The Right Coast

Will Mormons Save the Great Salt Lake? | RealClearPolitics

I always remind people that we’re in the midst of a crisis, not on the brink of one,” said Ben Abbott, a watershed ecologist at Brigham Young University who studies the lake. “We’re already seeing dust clouds emanate from the lakebed, blowing out across densely populated neighborhoods on windy days. It’s really frightening, especially since air quality is already bad here.”

Often blanketed by a grayish-brown haze rivaling Mexico City’s notorious smog, Salt Lake City and its suburbs rank among the nation’s most polluted cities for both ozone and short-term particle pollution. Researchers say breathing Utah’s air on bad days is the equivalent of smoking five cigarettes. State lawmakers have taken small steps to reduce Utah’s household and industrial emissions, but these measures do nothing to address the pollution coming from the lake.

The lake reached its low point in 2022, having lost 73% of its water and 60% of its surface area compared with its average natural level. Scientists feared the lake’s ecosystem would collapse. But two consecutive winters of heavy snowfall gave the lake a needed drink.

Water levels have risen significantly but still sit more than five feet below where experts say a healthy range begins. Along with the large patches of lakebed that remain exposed, the political will to create permanent solutions has begun to dry up. “We’re in a better place ecologically with the lake but in a worse spot politically,” said Abbott. “We’re losing our urgency. If we don’t reduce our water consumption quickly we could end up right back where we were two years ago. We can’t let that happen.”

via www.realclearpolitics.com

The Case of District Judges vs. Trump - WSJ

If the president is the most powerful official in the U.S. government, who is second? The House speaker? Neither he nor any Senate leader can do anything without a majority and agreement from the other chamber, the president or both. The chief justice? He is the administrative and ceremonial chief but only one of nine justices. The vice president? OK, that one is a joke.

A conversation with Judge James C. Ho convinces me that the best answer is the district judge—the jurist who presides over trials in federal court. There are 630 of them at the moment, with 43 vacancies, plus hundreds of semiretired senior judges who still hear cases part-time. “District judges are unique in our judicial system,” Judge Ho says in an interview in his chambers. “They are the only members of the federal judiciary that can exercise the judicial power of the United States unilaterally—all by themselves—without anyone else having to agree with them.”

That ability to exercise constitutional power unilaterally exists nowhere else outside the executive branch, so it isn’t surprising that district judges cumulatively have proved the heaviest counterweight to Donald Trump’s second-term agenda—especially given that Presidents Obama and Biden appointed more than half of all active district judges.

via www.wsj.com

Exclusive | America’s Richest Foundations Team Up Against Feared Trump Assault - WSJ

Some of America’s wealthiest and most powerful private foundations are informally banding together to protect their tax-exempt status from any potential attempt to revoke it by the Trump administration.

Grantmakers across the political spectrum, including the Ford Foundation, the Gates Foundation and the Charles Koch Foundation, are discussing possible ways to respond should the administration make such an attempt, said people involved in the effort. Many of the foundations have discussed whether to seek legal representation as a class or individually should their tax status come under fire. 

Some foundations also have been covering part of the legal and communications expenses behind the effort, said a person familiar with the matter. 

The Trump administration hasn’t explicitly pledged to revoke foundations’ tax-exempt status, though it is exploring ways to challenge the tax-exempt status of nonprofits more broadly. President Trump has also threatened Harvard University with revocation of its tax-exempt status and hinted at future actions against specific nonprofits. 

via www.wsj.com

I wonder how much of a difference it would make if foundations were held strictly to their founders' intents, with the rules enforced quite woodenly. Yes, it would mean the dead hand of the past had a lot more influence, but surprisingly, this looks like it would turn out to be much better than just letting progressive trustees take over the loot and do what they please with it. See the Ford Foundation for example. And the rachet only seems to work one way, oddly enough.

Exclusive | America’s Richest Foundations Team Up Against Feared Trump Assault - WSJ

Some of America’s wealthiest and most powerful private foundations are informally banding together to protect their tax-exempt status from any potential attempt to revoke it by the Trump administration.

Grantmakers across the political spectrum, including the Ford Foundation, the Gates Foundation and the Charles Koch Foundation, are discussing possible ways to respond should the administration make such an attempt, said people involved in the effort. Many of the foundations have discussed whether to seek legal representation as a class or individually should their tax status come under fire. 

Some foundations also have been covering part of the legal and communications expenses behind the effort, said a person familiar with the matter. 

The Trump administration hasn’t explicitly pledged to revoke foundations’ tax-exempt status, though it is exploring ways to challenge the tax-exempt status of nonprofits more broadly. President Trump has also threatened Harvard University with revocation of its tax-exempt status and hinted at future actions against specific nonprofits. 

via www.wsj.com

I wonder how much of a difference it would make if foundations were held strictly to their founders' intents, with the rules enforced quite woodenly. Yes, it would mean the dead hand of the past had a lot more influence, but surprisingly, this looks like it would turn out to be much better than just letting progressive trustees take over the loot and do what they please with it. See the Ford Foundation for example. And the rachet only seems to work one way, oddly enough.

The Good Life, According to Gen Z - by Maya Sulkin

It came via a program called MakeMyMove, which gives incentive packages to people who move to towns—in Southern Indiana, say, or Eastern Kentucky—that are looking to increase their populations. In exchange for relocating to Perry County, Lyons would get a cascade of perks—coupons to local restaurants, a free night at a local winery, a free trip to a local axe-throwing place, a free yearlong gym membership—as well as a $7,000 relocation fee, distributed over the course of two years.

“All of a sudden we were like: It would be nice to afford a house right away. And look at how cheap these houses are!”—the three-acre plot they put an offer on was $215,000—and although a part of her felt guilty about letting go of her ambition, she told me: “We just set our pride down and said, ‘This would be nice, this is what we want, and there’s no shame in that.’ ”

The couple bought the house and got married. Instead of writing movies, Zosha writes grant proposals for schools on a contract basis. She’s due to give birth to twins any day now.

“I got what I wanted from my 20s,” she told me, “and now I’m really happy to be settled.”

When I was speaking to her I thought: Zosha Lyons might be the voice of my generation.

via www.thefp.com

A papacy against populism? That is a terrible idea - spiked

So is Pope Leo XIV woke or right-wing? Is he a Marxist in holy robes come to slay Trumpism or a traditionalist and a ‘transphobe’ who’s about to break every Catholic lefty’s heart? Will his papacy please Turning Point’s virgins in their ill-fitting suits or put a smile on the faces of the blue-haired people? The internet almost buckled under the weight of such panicked queries yesterday. And it was a truly sorry spectacle. Rarely has the frivolity and neediness of the digital left and digital right been so starkly exposed than by this frantic yearning for the new pontiff to add some spiritual weight to their political campaigns.

via www.spiked-online.com

Brendan O'Neill.

Elon Musk and DOGE discover that serious spending cuts are ‘really difficult’

As recently as March 27, Elon Musk was still confident that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the cost-cutting initiative he unofficially headed, could reduce annual federal spending by $1 trillion. But during a Cabinet meeting two weeks later, Musk projected that the savings in FY 2026, when DOGE sunsets, would be more like $150 billion.

Even the latter, much smaller number cannot be trusted, because DOGE has been vague about most of its purported cuts and has repeatedly exaggerated the ones it has specified. And last week, as he shifted his focus from DOGE back to his businesses, Musk acknowledged a reality that should have been obvious from the outset: Any serious attempt to address the country's looming fiscal crisis will require hard choices and congressional action.

via reason.com

Buy gold.

University of Michigan President Santa Ono’s Move: a Realignment in Higher Education

For these efforts, he was booed at Saturday’s commencement ceremony—the reaction of a campus activist class furious that a university president dared to champion institutional integrity over ideological appeasement.

This reaction illustrates the core dilemma facing reform-minded leaders in elite academia. Even modest steps to restore legal and intellectual norms now spark open rebellion from leftist faculty and students who see the university not as a place for truth-seeking or public service, but as a vehicle for political revolution. Many presidents have chosen appeasement to preserve their positions. Ono made a change—and that may be why he is now moving on.

Nonetheless, Ono’s new destination is revealing. The University of Florida, despite the recent resignation of former president Ben Sasse, remains the most serious challenger to the ideological monopoly long maintained by America’s elite public universities. 

Florida’s transformation has outlasted any one leader. Under Governor Ron DeSantis, the state has aggressively overhauled its higher education system, cutting DEI bureaucracies, anchoring general education around the Western canon, and establishing new academic centers committed to free inquiry. Under the guidance of Will Inboden, UF’s Alexander Hamilton Center, in particular, has quickly become a national model for restoring academic seriousness and civic education, backed by real resources and political will. Florida’s leadership understands what so many legacy institutions have forgotten: that public universities must answer to the public, not to insular activist cliques.

A decade ago, it would have been unthinkable for a University of Michigan president to view Florida as a step up. Today, it makes perfect sense. The balance of moral and intellectual seriousness in American higher education is shifting southward.

via www.city-journal.org

University of Florida is the place to be. Florida is the place to be for young persons who can tolerate the heat and humidity and the raucous culture.

Law Firms Scramble to Avoid Being Trump’s Next Target - WSJ

The White House, on the heels of a successful pressure campaign against law firm Paul Weiss, is escalating its attacks on the legal industry and leaving some firms scrambling to stay out of the crosshairs.

President Trump took a broad swing at the industry Friday night after three earlier orders punishing Paul Weiss and two other firms. In a presidential memorandum, he broadly accused law firms of abusing the legal system to challenge his policies, stymie immigration enforcement and pursue partisan causes. He instructed Attorney General Pam Bondi to seek sanctions in court against lawyers and firms who engage in “frivolous, unreasonable and vexatious litigation.”

via www.wsj.com

I can't imagine it is constitutional but there's no doubt that many of the large firms deserve whatever they get. At my famous big law firm in DC, I witnessed the most appalling bias and general political foolishness by complete political hacks (though spendid lawyers) and much worse than the fairly appalling departures from scientific methodology by some Reagan administration economists. If anything can make you a Calvinist, having anything to do with lawmaking will do it.

Timeline: Beaglegate - by Greg Collard and James Rushmore

In the last decade, White Coat Waste (WCW) has led an aggressive campaign to end the use of dogs for medical research. It focused a lot of its energy on pressuring Anthony Fauci, who led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for nearly 40 years, to end the practice. The NIAID is a division of the NIH.

“Today’s landmark victory is especially sweet as our fight to expose and close Fauci and NIH’s in-house dog labs–which slaughtered more than 2,000 beagles over the last 40 years–was the first campaign White Coat Waste started in 2016,” said Anthony Bellotti, the founder and president of WCW, the day Bhattacharya said the last lab was gone.

But to hear WCW spokesman Justin Goodman talk, the victory is more like winning a battle in a war.

“It was the NIH's last in-house dog lab. And it was actually the last deadly dog laboratory across all government agencies inside the agencies themselves,” Goodman says. “Unfortunately, the NIH, the Department of Defense, the FDA and other agencies are still funding experimentation on dogs and cats outside of their agencies at colleges and universities and private companies across the country. So we're hoping to export this great homegrown victory inside the government, outside to these other laboratories that are being funded with our tax dollars.”

via www.racket.news

Dogs, cats, amphibians, reptiles and finally in the end, maybe human unborn babies. You never know.

Finding Beauty and Truth in Mundane Occurrences | Quanta Magazine

Nagel and his collaborators have developed theories of “jamming” that help explain the flow (or lack of flow) of both sand and traffic. They’ve also stumbled upon new phenomena in droplets and splashes.

“My deep and abiding feeling is that if you look at anything closely enough, there will be new riches to be found,” Nagel said.

Unorthodox though it is, his work has been highly impactful and widely celebrated: Nagel won the 1999 Oliver E. Buckley Prize, one of the most coveted awards in condensed matter physics, and the 2023 Medal for Exceptional Achievement in Research (opens a new tab) of the American Physical Society.

He also takes great pains to capture aesthetically pleasing visuals in the course of his research. Images from his experiments have graced museum walls, an achievement that seems to make Nagel at least as proud as his discoveries do. “When people see this image on the wall, I hope that it makes them feel more enriched,” he said. “It matters that it takes a full human being” — someone capable of appreciating both art and science — “to look at it. There isn’t just one aspect involved.”

via www.quantamagazine.org

Sounds like a cool guy. Condensed matter physics is definitely cool.

The Ivy League Hoodlums Are Getting What They Deserve - Chronicles

You and I have to pay more taxes so elite universities that willfully break the law discriminating against Jews, whites, and Asians can get tax exemptions. It’s a slap in the face. Yet Harvard alum Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is trying to turn the tables, accusing the Trump administration of “weaponizing” the IRS to strip Harvard of its 501c3 tax exempt status.

Truth is, Harvard should lose its tax-exempt status because it’s guilty of illegally allowing the civil rights of Jewish students to be trashed. The case against Harvard is a slam dunk. Numerous other universities where Jewish students are persecuted, including Ivies like Columbia and Yale, should lose their exemptions too.

via chroniclesmagazine.org

Betsy McCaughey

They can always apply for more grants after they clean up their act.

After Germany’s Elections, the AfD Could Still Have the Last Laugh

So wherein lies the AfD’s crimes against the “central fundamental principles of the constitution?”

The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, this alleged defender of Germany’s “free democratic basic order,” has not deigned to publish the 1,100-page secret dossier on which its judgment rests. The public cannot evaluate the BfV’s decision. The AfD cannot respond to or defend itself against the agency’s indictment.

But the BfV’s press release makes clear that the AfD’s sins are purely conceptual: It rejects what would appear to be contemporary Germany’s most fundamental value—demographic replacement. In calling for an end to mass migration—the AfD’s central tenet—party leaders notice things that one is not allowed to notice in Germany today and hold views about nationhood that one is not allowed to hold.

The AfD has had the temerity, reports the BfV, to use terms like Messermigranten [knife migrants], presumably in reference to the long train of knife attacks by Muslim immigrants. (As long as it was at it, the AfD might as well have also coined the phrase, Menschenmengerammende Migranten [crowd-ramming migrants], in reference to terrorist vehicle rampages in Christmas markets and elsewhere.)

After the BfV’s announcement, Germany’s media, barely tamping down their elation, rushed to fill out the details of what the BfV calls AfD’s “xenophobic, anti-minority, anti-Islamic and anti-Muslim statements.” (Apparently, postcolonial studies has reached even the denizens of Germany’s sprawling government bureaucracies.)

A favorite video clip making the rounds on ZDF, a large public TV broadcaster, shows Weidel telling two women: “These phenomena, people walking around armed with knives, the rapes, are completely new in our country. . . . We are experiencing Jihad on our streets.”

Hyperbole is now apparently a political crime. Of course, knifings and rapes occurred before mass migration into Germany. But the scale of post-mass-migration violent crime is unique. Germany never experienced mass sexual assault before the New Year’s celebrations in 2015. From 2019 to 2023, asylum seekers, mostly from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq, have sexually assaulted more than 52,000 females. In 2023, Germany saw 761 group rapes. Half of the suspects were foreign nationals; others were of immigrant parentage. There were nearly 40 knife attacks a day in 2023, with non-Germans six times more likely to be the assailant than Germans. In 2023, foreigners committed 41 percent of all crimes in Germany, though they were about 15 percent of the population.

To notice such a disparity in criminal offending, as some AfD leaders do, promotes “irrational fears,” according to the BfV, and thus is not allowed. Never mind that the disparities are real.

via www.city-journal.org

Heather MacDonald.

A.I. Hallucinations Are Getting Worse, Even as New Systems Become More Powerful - The New York Times

Last month, an A.I. bot that handles tech support for Cursor, an up-and-coming tool for computer programmers, alerted several customers about a change in company policy. It said they were no longer allowed to use Cursor on more than just one computer.

In angry posts to internet message boards, the customers complained. Some canceled their Cursor accounts. And some got even angrier when they realized what had happened: The A.I. bot had announced a policy change that did not exist.

“We have no such policy. You’re of course free to use Cursor on multiple machines,” the company’s chief executive and co-founder, Michael Truell, wrote in a Reddit post. “Unfortunately, this is an incorrect response from a front-line A.I. support bot.”

More than two years after the arrival of ChatGPT, tech companies, office workers and everyday consumers are using A.I. bots for an increasingly wide array of tasks. But there is still no way of ensuring that these systems produce accurate information.

via www.nytimes.com

Obviously, this will have to be fixed before AI will be of any use to lawyers.

NIH investigates Biden last-minute $89 billion grant to ‘seemingly dormant’ University of California nonprofit | The College Fix

The National Institutes of Health will look into an $89 billion, 25-year grant awarded to the Alliance for Advancing Biomedical Research in the last days of President Joe Biden’s administration.

The nonprofit “operate[s] exclusively for the benefit of” the University of California system, according to its tax filings. However, the nonprofit, formed in 2022, has never raised a dime nor spent a dime.

Furthermore, the California-based nonprofit would operate the lab at Maryland’s Fort Detrick, taking the contract away from Leidos Biomedical Research. As reported by The Washington Free Beacon, Leidos “held that role for about 30 years.”

The Washington Free Beacon reported the “seemingly dormant” Alliance for Advancing Biomedical Research now faces an investigation, after Iowa Republican Senator Chuck Grassley raised questions about the massive grant.

via www.thecollegefix.com

$89 Billion. That's a lot of surgical masks.

Jeremy Renner and the Science of Extraordinary Near-Death Experiences - The New York Times

The general public may be familiar with these events through a genre of memoirs that present near-death experiences as proof of a Christian afterlife. But they have been reported across countries, demographics and religions, as well as by atheists, and have been a subject of scientific research for decades.

There is no scientific consensus on what causes near-death experiences. But whatever their cause, they can change people’s lives. Some lose all fear of death; others change careers or leave relationships. The reactions to near-death experiences seem to outstrip what researchers have seen in people who nearly die but don’t have such an experience.

For those people, “usually it’s like, yeah, you almost died, so you become more appreciative of life,” said Marieta Pehlivanova, a research assistant professor of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the University of Virginia School of Medicine’s Division of Perceptual Studies, which researches near-death experiences.

But, Dr. Pehlivanova said, “the changes we see in these people who almost died but didn’t have an N.D.E. are much more subtle and do not continue over such a long period of time.”

via www.nytimes.com

Maggie Astor.

I'm looking forward to my NDE or just my DE.

The Tragedy of Affirmative Action - WSJ

Between 1940 and 1970, the median annual income for black men rose from 41% to 59% of the median annual white male income, an 18-point gain. Yet under the first quarter-century of affirmative action, 1970-95, black male earnings as a percentage of white earnings grew by only 8 more points, to 67%. Among black women, the pre–affirmative-action gains were even more dramatic. Median black female earnings climbed from 36% of the white female median in 1940 to 73% by 1970. Between 1970 and 1995, however, pay for black women grew by only 16 more points. Black earnings clearly were rising at a much faster clip prior to affirmative action. They continued to rise thereafter, but more slowly. To say that affirmative action led to the jump in black incomes is to ignore these pre-existing trends.

Central to the social-justice ideology that promotes affirmative action is a belief that statistical disparities among groups result mainly from discrimination rather than from statistical differences in skills, behaviors and attitudes. Accordingly, black social and economic advancement is said to be dependent on policies that counter antiblack bias with antiwhite bias. Yet the phenomenal rise of blacks in the first two-thirds of the 20th century, despite centuries of maltreatment, provides a strong rebuke to such claims. History shows that black people have made greater strides under policies of colorblindness than affirmative action. At best, race preferences have helped to continue something that was already happening. At worst, they’ve done more to throttle than to expedite black upward mobility.

via www.wsj.com

Jason Riley.

Harvard Isn’t Just Playing Host to Some Antisemites. It Is Breeding Them.

Students were insulted, shunned, harassed, and hounded in a hundred ways. An Israeli student was mobbed and assaulted at a “die-in” protest days after October 7. “Privilege trainings” for Jewish students were run by the university. Another student, a former soldier in the Israel Defense Forces, told me she was afraid to walk alone to her dorm room. Students were ghosted by longtime friends for expressing sympathy with Israel; one was told by friends it would hurt their careers to “associate with a Zionist.” Professors, in courses on Israel, removed all Israeli sources from the syllabus. Required reading in a Public Health course titled Settler Colonial Determinants on Health teaches that “Zionism manipulated Judaism as a religion to reinterpret history and redefine Jewishness in terms of ethnic belonging.”

via www.thefp.com

David Wolpe.

The Spanish Government Is Lying About The Blackouts

Renewable energy had nothing to do with Spain’s catastrophic blackouts, its Prime Minister says, insisting instead that the real culprit was a rare technical failure unrelated to the country’s green energy transition. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez went further and reiterated his government’s opposition to nuclear energy, which he called “far from being a solution.”

But, as I pointed out on Monday, the underlying cause of the blackout was the lack of “inertia,” the physical buffer provided by traditional power plants that use heavy spinning machinery to stabilize the grid during sudden fluctuations. Our electrical systems are based on power plants that rotate massive metal shafts at thousands of revolutions per minute, creating electricity while also providing momentum. That rotational mass acts like a shock absorber, automatically resisting sharp swings in supply and demand. When a fault or sudden drop hits the system, that inertia buys precious seconds for control systems to respond and for operators to isolate the problem. In contrast, solar panels and most modern wind turbines rely on inverters, which lack physical mass and can’t cushion these shocks.

via www.public.news

Michael Shellenberger.

Renewables had nothing to do with it, Covid came from pangolins, and vaccines never make you sick. Anything else?

Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber: a Professor on Life at the University Under His Leadership

Rufo: Conversely, how are white and Jewish men on the faculty responding? 

Professor: Largely by being quiet and afraid. A scientific department had displayed photographs of all the previous department chairs for the last 70 years—all white men, many of them Jewish. One day, all the pictures disappeared. The administration had removed them from the wall because someone found it objectionable that all these white men should be staring down at them. And yet, a number of those men were key in bringing black students to Princeton in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. But none of that history matters: it’s just a bunch of whites faces, so they removed all the photographs, and no one objected—no one.

Rufo: And how do you hope that this conflict between Trump and Princeton will resolve?

Professor: I want this university severely punished for its unlawful behavior. I want discovery; I want all the emails to come out that will make it very evident that this university was engaged in illegal discrimination. I want President Eisgruber subpoenaed before Congress to have to account for not only anti-Semitism, but for DEI and for the “systemic racism” arguments that he’s made. I want him to be publicly put on the stand. That’s what ultimately will deeply embarrass this university.

via www.city-journal.org

The anonymous professor may get his wish.

Christopher Rufo.

Trump’s 100 Days of Revolution - by Matthew Continetti

Winning the popular vote last year after indictments, civil suits, a criminal conviction, and two assassination attempts has exhilarated and emboldened the president. And the GOP and conservative movement is far more nationalist and populist than it was in 2016.

The mainstream conservatism of a decade ago has moved to the periphery. Rush Limbaugh is gone. Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan have taken his place. Mike Pence, an advocate of small-government conservatism, is a former vice president. The current veep, J.D. Vance, urges Trump to adopt a more active role for government at home and a less interventionist policy abroad. Former secretary of state Mike Pompeo exemplifies hawkish, peace-through-strength diplomacy. But the face of Trump’s second-term foreign policy is his friend and business partner Steve Witkoff—a political novice who leans more toward peace than strength.

Trump’s first-term legal team included individuals affiliated with past Republican administrations and with the conservative legal movement: Attorney General Bill Barr and White House counsels Don McGahn and Pat Cipollone. Outside of government, the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo helped write the shortlists for Trump’s Supreme Court picks. In the second term, key legal appointments—from the associate attorney general to U.S. attorneys—have been based not on movement credentials but on personal trust. Trump’s new team seems less interested in making the courts more conservative than in showing them who’s boss.

via www.thefp.com

The US is going to end up like Spain or Israel (and other countries too) if things stay on their current path, with a permanently alienated legal class led by its judges. This would be bad. Not sure what to do about it though.

NEH hiring Trump’s ‘Garden of Heroes’ artists after cancelling grants

After just cutting more than 1,000 grants, the National Endowment for the Humanities is recruiting artists to create 250 statues for President Donald Trump's Garden of Heroes idea in time for the country's 250th Anniversary next year.

The grant application opened Thursday and allows for up to $600,000 per artist to create three statues of American heroes Trump identified in an executive order during his first term. Each statue can cost up $200,000, must be life-sized and made of marble, granite, bronze, copper, or brass.

"The purpose of this program is to celebrate key moments in American history and honor the statesmen, visionaries, and innovators who shaped the nation through the creation of statues in their likeness," according to the grant notice. The sculptures are supposed to be in place by the 250th anniversary of America's independence from Britain, on July 4, 2026, but a location for the garden has not been publicized.

via www.usatoday.com

Atlantic City, maybe?

Child Damages Multimillion-Dollar Rothko Painting at Dutch Museum

A child damaged a prized Mark Rothko painting last Friday, April 25, while it was on display in an exhibition at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. The work in question is Rothko’s “Grey, Orange on Maroon, No. 8” (1960), regarded as one of the most important paintings in the museum’s collection.

In a statement shared with Hyperallergic, a spokesperson for the museum explained that “small scratches are visible in the unvarnished paint layer in the lower part” of the painting as a result of a child touching the work, and that conservation expertise has been sought in the Netherlands and abroad.

“We are currently researching the next steps for the treatment of the painting. We expect that the work will be able to be shown again in the future,” the statement continued.

The spokesperson declined to provide images of the damages, as well as additional information regarding the painting’s valuation and possible costs of its restoration.

via hyperallergic.com

Well it's not like the child scratched a Reubens or a Raphael. Maybe he even made the painting better.

Giant 'phantom' animal filmed swimming over the seafloor in Antarctica | Discover Wildlife

Earlier this year, an enormous iceberg spanning around 209 square miles (510 square kilometres) calved from the George VI Ice Shelf, a floating glacier attached to the Antarctic Peninsula ice sheet.

The event presented a unique opportunity for deep-sea researchers on board Schmidt Ocean Institute’s R/V Falkor (too) to explore a vast area of ocean that had never been accessible to humans.

The team reached the newly exposed seafloor on 25 January, and with the aid of their remotely operated vehicle (ROV SuBastian) they began to investigate.

“We didn’t expect to find such a beautiful, thriving ecosystem," says expedition co-chief scientist Dr. Patricia Esquete.

“Based on the size of the animals, the communities we observed have been there for decades, maybe even hundreds of years.”

The researchers made numerous astonishing discoveries beneath the iceberg, including icefish, octopuses and giant sea spiders. They also recorded the first-ever footage of a glacial glass squid. 

But one of the most striking animals filmed on the eight-day expedition was a giant phantom jelly (Stygiomedusa gigantea). This mauve-coloured jellyfish can grow to a colossal size: the bell can be more than one metre (3.3 feet) across, and the animal's four ribbon-like 'oral arms' can reach lengths of more than 10 metres (33 feet).

via www.discoverwildlife.com

Sounds cold. And cool.

The Road to Campus Serfdom – John O. McGinnis

It seems remarkable that seemingly antisemitic protests by undergraduates, such as those at my own university of Northwestern, could threaten the biomedical research funding of its medical school. But the structure of civil rights laws as applied to universities has long allowed the federal government to cut off funding to the entire university based on the wrongful actions of particular units or departments.

Ironically, the left, now alarmed by the federal government’s intrusive reach, bears direct responsibility for crafting the very legal weapons wielded against the universities it dominates. Almost four decades ago, progressive legislators demanded sweeping amendments to civil rights law, expanding federal oversight over higher education. The sequence of events reveals a cautionary tale of political hubris: progressive confidence that state power would reliably serve their ends overlooked the reality that governmental authority, once unleashed, recognizes no ideological master. Today’s circumstances starkly illustrate how expansive federal control over civil society, originally celebrated by progressives, returns to haunt its architects. The left’s outrage ought to focus not on this particular administration but on its own reckless empowerment of the state.

The story begins with Grove City College, a small Christian institution in northwestern Pennsylvania.

via lawliberty.org

How Demonology Won the 2024 Election | The MIT Press Reader

The fact that Trump won swiftly and decisively, and beyond that, gained votes across almost every demographic group despite all the vitriol and controversy that swirled in the lead-up to November 5, seems to point to a powerful and growing cult of personality. We make a very different argument in our book, “The Shadow Gospel.” Trump hasn’t built a cult of personality. Trump has inherited a cult of demonology, the origins of which extend back to the Cold War and center on a shape-shifting liberal devil mapped sometimes onto nefarious “elites,” sometimes onto economic leftism (which also rails against elites, but that’s just details), sometimes onto the institutional Democratic Party, and sometimes, simply, onto things demonologists don’t like. This is a devil that spans partisan lines and defies logical coherence.

Throughout the 2024 campaign, Trump and his surrogates, boosted by a sprawling rightwing media apparatus, seized every opportunity to highlight how the family, God, conservatives, and America were endangered by the liberal devil. All discursive roads inevitably lead back to that threat: what the liberal-leftist-elite-Democrat-Marxist them was doing to pull the country into hell, a framing that simultaneously allowed Trump to position himself as the nation’s savior.

via thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

Demons should be included too you know.

Trump Executive Order Is His Biggest Step Yet Toward Restoring Meritocracy

Measured in Trump time, it took them eons to get around to it, but the White House has finally taken the most important step it can to restore meritocracy to American society: eliminating disparate-impact theory from civil rights analysis and enforcement.

Disparate-impact theory holds that if a neutral, colorblind standard of achievement or behavior has a disproportionately negative effect on underrepresented minorities (overwhelmingly, on blacks), it violates civil rights laws. It has been used to invalidate literacy and numeracy standards for police officers and firemen, cognitive skills and basic knowledge tests for teachers, the use of SATs in college admissions, the use of grades for medical licensing exams, credit-based mortgage lending, the ability to discipline insubordinate students, and criminal background checks for employees and renters. It has been used to eliminate prosecution for a large range of crimes, including shoplifting, turnstile jumping, and resisting arrest; to end police tactics such as proactive stops (otherwise known as stop, question, and frisk); and to purge safety technologies like ShotSpotter and speeding cameras from police departments.

via www.city-journal.org

Heather MacDonald.

Arresting a judge who breaks the law does not amount to war on the judiciary

I get that Democrats and their media allies want to persuade Americans that Trump is waging war on the judiciary. They see this theme as a winner, and for good reason. The vast majority of Americans believes the president should abide by final court rulings, especially those rendered by the Supreme Court. At long last, an 85-15 issue the Democrats can try to hang their hat on.

But to use the arrest of the Wisconsin judge to further their Trump-is-a-lawless-enemy-of-the-judiciary narrative is to mix apples and oranges. Indeed, it’s a deliberate attempt to mislead.

Disregarding final court rulings would be one thing. Arresting lawbreaking judges is something entirely different. The former move would undermine the law. The latter move upholds it.

My memory isn’t what it used to be, but it’s still good enough to remember back to last year when Democrats solemnly informed us that no one is above the law. Surely, that includes judges.

The judge in question here, Hannah Dugan, tried to prevent federal agents from detaining an illegal immigrant who was set to appear for a non-immigration related proceeding. According to the government, Dugan told the agents who were looking for the immigrant to speak to her clerk. With their attention thus diverted, Dugan escorted the immigrant and his lawyer out of her courtroom through a private exit.

via ringsideatthereckoning.substack.com

Paul Mirengoff.

Exclusive | Elite Universities Form Private Collective to Resist Trump Administration - WSJ

Leaders of some of the nation’s most prestigious universities have assembled a private collective to counter the Trump administration’s attacks on research funding and academic independence across higher education, according to people familiar with the effort.

The informal group currently includes about 10 schools, including Ivies and leading private research universities, mostly in blue states. Strategy discussions gained momentum after the administration’s recent list of demands for sweeping cultural change at Harvard, viewed by many universities as an assault on independence.

The collective, as some are calling it, represents a separate, quiet and potentially more potent effort than recent public resolutions from university-aligned groups.

The group comprises figures at the highest levels, including individual trustees and presidents. Maintaining close contact, they have discussed red lines they won’t cross in negotiations and have gamed out how to respond to different demands presented by the Trump administration, which has frozen or canceled billions in research funding at schools it says haven’t effectively combated antisemitism on their campuses.

via www.wsj.com