LATE TO THE PARTY: MIT President’s Statement on the Anti-Israel Students’ Encampment. “Here’s the transcript; on balance, the message seems to me to be correct (though I would be inclined to say that such encampments, if they violate content-neutral rules—as they usually do—should be removed more promptly).”
April 28, 2024
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Columbia says student who made comments about ‘murdering Zionists’ to administrators has been ‘banned from campus,’ won’t say if he is expelled. That means he wasn’t.
LIGHTNING DEAL: EBL Portable Power Station Voyager 1000, 110V/1000W Solar Generator. #CommissionEarned
NOTHING SAYS NOTHING TO HIDE LIKE THREATS TO DISCIPLINE WHISTLEBLOWERS: UCLA Med School Launches Review Of ‘Health Equity’ Course But Warns That Whistleblowers Could Be Disciplined.
HEH:
you wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me. pic.twitter.com/hkhdRlBCkj
— Monica Lewinsky (she/her) (@MonicaLewinsky) April 25, 2024
CALL IT THE OLIGARCHY PROTECTION BOARD:
The purpose of a system is what it does https://t.co/BbRAvOCIrP
— Aaron Slodov (@aphysicist) April 27, 2024
Because the purpose of a system is what it does.
TRY THAT IN A RED STATE: 69 overnight trespassing arrests after Israel-Hamas war protest at ASU Tempe.
Though to be honest, it’s not going much better for them in Boston: Boston Mayor Michelle Wu says she directed police response at Emerson College encampment. “Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said she directed police to take down an Emerson College student encampment for public safety reasons, thereby empowering the commissioner to make 108 arrests to enforce the city ordinance it was violating. Wu, in remarks Friday, reiterated her support for a police response the prior morning that has been criticized by some community members and city councilors, including the body’s President Ruthzee Louijeune, as being ‘heavy-handed.’ The mayor added that she was behind that response, which led to clashes between pro-Palestinian student protestors and police, and had been working closely with Emerson school officials and Boston Police Commissioner Michael Cox for several days before deciding to proceed with removal of the encampment.”
Wu has been a big lefty in the past, but I think her Asian-American constituents are dragging her to the center.
April 27, 2024
OPEN THREAD: Do your thing.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Agile Space lands propulsion contract for U.S. Space Force mission.
HMM: Alcohol-Protective Genes Linked to Other Health Conditions, Scientists Discover. I’m not sure “alcohol protective” is the right term for genes that make people get sick when they consume small amounts of booze.
IMAGINE BEING A VOCIFEROUSLY ANTI-ISRAEL CONGRESSMAN, AND BELIEVING THAT GAZA HAS A CHIEF RABBI: Progressive NY Rep. Jamaal Bowman duped by fake ‘Chief rabbi of Gaza’.
ALL THE DISINFORMATION THAT’S FIT TO PRINT: Will heavy-handed U.S. intelligence spooks re-elect Trump? Will the New York Times help?
They’ll do their best:
We sometimes lose sight of how downright weird so much news reporting has become. Imagine you’re the New York Times. Donald Trump might return to the presidency so you report, as the paper did on April 12, on the “distrust” that exists between him and the U.S. intelligence agencies. But you leave out the part about top Obama intelligence officers going on national TV to call Mr. Trump a Russian agent. You leave out the part about FBI counterintelligence leaders knowingly trafficking in fabricated evidence about him. You leave out the part about 51 former intelligence officials lying to voters to influence an election and help his opponent.
How should we cover Mr. Trump, the Times famously asked on its home page in 2017. The answer might have been “fairly.” Don’t lie about him or anyone else. This fogey advice has now evidently given way to the psychology of “splitting,” a defense mechanism that involves editing out facts and realities that cause emotional dissonance.
For a Times reader who wants to think the worst of Mr. Trump, after all, it can be painful to realize, yes, Mr. Trump is awful but his enemies did lie about him, intelligence officials did abuse their powers in shocking ways. Times readers aren’t babies, you respond. They can handle emotional complexity. Difficult truths aren’t going to turn them into MAGA supporters. On top of everything else, you add, a world in which Donald Trump is Donald Trump, and the intelligence agencies are trying to thwart him, is an interesting world.
Exactly. The Times isn’t serving its readers, it’s serving itself. Whatever they say, readers tend to click on comfort food. More to the point, Times reporters and editors have learned they can be thrown overboard by management in any online controversy that erupts over reporting that seems to justify Mr. Trump or suggests less than total fealty to a groupthink worldview.
I saw this social fear at work first when certain conservative commentators panicked over a Trump threat to their insignificant personal “brands,” rendering them incapable ever since of commenting objectively or intelligently on the Trump phenomenon.
Hillary Clinton was a victim. In her terror lest she humiliatingly lose to Mr. Trump, she oozed a visible contempt for voters that likely cost her a close election.
It’s also possible the the media and our political class are just awful people. Plus:
His enemies made Mr. Trump, a novelty act now on his way to becoming a historical figure for good or ill.
The press thought it clever to lie about him. The little Walter Mittys (as I called them after the 2016 election) of the intelligence agencies decided they would punish Americans for how they voted.
Your text here is “The Simpsons,” Season 8, Episode 23. Frank Grimes is a coworker so frantic in his insistence that others acknowledge Homer’s laziness and incompetence that he causes his own death.
Whatever happens this fall, we are deluded to think we are done living with the consequences.
But there need to be consequences for the “cabal” that saddled us with a corrupt, demented, incompetent Biden Administration.
BLAIR’S LAW: “Coined by Australian journalist, Tim Blair as ‘the ongoing process by which the world’s multiple idiocies are becoming one giant, useless force.’”
See also:
NOW: Mumia Abu-Jamal is calling in to the CUNY-CCNY encampment from prison. Students blast his phone call over the encampment audio system. pic.twitter.com/AIWGeYG6mm
— Sophie Hurwitz (@sophiehurwitz) April 27, 2024
READER FAVORITE: Set of 2 Adjustable Steel Mesh Zero Gravity Lounge Chair Recliners. #CommissionEarned We bought these a few years ago and they held up fairly well and were pretty comfortable.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Colleges are now closing at a pace of one a week. What happens to the students? Most never finish their degrees, and graduates wonder about the value of degrees they’ve earned. “So many colleges are folding that some students who moved from one to another have now found that their new school will also close, often with little or no warning. Some of the students at Newbury, when it closed in 2019, had moved there from nearby Mount Ida College, for example, which shut down the year before.
Most students at colleges that close give up on their educations altogether. Fewer than half transfer to other institutions, a SHEEO study found. Of those, fewer than half stay long enough to get degrees. Many lose credits when they move from one school to another and have to spend longer in college, often taking out more loans to pay for it. The rest join the growing number of Americans — now more than 40 million, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center — who spent time and money to go to college but never finished. . . . The closings follow an enrollment decline of 14 percent in the decade through 2022, the most recent period for which the figures are available from the Education Department. A decline of as much as 15 percent is projected to begin next year.”
If only there had been some sort of warning offered.
Related: Education Apocalypse Now?
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: After Learning She Killed Her Puppy, Dr. Fauci Endorses Kristi Noem.