Biden went ahead and finally approved strikes on Houthi targets over the Iranian-backed terror group’s attacks on container ships and US Navy vessels.

Biden’s statement took care to emphasize that these were “strikes against a number of targets in Yemen used by Houthi rebels to endanger freedom of navigation in one of the world’s most vital waterways.”

The statement describes them as “targeted strikes” that reportedly hit Houthi radar sites, weapons depots, production facilities and launch systems with the goal of preventing the Houthis from launching attacks on shipping.

This sounds sensible, but it’s also containment. And very temporary at that. Rather than trying to significantly cripple Houthi abilities, these attacks are geared to keeping the Houthis from attacking ships… right now. What happens later comes… later.

The Biden calculus is to do the bare minimum to stop the attacks for the moment.

Will that succeed? I suspect it won’t. Iran and the Houthis were prepared for attacks like these and their capacity will diminish but I suspect that there will be more attacks on shipping before long.

via www.frontpagemag.com

Trump’s Hold on Rural America Is Key to His Resilience - WSJ

GARNER, Iowa—Republican voters in Hancock County largely rejected Donald Trump eight years ago, giving him less than a fifth of the vote in the GOP caucuses. As recently as a year ago, some party faithful here and elsewhere in Iowa seemed eager to move on, saying they were tired of the former president’s chaos and liabilities.

Now Trump appears poised to win this county Monday and claim victory in Iowa’s caucuses, powered largely by his overwhelming support among rural voters who see him as the best candidate to advance a populist conservative agenda. That pattern has played out in similar places across the country, helping explain why Trump has a hold over the Republican Party and is the nomination front-runner.

Trump arrives at the caucuses that kick off 2024 nominating contests with baggage that would likely stop any other politician. He faces 91 criminal charges related to everything from his handling of classified documents to efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. He has used language that echoes Adolf Hitler. And he led his party to election losses in 2018, 2020 and 2022.

In Hancock County, none of that matters to many GOP voters. The fact that so many damning allegations against Trump have been aired is a strength, they say, because it suggests he’s unlikely to be derailed by a new tarnishing revelation. Many GOP voters here think Trump is most likely to achieve their ultimate goal—defeating President Biden—because he is a proven commodity and ties or beats the incumbent in general election polls.

via www.wsj.com

Professor Quits Because Some Students Have Bad Beliefs

Now perhaps his reasoning was something like this: I had a job in the business world that paid me very well. I took a pay cut to work at MIT, because I was excited about sharing knowledge with the younger generation. (I'm just guessing at this, but so far it's consistent with what many people do.) But now that I see how awful some members of the younger generation are, the costs and benefits of an MIT job come out the other way. I'll just go back into the private sector, and if some bad people profit from what I do for them, at least I'll be making really good money doing that.

Yet even that would strike me as odd. If one finds joy in helping pass along the aggregate knowledge of mankind, does it really make sense to sour on that just because some small fraction of the students are morally benighted? Again, if that's indeed his personal choice, I don't begrudge him whatever reason for what is, after all, a decision about his own career. But it's just not the sort of choice that strikes me as likely to be common, or to tell us much about how to organize a modern university.

via reason.com

Eugene Volokh.

I see Eugene's point but I think it's a matter of degree. I can see why a professor would grow disillusioned if the prevailing opinions of his students grew so bad that he just didn't want to be around it anymore. This seems to be the situation at MIT, where just being a Jew, let alone an Israeli, makes one a target for hate and vitriol. It's not a matter of the opinions of your students; it's a matter of how they behave, and students at MIT, enough of them, behave quite badly. It only takes a minority, say 10 or 20 percent of students, behaving very badly, to spoil the whole enterprise of "passing along the aggregate knowledge of mankind." Instead, you have to witness how that knowledge, so hard earned, is lost.

Lawyer for South Africa: Israel's war in Gaza is not self-defense since it is 'in occupation' of Strip | The Times of Israel

THE HAGUE — Prof. Vaughan Lowe KC lists in court the provisional measures that South Africa is requesting from the International Court of Justice.

Those include “immediately suspend[ing] its military operations in and against Gaza” and desisting from the “deprivation of access to adequate food and water.”

The measures also include humanitarian assistance for Gazans, including access to adequate fuel, shelter, clothes, hygiene and sanitation and medical supplies and assistance.

In addition, he says Israel must desist from the “destruction” of Palestinian life in Gaza.

Lowe claims that Article 51 of the UN charter permitting a country to defend itself from attack is not applicable to Israel’s war in Gaza, since, he contends, Israel remains “in occupation of Gaza” due to its control of its access points.

“Israel says it aims to destroy Hamas. But months of bombing, flattening entire residential blocks, cutting off food and water to an entire population cannot credibly be argued to be a manhunt for Hamas,” claims Lowe.

He also alleges “Israel’s apparent inability to see that it has done anything wrong in grinding Gaza and its people into the dust.”

Citing UN officials, Lowe says the suspension of Israel’s military operations is critical in enabling the provision of humanitarian relief to Palestinians in Gaza.

He also points out that no disciplinary measures have been taken against those in Israel, including government officials and Knesset members, for what South Africa’s application describes as “incitement to genocide.”

The war was sparked by the October 7 Hamas terror onslaught in which some 1,200 people in Israel were killed and approximately 240 kidnapped and held hostage in Gaza, mainly civilians.

via www.timesofisrael.com

Why Are We Using Black Box Models in AI When We Don’t Need To? A Lesson From an Explainable AI Competition · Issue 1.2, Fall 2019

In 2018, a landmark challenge in artificial intelligence (AI) took place, namely, the Explainable Machine Learning Challenge. The goal of the competition was to create a complicated black box model for the dataset and explain how it worked. One team did not follow the rules. Instead of sending in a black box, they created a model that was fully interpretable. This leads to the question of whether the real world of machine learning is similar to the Explainable Machine Learning Challenge, where black box models are used even when they are not needed. We discuss this team’s thought processes during the competition and their implications, which reach far beyond the competition itself.

via hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu

Please look at this as well.

Conservatives Revolt Over Mike Johnson’s Deal to Avert Shutdown - The New York Times

Conservatives thrust the House back into chaos on Wednesday, grinding business to a halt in protest of the spending deal Speaker Mike Johnson struck with Democrats to avert a government shutdown and leaving the funding package in limbo.

A dozen hard-line Republicans defected from the party line to tank a routine procedural measure, blocking consideration of a pair of G.O.P. bills in what amounted to a warning shot by members of the ultraconservative Freedom Caucus that they would not stand for the agreement. As the measure failed, members of the group could be seen in animated discussion with Mr. Johnson and his deputies on the House floor.

The Republican revolt underscored Mr. Johnson’s predicament in trying to steer the spending deal through the closely divided House, where it has enraged a sizable bloc of Republicans, while keeping his grip on his job. The upheaval came as it was becoming clear that Congress would most likely have to resort to yet another short-term spending patch — something Mr. Johnson had previously ruled out — to buy time to push a bipartisan deal to fund the government.

via www.nytimes.com

La Mesa heirs of Nazi-looted Pissarro painting lose legal battle to Spanish museum - The San Diego Union-Tribune

After nearly two decades of litigation that has included a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled unanimously Tuesday that a Spanish museum can keep a painting that was looted from the German Jewish family of a former La Mesa resident — though one judge expressed moral misgivings about the decision.

“Sometimes our oaths of office and an appreciation of our proper roles as appellate judges require that we concur in a result at odds with our moral compass,” Judge Consuelo Callahan wrote in a concurring opinion. “For me, this is such a situation.”

Callahan also wrote that, while not legally obligated to do so, “Spain ... should have voluntarily relinquished the Painting” in accordance with international agreements it has signed regarding the return of Nazi-confiscated art.

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Tuesday’s ruling was the latest in a winding, complex case first filed in 2005 by La Mesa resident Claude Cassirer, who died in 2010. The suit sought the return of French artist Camille Pissarro’s 1897 Impressionist masterpiece, “Rue Saint-Honoré, Après-midi, Effet de Pluie,” which by some estimates is worth more than $30 million.

via www.sandiegouniontribune.com

Glenn Greenwald & Megyn Kelly AGREE: VIVEK RAMASWAMY Is Right About January 6

via www.youtube.com

Orf vs. the Memory Hole: Anthony Fauci's Pandemic Follies

On March 9th of last year, former chief medical advisor to Joe Biden, Dr. Anthony Fauci, gave an interview to Neil Cavuto on Fox News expressing mirthful astonishment that anyone could say he pushed a zoonotic “spillover” theory for Covid-19. “That’s totally bizarre,” he said. “First of all, I wasn’t leaning totally strongly one way or the other. I’ve always kept an open mind.”

Two days later he was on CNN, telling Jim Acosta that he didn’t start off in one place or another, but was influenced by “two very important, well-written, peer reviewed papers in Science magazine strongly suggesting that in fact it was a natural occurrence from an animal to a human.” As Racket’s Matt Orfalea goes on to show above, Fauci didn’t just repudiate the substance of what he’d said about Covid’s origins across three years, but the specific language, down to the word “strongly,” dating to the beginning of the pandemic.

I’m recovering from a particularly violent bout of Covid-19, so perhaps as a vaccinated person I’m a bit frostier on the subject than one might normally be, but Orf has put together a clip I hope future historians will bother to review. It’s now clear one of the biggest, if not the biggest single sources of misinformation about the Covid-19 pandemic was Fauci himself. Incidentally, as Dr. Jay Bhattacharya just noted, Fauci just admitted the six-foot social distancing rule “just sort of appeared,” and was likely not based on any data. So there’s that.

via www.racket.news

Matt Taibbi and Matt Orfalea.

Don't watch Orf's little trip down memory lane before you try to go to sleep. It will just keep you up grinding your teeth.

Why I Quit My Dream Job at MIT | The Free Press

Over 65 percent of students from each MIT undergraduate class—or around 800 students—enroll in my Introduction to Algorithms course every year. When I looked at the names of the leaders of some of the most violent anti-Israel groups on our campus, I found a handful of my students on the list. Then I found out that one of my former teaching assistants—a bright young woman—was one of the organizers of the Coalition Against Apartheid and helped bring Mohammed El-Kurd to campus. 

I loved my job. But I realized there and then I could no longer train kids in algorithms, knowing they might one day spread this ideology even further through their advanced knowledge. I knew I could no longer be a part of a system that foments antisemitism. In late November, I sat on the ferry I used to take from MIT’s campus back home and decided that I should resign. I have worked hard throughout my professional life to have choices, so I have the luxury of acting on my principles. A few weeks later, on December 13, I handed in my resignation to the head of the department. 

My letter stated, in part: “I cannot continue teaching Algorithms to those who lack the most basic critical thinking skills or emotional intelligence. Nor can I teach those who condemn my Jewish identity or my support for Israel’s right to exist in peace with its neighbors.” 

My boss asked me to reconsider. But my mind was already made up. 

It has been one month since I’ve resigned, and for now, I’m spending a lot of time reflecting. I still have hope MIT can return to its roots—offering one of the best science and engineering educations in the world—and that the good forces can beat the bad. 

MIT’s mission is to train the next generation of leaders. But right now, I’m terrified of the thought that today’s students could lead anything in the future.

via www.thefp.com

Mauricio Karchmer.

Ukraine’s War Effort Is Stuck. This Heroic Battlefield Failure Shows Why. - WSJ

The planners of Ukraine’s counteroffensive against the country’s Russian invaders last year envisioned that elite forces, like the unit led by Capt. Anatoliy Kharchenko, would sweep in to deliver the final blows of a D-Day-like triumph. 

But by the time paratroopers in Kharchenko’s company entered the battle on a moonless night last August, the counteroffensive was already skidding toward failure—and his men were about to learn all of the deadly reasons why. 

As the company crept along the edge of a field in southeastern Ukraine, the operation’s objectives had already been severely downsized. Because the West had dithered for months over the provision of tanks and other armored vehicles, the Russians were ready. They had dug in on the flat farmland of southeastern Ukraine, laying hundreds of thousands of mines and setting up firing positions for machine guns and antitank missiles.

The first wave of Ukrainian brigades, launched in June, had barely advanced and suffered heavy losses. A switch to small, infantry assaults had been stymied as well, advancing just a short distance and seizing only one village. Now Kharchenko’s company came in not as closers, but as a final roll of the dice.

Their initial goal, assaulting a hill near the village of Verbove, was modest. But things went badly wrong within minutes. 

Just after dawn on Aug. 12, drones swept overhead as they approached the target along a line of trees between farm fields. Kharchenko’s men had been told Russian drones would be downed by Ukrainian jamming equipment and assumed they were their own. Then the drones began dropping explosives. The trees exploded with machine-gun fire. Grenades lobbed from automatic launchers burst around them. 

The platoon was incapacitated. More than half of its 20 or so men were dead or wounded within minutes, including the medic.

via www.wsj.com

Will the Supreme Court Keep Trump off the Ballot? - WSJ

As a political matter, banning Mr. Trump from the ballot is shortsighted and deeply troubling. It disenfranchises his supporters in a race that polls show him leading. It advances the rigged-system and self-grievance narratives that are catnip to his base. And it’s hypocritical insofar as it undermines democratic norms to take down someone regularly accused by opponents of undermining democratic norms. Republican backlash is inevitable.

As a legal matter, however, Mr. Trump’s situation is more complicated. The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear an appeal to last month’s 4-3 decision by the Colorado Supreme Court to exclude the former president from the state’s primary ballot on grounds that he engaged in insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021. Trump supporters believe that the high court’s conservative majority makes the case a slam-dunk in Mr. Trump’s favor. It’s likely that the justices will overturn the Colorado Supreme Court, but how they reach that decision is as important as what they decide.

That’s because the U.S. electoral system is decentralized in the extreme. Our national elections are structured on a state-by-state basis, and election laws vary. When it comes to absentee ballots, voter registration, felon disenfranchisement, same-day voting and myriad other issues, procedures vary from one state to another. Ballot access is no different, and the Supreme Court historically has tended to allow states to make their own rules.

Akhil Reed Amar, a Yale law professor and constitutional scholar, remarked in a recent podcast discussion that the court might opt for a minimalist ruling that defers to Colorado but doesn’t bind other states. It could decide that Mr. Trump was permitted to make his case for ballot access and lost, thus upholding the Colorado Supreme Court decision while still allowing other states with different ballot-access qualifications to go their own way.

What the court shouldn’t dodge, however, is its duty to provide some guidance on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, a Civil War-era provision that bars from holding public office someone who has sworn an oath to defend the Constitution and then engaged in “insurrection or rebellion.” Colorado and Maine relied on the clause to exclude Mr. Trump from the ballot, but there’s wide disagreement over what it means and how it should be applied.

via www.wsj.com

Jason Riley.

Fani Willis, Prosecutor in Trump Georgia Case, Subpoenaed to Testify in Colleague’s Divorce - WSJ

ATLANTA—Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has been subpoenaed to testify in a colleague’s divorce proceeding, according to a court filing, a development that could shed light on claims Willis and the colleague carried out an improper romantic relationship as they prosecuted former President Donald Trump and others.

via www.wsj.com

Impropriety as a way of life.

California’s Wealth Tax Arrives - WSJ

Democrats introduced the bill last winter, and it will get a hearing Wednesday in the state Assembly as lawmakers scrounge for revenue to fill a projected $68 billion budget hole. Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday will also unveil his budget for the coming year. Democratic legislators are proposing a wealth tax as an alternative to spending restraint.

The bill would impose an annual excise tax of 1.5% on the worldwide net worth of every full- and part-year California resident that exceeds $1 billion, starting this tax year. Come Jan. 1, 2026, the state would tax wealth that exceeds $50 million at a rate of 1% each year, with an additional 0.5% tax on assets valued at more than $1 billion.

Part-time residents would be taxed on a pro rata share of their wealth based on the number of days they spend annually in California. The tax would also apply to nonresidents who have recently left the state. You can check out of the state, but you would still have to pay California’s wealth tax if you do.

The wealth tax would apply to nearly all assets, including shares in a partnership, private-equity interests, artwork and financial assets held offshore. California’s Franchise Tax Board would value assets that aren’t publicly traded. That means private businesses located outside the state could be examined by the board’s auditors and appraisers.

It’s worth noting that Democrats exempted real property from the tax as a favor to their high-end real-estate industry and Hollywood donors. This carve-out would encourage the wealthy to shift more of their investments into real estate. Perhaps Democrats are trying to ameliorate the damage from local mansion taxes in San Francisco and Los Angeles on real-estate sales.

via www.wsj.com

The camel's nose is poking your wallet.

A Party of Short Sellers: Why Democrats Need to Re-Think Hunter's Contempt | Opinion - The Messenger

Oversight Committee Ranking Member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) declared this week that there "is no precedent for the U.S. House of Representatives holding a private citizen in contempt of Congress who has offered to testify in public, under oath, and on a day of the committee’s choosing.” Raskin said that Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) “repeatedly urged Hunter Biden to appear at a committee hearing, and Hunter Biden agreed” — without mentioning, of course, that Hunter set his own conditions on any appearance.

So House Democrats — all of them — are expected to oppose holding a witness in contempt for openly defying a subpoena and instead holding a defiant press conference outside the Capitol. In doing so, Raskin and his colleagues will establish that in the future, when Democrats are in control, witnesses will be able to unilaterally refuse to appear for depositions with committee staff and to dictate the conditions under which they will appear for testimony.

No impartial judge would support such an absurd claim — but it will become the position of the Democratic Party going forward.

For real short sellers, the idea is to leverage money to buy stock or shares while betting that the stock or shares will decline in value. By selling them and then buying the cheaper securities, the short seller can return the cheaper shares to the lender while pocketing the difference. Of course, the problem is when the value of the things you are selling goes up.

That is precisely what has happened to past Democratic short sells, from Senate filibusters to House impeachments. The institutional rules they sold out proved to be very valuable within a couple years, when Republicans took control — leaving them with little beyond hypocrisy in crying foul.

What is most impressive, however, is the lack of criticism by party members or the media. These were costly mistakes, but the "lenders" seem entirely comfortable with the losses; they are enabling these bad trades for a party of short sellers.

With the Biden contempt vote, Democrats once again will be asked to think beyond the political moment or the next election. At some point, the costs of shielding the Bidens from an alleged corruption scandal will become prohibitively high. And, eventually, the Democratic Party will find itself one short-sell short of political and ethical bankruptcy.

via themessenger.com

Jonathan Turley.

Boeing 737 Max 9: Airlines found loose parts in door panels during jet inspections | AP News

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Federal investigators say a door panel slid up before flying off an Alaska Airlines jetliner last week, and they are looking at whether four bolts that were supposed to help hold the panel in place might have been missing when the plane took off.

The comments Monday from the National Transportation Safety Board came shortly after Alaska and United Airlines reported separately that they found loose parts in the panels — or door plugs — of some other Boeing 737 Max 9 jets.

“Since we began preliminary inspections on Saturday, we have found instances that appear to relate to installation issues in the door plug — for example, bolts that needed additional tightening,” Chicago-based United said.

Alaska said that as it began examining its Max 9s, “Initial reports from our technicians indicate some loose hardware was visible on some aircraft.”

via apnews.com

Maybe this is why we've got all those crashed UFOs. Not that I'm suggesting they have loose doors. Probably more like their time-travel circuits are poorly calibrated.

Bill Ackman's war to make universities accountable has the left panicked

A world in which Ivy League presidents have to care what people outside their institutions think is a new world indeed and not a very welcome one to residents of the Ivy bubble.

Ackman is doubling down. With help from artificial-intelligence technology (and his extensive and well-paid research staff), he’s looking for plagiarism among university administrators and faculty, and odds are he’ll find quite a bit.

As a defensive move, the left-leaning press is trying to normalize plagiarism and stigmatize concerns about it as a “conservative weapon.” 

Sounds like it knows there’s a widespread problem.

A lot of unqualified people have been promoted in higher-education administration, but they still, at least formally, must check the traditional boxes with dissertations and publications.

Since nobody cared about the work’s quality, though, there was probably a lot of “borrowing” going on. Now it’s much easier to check such things.

So the obvious solution is to devalue plagiarism as an offense.

It was always a firing offense; it will soon be transmogrified into a mere peccadillo or even a blow against a “privileged” system.

But this is where Ackman has them trapped.

via nypost.com

And given the capabilities of AI now, I should think Ackman could run thousands of plagiarism checks almost trivially. He could probably do it completely in house. If I were a president at some university and had faked up my PhD dissertation, I would be worried. Very worried.

This is Glenn Reynolds, BTW.

'That book', the Black Nazarene, and my grown-up marriage

Third, despite “rumors” to the contrary, I think it would be naive to expect that Cardinal Fernández will resign over this brouhaha, or over other recent controversies under his tenure. 

In truth, I don’t even think there really are “Vatican rumors” that Fernández will resign, as some news outlets have suggested. I think that whole idea is a fabrication, a bit of wishful thinking by his critics. I don’t expect the cardinal will do any such thing.

But the short Fernández tenure in the DDF has thus far been rife with “misunderstandings,” as the cardinal has put it, especially as this incident comes shortly after the cardinal was forced to issue a 2,000-word press release “clarifying” Fiducia supplicans, the Dec. 18 declaration on same-sex blessings. 

It seems clear that Fernández has had a rough month. His critics argue that the cardinal has failed to appreciate the difficulty of the office he possesses, and has been unprepared to deal with the controversy he’s generated. 

At this writing, Fernández is at something of a juncture. He’ll either say “damn the torpedoes,” and continue as if his dicastery isn’t facing new crises each week, or the challenges of the last month will impact his leadership approach and style, or the pace with which he addresses matters of global importance.

via www.pillarcatholic.com

The Pillar is the thing to read if you want to keep up with what's going on at the Vatican, assuming you can stand to. I ask myself, if I had a 15 year old daughter, would I allow the good Cardinal to babysit her for the evening. Ho ho. The question answers itself. And then, would you want such a man to be in charge of the doctrine of the faith? The office formerly known as the Inquisition? Another self-answering question. It gets worse, but that's enough for now.

The Vatican’s ‘two Chinas’ problem

Bishop Peter Shao Zhumin of Wenzhou was arrested last week, just days after being released from detention over the Christmas holiday.

Bishop Shao’s arrest was noteworthy, but also part of a long pattern for the bishop, who as a dissenter from the state-controlled Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association has been routinely harassed, detained, and arrested for several years now.

via www.pillarcatholic.com

Of course one hears almost nothing from the Vatican about the China problem these days.

Scientists Figure Out Why Urine is Yellow: What to Know

Urine color can change due to hydration, diet, and medication. But among the average healthy person, it’s a shade of yellow.

According to a new study published this week in Nature Microbiology,Trusted Source researchers have finally uncovered a long-standing mystery, what leads to that yellow color?

Researchers have found that an enzyme called bilirubin reductase (BilR) is what gives urine its yellow color. These results could be used to help study the links between the gut microbiome and health conditions such as jaundice and inflammatory bowel disease.

via www.healthline.com

There's a myth common in the alpinist community that you should drink water until your urine is clear and then try to maintain that. According to my favorite endocrinologist, this is wrong and can be even dangerous. You just want a healthy, mid-yellow cast. You can destroy your kidneys by drinking too much water. Details to follow, perhaps, if I think of it. But just don't drink too much water. Not a problem for most people, but still.

Private US Moon mission launches — will it open a new era for science?

The launch is the first of at least ten planned through NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) programme, in which the agency pays private companies to deliver scientific instruments to the Moon’s surface. If the programme succeeds, NASA will essentially be outsourcing future robotic lunar missions to private companies — a sort of Uber Eats delivery for Moon science.

NASA is aiming for an average of two CLPS flights each year, but as many as six could happen in 2024. “You’ll see progressively more complex science as the commercial community demonstrates what they are capable of,” says Chris Culbert, programme manager for CLPS at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

Today’s launch is just the first step in the difficult process of landing on the Moon. The spacecraft, which is called Peregrine and was built by the company Astrobotic in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, still has to successfully enter lunar orbit and then touch down safely. The landing attempt is planned for 23 February.

via www.nature.com

This is fine with me. The combination of the Navajo bad juju and the general bad vibes from transporting human remains to the moon probably succeeded, to a high degree of probability, of jinxing the whole launch project.

Iowa, one week out - Washington Examiner

IOWA, ONE WEEK OUT. The first votes to be cast in the strangest presidential nomination in anyone’s memory will be cast one week from tonight in the Iowa caucuses. The polls say former President Donald Trump will run away with it, and they’re probably right. In the current RealClearPolitics average of polls, Trump has a 32.7-point lead over Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and a 35.2-point lead over Nikki Haley. No one else really matters. Trump has a 45.4-point lead over Vivek Ramaswamy and a 47.6-point lead over Chris Christie. And remember Asa Hutchinson? He’s still in the race, 50.6 percentage points behind Trump.

One caution: The polls are old. The most recent polls in the RealClearPolitics average are all pre-holiday surveys, making them now three weeks old. If there has been any shift among, say DeSantis and Haley, in the last three weeks, we don’t know it yet. Look for a bunch of new polls, including the high-profile Des Moines Register poll, to come out between now and Jan. 14.

But you have to ask: Are today’s polls gonna be wrong by 35 points? Could there be a 35-point event to change the race? It doesn’t seem likely. There have been some spectacular polling failures in the past, but if the final polls from Iowa show Trump’s lead remaining stable, as it has been for quite a while, it would be world-stopping news if someone else won the Iowa caucuses.

via www.washingtonexaminer.com

Byron York.

Navajo Nation objects to a plan to send human remains to the moon : NPR

A plan to deposit some human remains on the moon as part of a rocket launch that blasted off early Monday morning is prompting criticism from the head of the Navajo Nation, who says it would be a desecration of the celestial body sacred to many tribes.

Buu Nygren, president of the Navajo Nation, urged NASA or other government officials in a statement last week to address the tribe's concerns before the launch.

"The moon holds a sacred place in Navajo cosmology," he wrote. "The suggestion of transforming it into a resting place for human remains is deeply disturbing and unacceptable to our people and many other tribal nations."

The mission is not being run by NASA but rather a private company, the first time an American firm would land a craft on the moon.

Peregrine Mission One launched into space on a United Launch Alliance rocket transporting a lunar lander made by the company Astrobotic, which itself will carry multiple payloads to the moon.

The Peregrine lander is expected to touch down on the moon on Feb. 23.

via www.npr.org

This whole mission is very weird. I think the Navajos have a point.

‘Couldn't be any clearer': Judge Luttig predicts outcome of Supreme Court’s Trump ballot ruling

Judge J. Michael Luttig speaks to Ali Velshi about the Supreme Court’s decision to take up the question of Trump’s eligibility and why he believes it will be “one of the most consequential Supreme Court decisions since the founding of the nation.” He also explains what many Americans get wrong about the case and what he expects the outcome of the Supreme Court’s decision to be. “The Supreme Court does not want to decide this case and they will likely look for every legitimate way possible to avoid deciding whether the former president is disqualified from the presidency. But there are very, very few, if any, off ramps that would allow the Supreme Court to avoid decision in this case. Indeed, I believe there are none. Section 3 of the Constitution simply couldn't be any clearer."

via news.yahoo.com

The legal case for applying Section 3 of the 14th Amendment is apparently much better than you would think. But that's not good enough.

What’s Next for College Admissions? - by Peter Arcidiacono

In the wake of the Supreme Court decisions in SFFA v. Harvard and SFFA v. UNC—landmark rulings that deemed affirmative action, as we know it, unconstitutional—we are approaching a real turning-point.

Colleges can follow the clear intention of the Supreme Court’s ruling and embark on a different approach to admissions—seizing the opportunity to bring greater transparency to the admissions process—or they can continue with an even murkier version of ongoing policies, effectively trying to hide their criteria for acceptance.

What is apparent is that colleges are in a difficult spot. Both Harvard and the University of North Carolina argued in front of the Supreme Court that not explicitly considering race would result in unacceptable losses in enrollment of black students. Indeed, my analysis in the Harvard case (I testified for the plaintiffs as an expert witness) showed that if Harvard did nothing but drop race from their admissions decisions the number of Black admits overall would fall by over 60%, a staggering number.

We can safely assume that Harvard is going to work hard to avoid such a precipitous drop. But the analysis done by Harvard’s own expert would seem to compel them to drastically overhaul their admissions philosophy. Harvard could significantly mitigate diversity losses by getting rid of preferences for legacies and donors. They could also modify their athletic preferences, where the biggest bumps are given. (Harvard offers more varsity sports than any school in the country.) While it is one thing to give preferences for football and basketball (sports that are accessible at all income levels), it is another thing to give massive preferences for sports like sailing and golf. Yet Harvard to date has shown no signs of eliminating (or even mitigating) these preferences for the rich despite increasing public pressure to remove them—perhaps an indication that Harvard is deeply concerned that such an overhaul would affect alumni giving.

So, having passed up the most obvious reform, how will schools such as Harvard and UNC change their admissions policies in response to the rulings?

via www.persuasion.community

Court blocks California law that bans carrying firearms in most public places | AP News

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A new California law that bans people from carrying firearms in most public places was once again blocked from taking effect Saturday as a court case challenging it continues.

A 9th Circuit Court of Appeals panel dissolved a temporary hold on a lower court injunction blocking the law. The hold was issued by a different 9th Circuit panel and had allowed the law to go into effect Jan. 1.

Saturday’s decision keeps in place a Dec. 20 ruling by U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney blocking the law. Carney said that it violates the Second Amendment and that gun rights groups would likely prevail in proving it unconstitutional.

The law, signed by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, prohibits people from carrying concealed guns in 26 types of places including public parks and playgrounds, churches, banks and zoos. The ban applies regardless of whether a person has a concealed carry permit.

via apnews.com

Got all that?

Texas v. TechLords: - by Eric Rasmusen - Ras-Stack

  If someone wants to post a message saying “Vote for Trump!,” should Twitter be able to refuse?

It depends. The issue is whether Twitter is more like the phone company or a magazine.

    If Twitter is more like a local landline phone company, Twitter can’t refuse. When someone wants to telephone a friend and tell him, “Vote for Trump!”, the phone company can’t drop him as a customer. It may argue that it owns the phone lines, or that allowing such phone calls would make people think the company was pro-Trump, but these arguments will fail.  If Twitter is more like a magazine, on the other hand, Twitter can refuse. When someone wants to publish “Vote for Trump” as a letter to the editor, the magazine can refuse. 

     Which is the correct analogy, phone company or magazine?

via ericrasmusen.substack.com

Indeed.

Just 1% of Illinois Gun Owners Register ‘Assault Weapons’ Ahead of Ban | The Reload

Only a tiny fraction of Illinois gun owners registered their AR-15s and similar firearms before the state’s ban officially took effect.

Fewer than 30,000 of the state’s Firearms Owner Identification (FOID) card holders registered firearms recently classified as “assault weapons” by the end of the December 31 registration deadline, according to updated data the Illinois State Police (ISP) released on Tuesday. That means only 1.2 percent of the state’s 2.4 million documented gun owners complied with the state’s terms for allowing continued ownership of AR-15s despite enforcement of the ban beginning on Monday.

The final year-end numbers paint a picture of mass non-compliance with the efforts of Illinois officials to crack down on the supply of AR-15s, the most popular rifle in America, and similar firearms in civilian hands despite facing the threat of criminal penalties. Starting Monday, possession of an unregistered assault weapon became a misdemeanor, while the manufacture and sale of one became a felony. It adds to a recent trend of gun owners being reluctant to go along with similar gun bans and registration requirements in states like New York and California.

At the same time, because the state requires all gun owners to be licensed under the FOID card system, presumably not all gun owners who didn’t register own banned firearms. That leaves the extent of the civil disobedience among Illinois’ gun owners somewhat murky.

via thereload.com

H/t Glenn Reynolds, instapundit.

The reason why this law and others like it are bad is that as massively ignored laws increase on the books authorities will have more discretion as to whether to enforce them. This makes law less predictable and ultimately even tyrannical. Besides, there are lots of places in Illinois where I would sure as heck want an AR=15.

UAPs and Non-Human Intelligence: What is the most reasonable scenario? ~ Bernardo Kastrup, PhD, PhD

As a culture, we’ve thus reached an impasse. On the one hand, the meagre amount of data that has been declassified or leaked isn’t enough for us to derive any firm conclusions regarding the nature of the phenomenon. On the other hand, enough has been begrudgingly but officially acknowledged that we can’t dismiss the phenomenon under prosaic accounts either. The best we can do is thus to take the data seriously, but not extrapolate from it without basis.

In this spirit, I submit to you that the following tentative premises are justifiable: firstly, there is an engineered technology in our skies and oceans that is not human. The counterargument to this is, of course, that UAPs may be top-secret but very human military devices, often called ‘black technology.’ Yet, this seems to contradict much of what has been disclosed since 2017. The following passage from the testimony of CDR Fravor to Congress illustrates the point: representative Ms. Nancy Mace asked, “Many dismiss UAP reports as classified weapons testing by our own government. But in your experience as a pilot does our government typically test advanced weapons systems right next to multimillion-dollar jets without informing our pilots?” To which CDR Fravor responded: “No. We have test ranges for that.”

Moreover, if UAPs such as the metallic spheres were black technology the US Department of Defence were trying to keep secret, it is hard to imagine why Dr. Kirkpatrick—an official of that very department—would publicize their existence and even declassify a video showcasing their size, form, flight capabilities, etc. Also, the fact that UAPs often seem to defy our understanding of physics doesn’t line up with the black-technologies hypothesis, as it would require not only the engineering to be secret, but also the very advancement of the human understanding of physics. This isn’t impossible, but isn’t very plausible either. Finally, it is difficult to imagine why such game-changing black technologies—which would have to have been around for at least as long as the UAP phenomenon itself—were never used in large and conspicuous scales to advance the geopolitical interests of any nation.

Secondly, if there is non-human technology in our skies and oceans, then there must be Non-Human Intelligences (NHIs) active on our planet, engineering and controlling the UAPs. This does not imply that the NHIs are extra-terrestrial; it means simply that they aren’t human.

As implausible as these two premises may sound in this particular historical junction, the data, if taken seriously, does not seem to allow for prosaic alternatives. So whatever hypotheses we entertain, they will per force stretch our credulity. Indeed, to insist on prosaic explanations we must disregard the data. The latter is not necessarily invalid—it isn’t incoherent to imagine that all the data are the spurious fabrications of some sprawling disinformation campaign stretching over decades—but it certainly doesn’t advance the discussion. It thus seems more productive, at this point, to bite the bullet of what the data suggests—at least hypothetically—and then check whether we can make sense of it in a manner that renders the data less vexing.

via www.bernardokastrup.com

Bernard Kastrup. Whatever you think of his philosophical stances, clearly he's a smart guy (to me he seems very smart). This is a pretty wild essay from him, but he tries to follow what we know.

NY girl's basketball game called off after 'disgusting' antisemitism

This was flagrant and foul.

A high school girls’ basketball game in Yonkers was canceled this week when players on the home team shot antisemitic slurs at their Jewish opponents, who needed security guards to escort them off the court to safety.

The girl’s varsity teams from The Leffell School, a private Jewish school in Hartsdale, and Roosevelt High School, a public school in Yonkers, faced off in the non-league game Thursday evening.

“I support Hamas, you f–king Jew,” a Roosevelt player snarled at a Leffell opponent, according to The New York City Public Schools Alliance, a group of parents and teachers fighting antisemitism.

From the outset, there was hostility and aggression with “substantially more jabs and comments thrown at the players on our team than what I have experienced in the past,” senior player Robin Bosworth wrote in an op-ed for Leffell’s student-run newspaper, The Lion’s Roar.

via nypost.com

"An Egregious Failure of Scientific Integrity"

Today, I am very happy to share with you a new preprint of a paper that I have just submitted to the new Nature journal, npj Natural Hazards. My paper, which was invited by the journal’s editors, is titled, Scientific Integrity and U.S. “Billion Dollar Disasters.”

Here is the abstract:

For more than two decades, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has popularized a count of weather-related disasters in the United States that it estimates have exceeded one billion dollars (inflation adjusted) in each calendar year starting in 1980. The dataset is widely cited and applied in research, assessment and invoked to justify policy in federal agencies, Congress and by the U.S. President. This paper performs an evaluation of the dataset under criteria of procedure and substance defined under NOAA’s Information Quality and Scientific Integrity policies. The evaluation finds that the “billion dollar disaster” dataset falls comprehensively short of meeting these criteria. Thus, public claims promoted by NOAA associated with the dataset and its significance are flawed and misleading. Specifically, NOAA incorrectly claims that for some types of extreme weather, the dataset demonstrates detection and attribution of changes on climate timescales. Similarly flawed are NOAA’s claims that increasing annual counts of billion dollar disasters are in part a consequence of human caused climate change. NOAA’s claims to have achieved detection and attribution are not supported by any scientific analysis that it has performed. Given the importance and influence of the dataset in science and policy, NOAA should act quickly to address this scientific integrity shortfall.

The full submission will soon appear at Nature’s preprint platform, Research Square, and meantime I have provided a link to the PDF.2

via rogerpielkejr.substack.com

Roger Pielke, Jr.

Supreme Court allows Idaho abortion ban to be enacted, first such ruling since Dobbs : NPR

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday allowed Idaho's abortion ban to go into effect, for now, and agreed to hear an appeal in the case, scheduling arguments for April.

The court's order is the first time it has weighed in on a state's criminal law banning abortions since the high court's 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

via www.npr.org

Idaho! In the news!

A Solution to the Trump Ballot Conundrum - WSJ

Supporters of the Colorado decision will say Mr. Trump shouldn’t be allowed to profit from having engaged in unprecedented wrongdoing. That’s a coherent position, but it begs the question. We don’t know if Mr. Trump engaged in constitutional wrongdoing. We don’t even know if, legally speaking, what he did was unprecedented. One of the problems with cases like Colorado’s is the danger of a double standard in which the rules used to kill off one party’s candidate have never been and aren’t being applied to the other party.

If the Jan. 6 riot was an “insurrection,” what about the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots? In the middle of those riots, Rep. Ayanna Pressley said: “There needs to be unrest in the streets.” Sen. Kamala Harris said: “Everyone beware, because they’re not gonna stop. They’re not gonna stop before Election Day in November, and they’re not gonna stop after Election Day . . . and they should not. And we should not.” Rep. Maxine Waters even called the 1992 Los Angeles riots an “insurrection” as she egged them on. Ms. Pressley and Ms. Waters are still in Congress, and Ms. Harris went on to higher office.

There’s a way out for the U.S. Supreme Court. It should reverse the Colorado decision on grounds requiring Section 3 cases to be decided under a pre-established set of rules.

In In re Griffin (1869), Chief Justice Salmon Chase decided that a person could be disqualified from office under Section 3 only if Congress so provides in a statute and only under the procedures laid out in that statute. This case isn’t a Supreme Court precedent, since Chase was “riding circuit” at the time, hearing the controversy for a lower court. That’s why the Colorado justices were able to ignore it—but the U.S. Supreme Court is under no obligation to do so.

Congress enacted an insurrection statute in 1870 and has amended it since. It allows people to be prosecuted for engaging in an insurrection and disqualifies them from office if convicted. Section 3 itself doesn’t require a criminal conviction; Congress could lower the standard if it chose. But the crucial point, which the justices could achieve by following Griffin, is to preserve democracy by preventing judges—including the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court—from deciding presidential elections on the basis of rules they make up on the fly.

via www.wsj.com

Prof. Jeb Rubenfeld of The Yale Law School. This sounds pretty good to me.

Lesson of the Strike That Killed Soleimani - WSJ

Four years ago this week, at the direction of the president, forces under my command struck and killed Quds Force Commander Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad. He was arriving there to coordinate attacks on our embassy and coalition targets across the region. Our successful strike threw Tehran’s plan into disarray. The Iranian response—a barrage of missiles against Al Asad air base in western Iraq—was largely a punch that landed against air. The attack was designed to kill Americans, but commanders on the ground ensured there were no fatalities. I don’t minimize the injuries our forces absorbed in that attack, but it could have been much worse. The Iranians subsequently backed down.

Here is the lesson: The Iranians’ strategic decision-making is rational. Its leaders understand the threat of violence and its application. It takes will and capability to establish and maintain deterrence. We were able to reset deterrence as a result of this violent couplet. The Iranians have always feared our capabilities, but before January 2020, they doubted our will. The bombing of the memorial ceremony for Soleimani in Iran on Wednesday that killed dozens of civilians isn’t an example of deterrence but likely internal factions struggling for power.

via www.wsj.com

Give General McKenzie (another) medal. I mean it.